Why is it called Stillwater?

The term “stillwater” refers to a flat or slow-flowing segment of a river usually immediately upstream of rapids or falls. Consequently, there are places named Stillwater all across the United States. The story of how the name came to be applied to the second largest reservoir in the Adirondacks is an interesting one that deserves to be remembered.

The upper part of the Beaver River was unsettled and unnamed wilderness until 1822 when John Brown Francis financed a road from the eastern bank of the Black River near Lowville to a naturally wide section of the river called Beaver Lake. Francis owned all of Township Number Four at the time and hoped to sell plots of land to homesteaders. Naturally, the road was called, then as now, the Number Four Road. The pioneer settlement that grew up next to Beaver Lake was also dubbed Number Four.

The new residents of Number Four explored the Beaver River and found that it was impossible to paddle a boat upstream from Beaver Lake because the next ten miles of the river featured no less than nineteen rapids and waterfalls that effectively prevented navigation. Within a few years, hunters, fishermen and trappers established foot trails along the river and eventually came to a place above the furthest waterfall. Stretching out to the eastern horizon was a great flat marsh that they called “the still water” of the Beaver River.

 

Nelson Beach, one of the leading citizens of Lowville, along with other civic minded men petitioned the state legislature for years to build a road east from Carthage on the Black River all the way to Lake Champlain in order to attract settlers to the central Adirondacks. Finally, in 1841 Beach led a surveying party to lay out that road. Beach kept a detailed journal of his efforts. His crew followed a hunter’s trail around the Beaver River rapids to reach what he called “the Stillwater.” This is some evidence of when the name entered common usage.

 

The road was cleared in sections beginning in 1844. In 1851 the artist Jervis McEntee used the road to reach his first night’s destination at a place he recorded in his journal as “the Still water.” It’s fair to concluded, therefore, that the name had been firmly established by this date.

 

Originally the name Stillwater appears to have been applied to the entire marshy section of the river from above the falls eastward eleven miles to the next rapid, called then as now, “Little Rapids.” The first guidebook for Adirondack tourists, E.R. Wallace’s 1874 Descriptive Guide to the Adirondacks, included a map drawn by Dr. W.W. Ely that shows the upper Beaver River as a vague squiggly line with the entire section above the rapids labeled “Stillwater.” Prior maps of the area were either blank or showed only a squiggly line originating from three imaginary small lakes.

 

Frank Tweedy drew the first accurate map of the upper Beaver River in 1878 based on his survey performed that summer as part of Verplanck Colvin’s great Adirondack Survey. Tweedy’s map is highly detailed. Above the rapids it shows three small islands then a wide section labeled “Second Stillwater Level” then a small rapid followed by a larger wide section called the “Stillwater Level” attached to a deep pond labeled “Stillwater Pond” that was surrounded by high banks and almost cut off from the main river by an esker. 

The name remained firmly attached to the area until 1885 - 87 when the first dam was built at the place marked the Stillwater Rapids on Tweedy’s map. The dam submerged that rapid and portions of the Beaver River marsh for about five miles upstream. This first impoundment was called the “Beaver River Flow.” Subsequent dams built in 1894 and 1902 enlarged the impoundment but it continued to be commonly known as the Beaver River Flow. 

 

During the years between 1887 and 1925 the name Stillwater faded into the background. Old timers still called the area above the rapids by the name, but newcomers who built cottages in the area referred to it as Beaver River, or just Beaver, after the nearby train station and post office with that name. A large sportsman’s club built on a 200-acre island near the dam was called the Beaver River Club with no mention of Stillwater.

 

The name might have eventually been forgotten had it not been for the much larger dam completed in 1924. The new dam flooded almost all the old camps, including the entire Beaver River Club, creating what the state decided to call the Stillwater Reservoir. For a few years the one surviving hotel, the relocated Beaver River Inn, kept its old name, but by 1930 its owners renamed it the Stillwater Hotel. The cottage community that grew up on the west shore of the reservoir around the hotel likewise adopted the name Stillwater.

 

And so it has remained. It’s unlikely to change now, even though the great marsh originally responsible for the name disappeared underwater long ago.