Lacawac, originally called Connell Park, was built in 1903 by Scranton coal mine operator and Congressman William Connell as both his personal forested retreat and a private game park, and it served that role until his death in 1909. In 1912 his family sold the property to Connell’s friend and fellow Scranton businessman Col. Louis A. Watres, who was then assembling land for the Lake Wallenpaupack hydro-electric project. Widely regarded as the first of the summer homes in the Poconos, Lacawac was built in the Adirondack Great Camp style, and its buildings are recognized on the National Historic Register. The Carriage House, erected in 1903, housed the horses and wagons used to bring the Connell family from the train station in Lake Ariel over a dusty, bumpy seven-mile dirt road; its lower floor still largely retains original horse stalls, carriage storage space, tools, sliding barn doors, and doors to the upstairs hay loft. After 1913, under the Watres family, the Carriage House became known for barn dances with music, refreshments, and patriotic decorations. Today it serves Lacawac Sanctuary for classes, lectures, musical programs, and a renovated upper-level classroom and science laboratory. Connell also envisioned Lacawac as a private hunting preserve at a time when commercial hunting had wiped out Pennsylvania’s white-tailed deer population, so he enclosed the property with a tall four-mile wire fence supported by American chestnut posts and stocked it with white-tailed deer imported from Virginia. Near this spot stood the estate’s deer house, where caretakers stored and dispensed hay and other feed. After the Watres family acquired the property, the aging fence was allowed to come down and the herd dispersed into the surrounding countryside, helping repopulate white-tailed deer in northeastern Pennsylvania; the deer house later deteriorated after abandonment and was removed around 1948.