The Clemuel Ricketts Mansion is on the southwest shore of Ganoga Lake in Colley Township in the southeast part of Sullivan County. The house and lake are on a part of the Allegheny Plateau known as North Mountain; the plateau formed about 300 to 250 million years ago in the Alleghenian orogeny. Rocks—gray sandstone with conglomerates and some siltstone—of the Mississippian Pocono Formation more than 340 million years old, underlie the house and lake.[3] The lake is in a shallow valley, 13 feet (4.0 m) deep, which is impounded by glacial till up to 30 feet (9.1 m) thick at the southeast end, where Kitchen Creek exits.[4]
The earliest recorded inhabitants of the region were the Susquehannocks, who left or died out by 1675. The land then came under the control of the Iroquois, who sold it to the British in the Treaty of Fort Stanwix in 1768.[5] The land on which the house was later built was first part of Northumberland County, then became part of Lycoming County in 1795.[6] The Susquehanna and Tioga Turnpike, which followed the lake's western shore, was built between 1822 and 1827; it connected the Pennsylvania communities of Berwick in the south and Towanda in the north. The lake was then known as Long Pond, and the Long Pond Tavern, just north of the where the house was later built, was a lunch stop for the stagecoach on the turnpike.[7][8][9] Sullivan County was formed from Lycoming County in 1847, and two years later Colley Township was formed from Cherry Township.[10]
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