Annals of the Beaver River

This ruined concrete foundation is on a small island in the Stillwater Reservoir. Scattered about the ruin it is still possible to find the occasional piece of broken crockery, bricks or broken drain tile. During times of low water in the fall, traces of a barn foundation emerge nearby.  Stillwater locals and visitors rightly assume that the ruined foundation is all that remains of a large hotel that once occupied that location. The full story is far more complex. This strategic hilltop looking out on where Twitchell Creek flowed into the Beaver River is where the first Stillwater inhabitants of European descent lived. It was more or less continuously occupied for 100 years from 1825 until 1925 when the Stillwater Reservoir was flooded and the spot became an island. It’s not known exactly when the hermit  David Smith  built a small log shanty there, but based on mostly reliable guides’ tales, it was probably about 1825. Smith made his meager living by trapping and possibl...

Researching local history relies on a combination of luck, deduction, hours of following leads, the memories of strangers, searching old newspaper archives, luck, travel to places that might yield a clue, dogged determination and more luck. For example, it was by chance that I discovered a long-forgotten envelope of photos of the last community ice harvest at Stillwater Reservoir complete with a letter describing the scene. It included a list of some of the people in the photos, but no way to match the names with the faces. I proceeded to show the photos to anyone who might conceivably recognize someone. This long process gave me about half the identities, but half remained a mystery. I had concluded that I would probably never identify the others. As it happened, however, a year ago I gave a talk at the Stillwater Hotel about the hotel’s one-hundred-year history. After my talk a woman I didn’t previously know named Michelle Kelly approached me. She identified herself as the grand-daug...

Clarence L. Fisher had a dream. In that dream he saw a smooth, two-lane highway winding through unbroken forest – his forest. Clarence Fisher and his sister Florence Fisher Jackson had inherited about 40,000 acres of forest land in 1913 on the death of their mother, Mary Lyon Fisher. That vast forest bordered the Beaver River from Beaver Lake at Number Four to Stillwater where it encircled the west end of the Stillwater Reservoir. To manage their holdings, the Fisher siblings incorporated Fisher Forestry and Realty Co. Although lumbering continued to be their main business, they also turned their attention to selling cottage lots at Beaver Lake and Stillwater. Roads were not a serious concern for the Fishers when they first started to market their cottage lots. Both areas where they had lots for sale could be reached by the Number Four and Stillwater Roads. In 1921, however, they became alarmed when they discovered that the state planned to greatly expand the Stillwater Reservoir. The ...

Beaver River Station is the only place with year-round residents in New York that has no direct road connection to the outside world. Indeed, according to Wikipedia, there are only a handful of inhabited places that can make the same claim in all of the rest of the lower forty-eight states. However, from its establishment in 1892 until the end of 1914, Beaver River Station did have a road to the rest of the world: the Carthage-to-Lake Champlain Road. That road saw considerable use until December 1914 when the crucial Twitchell Creek Bridge was destroyed by an ice jam.   https://beaverriverhistory.blogspot.com/2026/02/the-twitchell-creek-bridge.html The Carthage-to-Lake Champlain Road was an important early road that once ran all the way across the central Adirondacks. Also known as the Catamount Road, or simply the State Road, it originally connected Carthage on the Black River in the west with Crown Point on Lake Champlain in the east. The course of the west end of this old road a...