As late as 1870, the sole occupants of what is now the incorporated Village of Lake Placid were two farms on Mirror Lake and a sawmill on Mill Pond. Beginning in 1800 a considerable colony had grown up on the outskirts, in the outlying town of North Elba, but it was not until 1850 that the village's first settler ventured up to the shores of Mirror Lake, then known as Bennet's Pond. 

In that year of 1850 Joseph Vernon Nash, who had come to North Elba with his family in 1840 at the age of 13, bought a wild and hilly tract on the west side of Mirror Lake. He built a three-room cabin on the lake shore, married Harriet Brewster, and hacked a great farm out of the wilderness. Soon he erected a frame house above the cabin, where the Hilton's Lakeside annex now stands, and bought more land to the south. An outlay of $480 had netted him 320 choice acres. His farm now included all of present Main Street from the Hilton down to the Central School, all of Grand View Hill and some of Signal Hill. 

By the 1850's tourists were already making an appearance on the farm roads of North Elba. Writers, artists, mountain climbers and sportsmen, seeking a bed and a sojourn among the wonders of the wild, were pounding on Joe Nash's door. Joe put an addition on his red house and turned innkeeper. For the next 20 years Nash's Red House would be a popular rural haven for the spiralling summer tourist trade. 

In 1852 Nash's brother-in-law Benjamin Brewster had bought the Great Lot north of the Nash tract, bordering Mirror Lake and encompassing the major part of Signal Hill. He, too, carved a substantial farm out of the wilderness. This, then, was the Village of Lake Placid in 1870. 

Ben Brewster had long envied the success of his brother-in-law's little farmhouse inn. In 1871 he built a small, primitive hotel just north of the present Mirror Lake Inn. Joe Nash followed suit in 1876, raising another summer hotel, the Excelsior House, on the ridge above his Red House. Sold to John Stevens in 1878, it was to evolve into the famous Stevens House. 

Plenty of outsiders were now casting a covetous eye on the Nash farmland, and Joe was beginning to understand its vast potential. In the 1870's he gave up farming and the tourist trade and went into the real estate business, selling off lots from his great holdings.

 One of the first to acquire a slice of Joe's pie was Moses Ferguson. Either by luck or design, he chose the prime acreage at the top of the Nash farm hill, overlooking lakes Mirror and Placid. It commanded what probably were and are the most spectacular mountain views in all the Adirondacks, the surrounding country predominately wilderness. Only 20 years before, Joe Nash had trapped a panther on the very spot where Ferguson in 1877 erected a little hotel aptly named the "Grand View". A small, plain but tidy building, it boasted three stories capped with an observation lookout and an encircling veranda amply stocked with rocking chairs.

 Two more hotels soon rose on the slope of the hill below the Grand View and opposite the present post office - in 1880 the Allen House (dubbed "mammoth" by a contemporary county newspaper), and in 1883 the Mirror Lake House, eventually the largest and most luxurious of its time. The infant village emerging from a wilderness now had five well-frequented houses of accommodation and a Main Street that sprang up along Joe Nash's cow path.

Henry Allen, proprietor of the Allen House, was, like many another pioneer Adirondack hotel-keeper, originally a farmer. Born in Ripton, Vermont in 1848, he was one of five brothers who fought in the Civil War. Arriving in the Lake Placid area in the spring of 1874, the young man hired out to a North Elba farmer and soon married the farmer's daughter. 

Simple farmer or no, Henry Allen was a born entrepreneur, sensing at once which way the wind was blowing up on the hill off Mirror Lake. In 1876 he rented Ben Brewster's small hotel, ran it for three years, and then built his own Allen House, at the same time operating a stage line between Lake Placid and Ausable Forks. In 1885 he even erected a telephone line from the Allen House to Saranac Lake.

 Moses Ferguson's Grand View was having its ups and downs. "Mose", as he was called (nothing was known of him beyond his name), seems not to have been suited to the tourist-catering business. For a couple of years he ran the Grand View himself. In 1880 rented it out to Andrew J. Daniel and H.C. Lyon (a clergyman), and then failed financially. The property passed under mortgage default to Reuben Clifford of Lake Placid. Henry Allen rented the Grand View beginning in 1881 and soon purchased it, running it in conjunction with his Allen House - a propitious move, for his Allen House burned down in 1886 and was never rebuilt.