BARTLETT'S CARRY -- History tells how Virgil Bartlett built a sportsmen's lodge on a narrow band of hills at the source of the Saranac River.

A short carry for canoes, the land divides water moving from Upper Saranac to Round Lake, now called Middle Saranac Lake.

He knew fishermen and hunters had to cross here in 1854 along an Adirondack water route. There were no roads.

Bartlett's vision of wilderness living endures in the reclusive property association that kept his name.

Bartlett Carry Club, a private cooperative of nine families on 36 acres, opened for a rare glimpse on a recent rainy afternoon.

NEVER GONE

The meeting hall -- built from the ashes of the Bartlett Inn in 1924 -- filled up for the preview of ongoing historic discovery.

Not far from where the first tavern stood, Fran Yardley brought Virgil's story into the present.

"The river hurries past you and yet is never gone," she said, summing up her work in words from an old book.

An actress and Adirondack storyteller, Yardley inherited the property at Bartlett Carry with her late husband, A.J., a descendant of Farnham Yardley, heir to a gentlemen's club that purchased the place from the Bartletts.

Picking details from boxes of photographs and postcards, old guest books and a huge locked safe they found when they arrived in 1968, Yardley described a treasure trove of "little clues tucked into hidden places."

Notes written on the back of photos or folded and stuffed in relics revealed the story.

They are a rare collection of source material, and Yardley's exploration is gradually becoming a new book.

WILDERNESS HOSPITALITY

Earliest images show a few barns and a wooden house that doubled as Virgil's inn on the spot called Bartlett's Carry.