Inlet grew from a Fulton Chain idea, not a crossroads

Inlet makes more sense when you start with water. The older story does not feel like a courthouse-square story or a farm-market story. It begins with the Fulton Chain Club, formed in 1889, and a purchase of more than 6,000 acres around the head of Fourth Lake, reaching toward Limekiln and Seventh Lakes.

That tells you what kind of place this is. Inlet sits along Route 28 inside the six-million-acre Adirondack Park, but its early identity was tied tightly to lake access, camps, guides, preserves, and the long pull of summer people moving through the Fulton Chain. Even now, the name feels almost literal: a town at the inlet end of a lake landscape.

You can feel that old shape in the modern errands. Boat launches, clean-drain-dry rules, shoreline questions, snowmobile routes, and Adirondack Park permits are not random chores dropped onto a pretty place. They are the current paperwork around a water-and-woods town.

That is the double picture Inlet gives you: the practical rule on one side, the Fourth Lake and Fulton Chain setting on the other. The place makes more sense when both stay in view.