TORPEDO STYLE

Hotel president John Boulton Simpson ordered this Fay and Bowen-built torpedo-stern boat during the First World War – over a century later she is back on Lake George, where she started life

- NIGEL SHARP

Lake George is without comparison, the most beautiful water I ever saw,” wrote Thomas Jefferson in 1791, a decade before he became the third President of the United States, “formed by a contour of mountains into a basin... finely interspersed with islands, its water limpid as crystal, and the mountainsides covered with rich groves... down to the water-edge.” It was here – in the Adirondacks Mountains about 200 miles north of New York City – that the story of the motor launch Fanita Jr began.

Her first owner was John Boulton Simpson. Born in 1846, Simpson was a veteran of the American Civil War, a millionaire New York businessman, president of the Estey Piano Co, vice president of the New York State Historical Association and an active churchwarden. But most significantly, from the point of view of this story, he was the vice commodore of the Lake George Yacht Club and one of the five businessmen who financed the building of luxury hotel Sagamore on Lake George’s Green Island in 1882.