George Snyder

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 after the occupants removed anything of value. A few were relocated onto private property. George, ever an inventive fellow, disassembled his cabin, built a log barge and reassembled his cabin on top. He originally moored his floating camp on Trout Pond. After the reservoir was expanded in 1925 it was possible to move it to neighboring Big Burnt Lake in times of high water, returning to the more sheltered Trout Pond for the winter. Unable or unwilling to decide if this structure was illegal, the state decided to leave George alone.

 

During the prohibition years George became a bootlegger. He had a hidden still somewhere back in the woods. He apparently made a good deal of money in the early 1920s when Beaver River was crawling with loggers clearing the 4000 acres that would soon be flooded by the new dam. When the loggers departed in 1924, George went back to trapping beaver and fixing things for his few neighbors.

 

On August 13, 1938 the Rap-Shaw Club motor launch pulled up to Snyder’s cabin on Trout Pond. On board were two young brothers, Robert and Buddy Ostrander, and Theodore Miller, an engineer and amateur photographer from Poughkeepsie, NY. While the club steward, Herbie Nye, steadied the boat, the boys jumped out to examine the cabin. Miller took the photograph that appears at the top of this post.

 

The photo is one of the very few stereographic photos ever taken anywhere in the Beaver River country. By a series of happy coincidences, Theodore Miller’s private collection of Rap-Shaw photographs has been shared with me by his great-grandson, John Miller.

 

Apparently, George Snyder continued to live on his floating cabin for many more years, eventually earning the status of Beaver River legend. One March George failed to show up at Beaver River Station when expected. It was his habit to spend the winter trapping beaver and other fur-bearing animals. He would haul out a sled full of pelts just before the ice and snow melted.

 

As the ice on the reservoir got increasingly thin, Stanley Thompson, owner of the Norridgewock Hotel, decided something bad must have happened to George. Stanley and an older neighbor named Del Petrie, a good friend of Snyder, crossed the barely frozen reservoir and headed up the Red Horse Trail. The snow was deep but quite soft when they reached Beaver Dam Pond late in the day. As they were about to turn back, they smelled smoke.

 

They found Snyder in his double-walled tent a short distance away. He was desperately ill and unable to walk. Thompson and Petrie gave him the sandwiches they still carried and gathered enough wood to last him the night. They had no other choice than to leave him there and go for help. The next morning Thompson led the district Forest Ranger, Bill Marleau, and a state trooper back to Snyder’s tent. They pulled him out of the woods on a sled and took him to the hospital on the next train. He survived.

 

Snyder returned to Beaver River after he recovered, but not to his floating cabin. He moved in with Del Petrie in the hamlet and lived for three more years before finally succumbing to liver disease. His cabin was hauled into town where it became the tool shed for the Norridgewock Hotel. His log barge was repurposed as a cargo barge for hauling goods from the end of the road at Stillwater to Beaver River. Although George is long gone now, a faint trace of his legend lives on.

 

Stereo photo of Snyder’s cabin by Theodore Miller by permission of John Miller.

 

Information about George Snyder was drawn from Pat Thompson, Beaver River: Oasis in the Wilderness (2000) pp. 57 – 59 and William B. Donnelly, “A Short History of Beaver River” (unbound pamphlet 1979) pp. 48 – 49.