Above is a vintage Seneca Ray Stoddard photo of the North River Hotel. The Blue Mountain Stagecoach is full of passengers. Men and boys stand at the front of the hotel to get their pictures taken and an old guide leans on the pole lamp next to his faithful hound. 

I am not very up on the North River history and I can’t quite pinpoint the location of this hotel, but I will give it a try. Some of you out there might be able to clarify this for us. I think this hotel was once called Roblee's hotel. It was built shortly before the Civil War by Lyman Roblee. It was located facing a small island in the Hudson, I believe the site of the current post-office. The Hotel closed in the 1880s, and then reopened by his son Calvin and sold in 1896 to Elmer Dunlap, destroyed by fire a few years later and never rebuilt.

The was another hotel purchased by William Harrison Roblee, Lyman's cousin and father of Allie Roblee. He bought a North River Hotel from Danforth Eldridge. It was a well-known establishment into the 1860's when it was supposed to have burned. Originally built to cater to lumbermen, it became a favored spot for tourists to stop and take meals while traveling the stagecoach line from North Creek to Blue Mountain Lake. It became known far and wide for its good cuisine, however, it doesn’t seem to match the time frame of the Stoddard photo who we put in the Adirondacks in the late 1870s-80s 

North River is a hamlet in Upstate New York, in the Adirondack Mountains. It is located on the upper Hudson River 5 miles north of the village of North Creek in Warren County, on the northern border with Hamilton County. Historically it was one of the centers of the New York State garnet industry. The last remaining garnet mine in New York is located close to North River. The hardest garnets in the world come from the Adirondacks and are still in demand, especially for industrial use. There is also a former garnet mine, the Hooper Mine, that is a tourist site. A local attraction is Gore Mountain, one of the tallest in New York and a skiing center.