Annals of the Beaver River

We take it for granted that the Adirondack wilderness with its grand forests, mountains, lakes, and streams is a sublimely beautiful place, but for most of the colonial period up until the Civil War the Adirondacks were generally considered a hard, forbidding place full of unknown dangers, unfit for settlement. Then as the Industrial Revolution swept across America, a small group of landscape artists began to look at the wilderness with new eyes. Where others had seen only dismal forests, they saw awe-inspiring beauty. The paintings they created showed Americans for the first time that they had a unique wilderness heritage that deserved recognition and protection.  In time, this group of American landscape painters would come to be known as the Hudson River School; named for the favorite locale of Thomas Cole and his talented student, Frederic E. Church.   In his influential 1836 “ Essay on American Scenery,” Thomas Co le declared,  “the most distinctive and perhaps the m...

In the two decades preceding the Civil War a few farmers living in the Town of Watson on the banks of the Black River in Lewis County, N.Y. supplemented their income by working as wilderness guides. Their skills were acquired from years of making a living on the edge of the wilderness. They grew up tramping long trails. Hunting and fishing were second nature. They learned what they knew of woodcraft by way of hard experience. They were physically strong and able to endure incredible hardships.   Two of the better-known guides active in the 1850s were William Higby and Asa Puffer.   William Higby  was born in May of 1809. He married Francis “Fannie” Dean in 1831 and they moved from Turin, N.Y. to a farm in Watson, N.Y.  In 1850, 1851 and 1855 Higby guided month-long camping trips to Raquette Lake for the wealthy Constable family and their friends. John Constable nicknamed him “Higby the Hunter.” At the time of the 1850 Constable trip, he built two open camps on a...

Every traveler who visited the upper Beaver River between 1826 and 1863 probably knew Orrin and Lucy Fenton, early settlers of the pioneer village of Number Four. John Brown Francis (1791 – 1864), a wealthy politician from Rhode Island, inherited a share of his grandfather’s essentially uninhabited “John Brown’s Tract” in the west central Adirondacks. Like his grandfather, he knew that one way to make money from wilderness property was to sell lots to settlers. He decided to attempt settlement in his Township No. 4 that was only eighteen miles from the Black River village of Lowville, rather than try to revive his forebearer’s settlement efforts at Thendara [Old Forge]. Accordingly, in 1822, he financed the building of a road from the east side of the Black River just outside Lowville through the forest to the Beaver River. The location he chose had promise, as the river was wide enough there to create a beautiful natural lake. To spur initial settlement, John Brown Francis offered 100...

Smith’s Lake was named for the hermit David Smith who cleared a few acres and built his cabin on its western shore about 1830. Not many visited the remote lake until after 1845 when the Carthage-to-Lake Champlain Road created a route around the ten miles of rapids on the Beaver River. From 1845 until 1891 Smith’s Lake was quite a popular wilderness destination. It offered many attractions. Not only was it remote and extremely beautiful, it was deep and cold enough to support a sizable population of lake trout. These fish, called salmon trout back in those days, could reach lengths of twenty inches or more and were extremely tasty. The area was also home to herds of white tail deer, especially around nearby Albany Lake. Most importantly, it met everyone’s definition of a true Adirondack wilderness. As the writer H. P. Smith put it in 1872, it was:   “A place where the toil-worn man of business may find new life, and where the lover of the pure and the beautiful may become satiate; i...

During a recent discussion concerning pre-Civil War roads in the Adirondacks, I mentioned to a friend that I am amazed by the number of people who insist on calling certain early roads “Old Military Roads” even though they never had a military purpose. My friend responded by telling me he heard that a hunter once found the remains of an old cannon somewhere near Terror Lake deep in the Pigeon Lake Wilderness. His point, I think, was that the cannon must have been abandoned in the course of some American military expedition along a long-vanished woods road. I asked him if he knew who had found the cannon. He didn’t. A few days later he sent me an email to inform me that one of his friends knew the identity of the hunter who discovered the cannon. He promised to track the guy down and question him closely. A few days passed before his next email. He had contacted the hunter and It turned out that he had not seen the cannon himself but had heard about it from someone else who had heard it...

In 1841, at the urging of some influential citizens, the New York state legislature authorized construction of a road all the way across the Central Adirondacks from west to east. Because this road started at Carthage on the Black River and ended at Crown Point on Lake Champlain it was named the   Carthage-to-Lake Champlain Road . In some accounts it was called the Catamount Road or simply the State Road. Nelson J. Beach of Lewis County was primarily responsible for course selection, surveying and construction along with Nathan Ingerson in Jefferson County and David Judd in Essex County. The expense of building and maintaining the road was to be defrayed by a tax on the non-resident lands to be benefitted. The road was surveyed in the summer of 1841 and opened in sections over the next nine or ten years.   The road followed the course of existing trails and earlier roads as much as possible. An entirely new route was only needed between Belfort and Number Four and between Stil...

The land comprising today’s Adirondacks was removed from the possession of the Haudenosaunee in the years immediately preceding and the years immediately following the American Revolution. The vast majority of the Adirondacks was then purchased by land speculators who hoped to resell the property at a profit to other speculators who might or might not be able to resell it to settlers.     The first of these great land grabs occurred in 1771. In the  Totten & Crossfield Purchase , the English Crown took title to a triangular plot of about 1,115,000 acres in the central Adirondacks from the Mohawk Nation and then for a hefty fee granted title to a group of investors. The Totten and Crossfield land speculators arranged to have the land surveyed and subdivided into 50 numbered townships.    The investors took possession of some of the new townships and began to sell the others. Before all of the townships were sold, the colonies went to war with England putting ...

Not much is known about the two hermits who lived along the upper Beaver River in the decades before the Civil War. They were by far the first year-round residents, predating those who later settled the area by thirty years or more. Their lives were lonely and difficult. Their stories provide some interesting glimpses into what it must have been like to live deep in the Adirondack wilderness during those days. David Smith: ~1825 until ~1845 A man named David Smith was the earliest year-round inhabitant of the upper Beaver River valley above the rapids. He is presumed to have arrived in the mid-1820s and reportedly first lived for a few years in a shanty near the confluence of the Beaver River and Twitchell Creek. Smith preferred the life of a hermit and did not welcome visitors. To avoid having his solitude interrupted by the infrequent hunter or trapper, sometime around 1830 Smith moved farther upstream where he cleared a few acres and built a cabin on the bank of the beautiful lake a...