Lake gives up its treasures for father-son duo

Post-Star, Glen Falls, NY: Lake gives up its treasures for father-son duo

QUEENSBURY -- After living on Glen Lake for nearly 40 years, Frank Brenneisen isn't tired of finding artifacts beneath the surface.

"I've been finding things in the lake for years," he said.

In 1993, the now-80-year-old man found a 45-pound brass and cast-iron bell sitting at the bottom of the lake after it was dumped there decades earlier by an annoyed neighbor of a summer camp where the bell would ring to announce meals, according to a Post-Star report from the year the bell was recovered.

Last week, the large, shiny bell hung in Brenneisen's back yard as he sat on his deck, catching the breeze coming off the lake on a quiet summer afternoon.

The table on his deck was filled with old magazines and photos of his and his sons' diving exploits on the lake. A large propeller and an old postcard of a steamship carrying passengers from the former Glen Lake Casino are among the collection.

Last spring, it was Brenneisen's son Frank Jr. who stumbled upon another historical treasure in the lake.

Frank Jr. said he and his father routinely follow up on tips and leads on old underwater artifacts, and they'd heard about an old steamship that sank in the lake in the 1920s after its bottom scraped along a rock pile. The passengers and the captain made it out of the boat before it sank, Brenneisen said, and the boat's steam engine was later recovered.

"It was in an old newspaper account in Glens Falls," Frank Jr. said. "Last winter, I was in the library and found it."

One of the postcards on Brenneisen's deck shows a Captain Davis with the steamboat as he took passengers for rides departing from the former Glen Lake Casino, now a private home on the lake.

"We don't know what his first name was," Brenneisen said about the ship's captain.

Brenneisen said passengers were charged a dollar for the ride.

When the father-and-son team looked at the postcard with a magnifying glass, they noticed a bell and a whistle at the top of the ship.

"The postcard shows two things on the roof of the boat," Frank Jr. said. "In those days, everybody had a bell and a whistle."

So the two men began searching the bottom of the lake for the bell, with the elder Brenneisen driving the pontoon boat as his son did the diving.

On a weekend in late May, when Frank Jr. took a trip from his home in New Jersey to visit his father, the diving continued.

"We kept checking rock piles and rock piles," he said.

Brenneisen said they went out for three hours one Saturday afternoon and found two pieces of metal with zebra mussels all over them. When the pieces were cleaned up, he said, he noticed one was a bell clapper. At around 4 p.m. on the following Sunday, they went back to the same spot.

When his son came up from a dive that Sunday, Brenneisen said, the weeds at the bottom of the lake were so thick he couldn't see, but his son had the bell.

Brenneisen said he put the bell in a strong acid to melt away the rust and other decay that was on it, only to reveal small cherubs engraved on the bell's surface.

The bell does not have any marks to reveal its origin, he said, though the year 1923 is inscribed on it. The year and an identifying etch of the foundry where it was made would normally be on the inside of such bells, he said, but only the year was etched on the outside of this one.

"I think this was a gift from a friend of (Captain Davis's)," Brenneisen said.

Paul Derby, a Glen Lake historian and a past Glen Lake Protective Association president, said Brenneisen is knowledgeable on lake trivia and helped him with 20th century references when he was researching local history.

"In the early part of the 1900s ... there were a lot of tourist places on the lake," Derby said.

Derby said he was familiar with Captain Davis but could not recall his first name.

"A lot of families have been here a long time - 100 years," he said. "If you ask people, they know Captain Davis from pictures, going to the casino and some of the other places."

Derby said Brenneisen's discovery helps recall the era of tourism on Glen Lake.

"The most significant piece is that it just brings back a very important figure to Glen Lake," he said. "It's a big part of the first half of the 20th century and kind of that era of tourism."

But Frank Jr. said he didn't think the find was that significant.

"I think a lot of private vessels go down in a lot of lakes and streams and are forgotten about, especially during war time," he said. "Now, modern days, everything comes out because of pollution. Back then, it's not important."