Annals of the Beaver River

In my view, most accounts of early Adirondack tourism get three significant things wrong. The greatest mistake is the assumption that there were no women outdoor tourists in the early years. I will address this error in a future post. The second mistaken assumption is that there was almost no Adirondack tourism until after 1869 when Murray’s   Adventures in the Wilderness   was published. While tourism did significantly increase after 1870, other posts on this blog demonstrate that there was a substantial outdoor tourist trade in the Beaver River country as early as 1845. The third mistaken assumption is that early tourists were only interested in fishing and hunting. While most visitors did come for sporting activities, we know artists were drawn to the Beaver River as early as 1851 when McEntee and Tubby visited. This post tells the story of how the Beaver River became the site of a remarkable early investigation of Adirondack butterflies. Admittedly, it started with a passi...

In the years between 1894 and 1916 quite a few camps were illegally built on the State Forest Preserve along the Red Horse Trail on the north side of the Beaver River. Some of these camps consisted of nothing more than a tent or simple open lean to. Others were log cabins or small frame buildings. One of these modest camps was built by a trapper and sometimes handyman named George Snyder.   Snyder was a short man with curly black hair. No one is exactly sure when he arrived in the Beaver River country or what attracted him to the area. He told people that he was from Wheeling, West Virginia, but revealed little else about his past. During the warmer months he spent a good deal of his time at the bar of the Norridgewock Hotel in the hamlet of Beaver River. He was known as a talented handyman and as a heavy drinker.   In 1916 the state evicted the squatters from state land all across the Adirondacks, including George Snyder. Most of the Red Horse camps were simply abandoned afte...

After the hermit Jimmy O’Kane died in 1859 human habitation at the Stillwater ended for a time. Until about 1870 the only enclosed shanty anywhere in the upper Beaver River country was Chauncey Smith’s cabin on the South Branch near the Sand Spring. This situation changed in 1870 when the Wardwell family bought fifty acres at the confluence of Twitchell Creek with the Beaver River on the west side of the Carthage-to-Lake Champlain Road bridge, the same spot where O’Kane had lived. This marked the first land transfer at Stillwater other than the sale of the whole township to Lyman R. Lyon from John Brown Frances in 1850.   William Wardwell was born about 1830 in Martinsburg in the Black River Valley south of Lowville. He married Sarah C. (maiden name unknown) in 1855 and in 1858 their daughter Rosa was born. He worked as a house painter before being drafted in 1864 to fight in the Civil War. He served one year then returned to his family. The steadily growing number of spo...

Charles Fenton was one the five children of Orrin and Lucy Fenton. He was born in the pioneer settlement of Number Four on June 15, 1829. As a young man he worked in the woods with his father and brothers as a market hunter, trapper, outdoor guide and probably as a logger.  At the age of 29 he married Annis Brown and moved to the 320-acre Brown family farm nearby in Watson. They had two daughters, Cora and Julia. According to the census, during this time in addition to farming he engaged in the lumber business, but exactly what role he played is unclear.  In 1863 his parents sold the homestead at Number Four to a neighbor, Losee B. Lewis. By that time the Fenton House was already widely known as a sportsmen’s hotel. Lewis continued to operate the Fenton House and guide sporting tourists for a few years. By 1870, the year his father Orrin died, Charles Fenton had accumulated enough money to buy back the property.  Even though the “little red house” that had served his pare...

Levi Wells Prentice, a young painter from Syracuse, NY, visited the Beaver River country during a five-week sketching trip in 1873 that followed an established circuit up the Fulton Chain of Lakes to Raquette Lake and Blue Mountain Lake, then down the Raquette River to the Saranac Lakes, returning by way of Tupper Lake, Little Tupper, Smith’s Lake, Albany Lake and out down the Beaver River. Prentice made dozens of sketches on that trip, some of which he later developed into fully realized oil paintings. Prentice was born on Dec. 18, 1851 on a farm in the town of Harrisburg in Lewis County, NY, the second son of Samuel and Rhoda Robbins Prentice. He grew up on the family farm then moved with his family to Syracuse in 1870. Not much is known of his early life. Doubtless, like all farm boys, it included a great deal of physical labor, outdoor activity and practical education. He must have dabbled in art but there is no record that he ever received any formal art education.   Not long ...

Back, way back in the nineteenth century, scores of adventurous campers, fishermen, hunters, trappers and even artists ascended the Beaver River on their way to spend at least a week at Smith’s Lake, now known as Lake Lila. This trip typically required three days of travel one-way. The first day was by wagon and on foot on a rough wilderness road from Lowville to Stillwater. The second and third days were by boat. It took a full day to row up the Beaver River from Stillwater twenty-two twisting river miles to the east end of the great marsh that we now know as the Stillwater Reservoir. At the end of that tiring day early travelers often camped at a spot near where the South Branch entered the main river. The South Branch was so shallow that it was only navigable for about 300 yards, but early explorers knew that if they turned in there, they would come to a good level camp site. An added attraction was the existence of a nearby spring bubbling up in the middle of the South Branch where...

The creation of the Carthage-to-Lake Champlain Road in 1844-45 made it reasonably feasible for hunters and trappers to prowl the almost untouched wilderness of the upper Beaver River. Before the road existed, it was possible, but quite difficult, to reach this area because upstream from the pioneer settlement of Number Four a series of nineteen falls and rapids prevented navigation by boat. Reaching the upper Beaver River above the falls required an eleven-mile hike. This limited the earliest hunters to only as much meat or fur as they could carry on their backs. After the road was opened, they could skirt those rapids and haul goods in and out with a horse drawn wagon. These early hunters and trappers typically erected temporary shelters near their favorite hunting grounds so they could remain in the woods for days or weeks until they had collected what they considered to be a marketable supply of dead animals. These primitive shelters were all loosely referred to as shanties. If inte...

  The Red Horse Creek enters the Beaver River from the north about five miles downstream from the foot of Little Rapids. It is  a modest, shallow stream, easy to overlook. Upstream along the creek there are a series of natural glacial lakes and ponds, each higher in elevation than the last.   In the centuries before the arrival of white settlers, the Red Horse Creek provided the Haudenosaunee with a relatively easy way to cross from the Beaver River valley to the Oswagachie River that they could follow on north to the St. Lawrence River. Use of the route by generations of Native American hunters and travelers resulted in a discernable trail along the Red Horse Creek.   By the time the first people of European descent pushed into the Beaver River country in the decades before the Civil War, the Haudenosaunee were gone but traces of their long-established trail still existed along the Red Horse Creek. The white hunters, trappers, and fishermen who first explored the up...