Horseshoe Lake, Stafford, NY
Today's Lake
Horseshoe Lake has not changed much in the last six decades. It is still a quiet collection of cottages and gravel roads surrounding a man made lake in Western New York. Its residents enjoy the scenic bucolic environs and love to see people out on the lake having fun.
Getting it right
Life at the lake was once rife with activity and intrigue. This document corrects the previous versions of the lake's history and provides insight into who these people really were and what they were doing here.
Ambition and Greed
During the first 160 years of the lake's history it became the object of much ambition and commerce. For want of a better term, greed. The lake has been seen as the means to an end by a succession of rapacious men with big ideas determined to conduct business their own way.
Who started it all
Robert William Fisher was from England, born in Suffolk in 1813. He made his way to Guelph, Canada and married Elizabeth Sidford Goodeve, also from England, in 1834. Her harrowing journey is well documented in her diary. Robert and Elizabeth then moved to Morganville in about 1834 just up the road from the town Stafford.