"The Man of Stone" by H.P. Lovecraft and Hazel Heald

I've actually been to Lake Placid! Twice! To do the Ironman there! It is beautiful country, but I never came across a village named "Mountain Top". I've been as far north as Au Sable Forks, since the bike course went up that way the first time I was there, and most of the way to Black Brook the second time, and of course Wilmington for the northwestern corner of the course. Regardless, from Au Sable Forks or Black Brook, there's only another 40 or 45 miles you can go before hitting the border with Canada, and google maps doesn't seem to know any place called "Mountain Top" in New York (or Vermont, since you're also close to the Vermont border at that point), so either it was made up for the story, or it has over the past 100 years been absorbed into some other locality and lost its original name.

Towards the end there, there is a reference to Route 2, and there is a US Route 2 that is in NY all the way up at the Canadian border, for about a mile, and then passes into Vermont. As best I can determine, US 2 was built on or before 1922, and the story was written in 1932, so that checks out.

US 2 starts by branching off from US 11 in Rouses Point, and that is the only inhabited place it passes through in New York state, as it immediately goes off over the water (is that Lake Champlain at that point, or still considered the Richelieu River? The wikipedia page for Rouses Point suggests it is Lake Champlain right there, but the entry for US Route 2 says Richelieu River, so who knows!) and into Vermont.

New York State Route 2 is way over by Albany, so it's not referring to that. So I guess what they call Mountain Top in this story is Rouses Point in reality? Rouses Point goes all the way back to the 18th century, while this story can assumed to be set in the early 20th century, so there's no reconciliation to be had, unless it's a colloquial name for a nearby unincorporated part of the county. Of course, it turns out that that part of New York state is extremely flat - no mountains to be seen anywhere for there to be a mountain top! Which is a problem for the setting of the story which is said to be a mountainous area...

Ah well, looks like the authors made up a name without knowing the reality of the locale, and so this is what we get.

As to Sugarloaf Mountain in the Catskills, there are, unfortunately, several mountains named Sugarloaf in that part of the Appalachians, so no way to know where exactly the author had in mind as there are no additional points of reference beyond that. Not that it matters, if they gave as much care and attention to locales here as they did for "Mountain Top"... :-P

The picture used is one of my own pictures taken while I was at Lake Placid. I could have, and probably should have, featured a picture of a statue of some sort, whether or a man or a dog, but I decided I wanted to show off one of my own pictures :)

To follow along: https://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/fiction/ms.aspx