Indian Lake Project: The Metal Box and the Children’s Camp Buried in New York’s Woods

On July 9, 1997, a hiker near Indian Lake in New York caught his foot on a piece of metal showing through the soil. He was far from a road or marked trail. After hours of digging with branches, he pulled out an old box. Its lid carried three marks: an upside-down triangle beside two circles. There was no lock.

Inside were 21 water-damaged photographs, three rolls of 8 mm film, and several papers. Most of the photographs showed children. Other images showed people in uniform, wooden buildings, and square concrete structures deep in the forest. The papers, as the finder later described them, looked like a personnel log, an adoption record, and a short medical report from a camp that operated between 1952 and 1955. The initials on the pages were I.L.P.—the Indian Lake Project.