Wardwell's

-


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 sporting tourists visiting the upper Beaver River must have been the reason the Wardwells decided they could make a better living by homesteading and accommodating visitors at a wilderness outpost at Stillwater.

 

The photograph at the head of this post is not of the Wardwell homestead, but of one that was probably quite similar. Their homestead consisted of a basic log house, a log barn and some outbuildings on the bluff overlooking a deep pool about a quarter of a mile back from the main river. They called their modest homestead “The Wild Woods Home.” In no time local outdoors guides started storing boats and supplies at Wardwell’s. There was a pasture for horses and a place where wagons could be stored.

 

Between 1870 and 1876 the Wardwells played host to almost every passing party visiting the upper Beaver River. Wardwell’s provided travelers with a simple meal of trout or venison and a place to sleep out of the rain. The Wardwell homestead was not a destination, but a welcome way station. The spot near Twitchell Creek at Stillwater was soon being shown on maps as “Wardwell’s.”

 

Bill Wardwell was a friendly but eccentric character. He claimed to be a crack shot, but visitor A. Judd Northrup noted the gun sight on his rifle was only loosely tied on with a leather thong. The roof of his log barn had tumbled in but Wardwell laconically told Northrup he would repair it “when I git ta it.”

 

W. W. Hill and his wife visited on a fishing trip 1873. They found that Wardwell’s was “in very comfortable shape for a place so far back in the forest, and is kept neat and tidy by Mrs. W. and her daughter, Rosa.” Fifteen-year-old Rosa especially impressed the Hills because she “can fish and row a boat as well as she can talk.”

 

Charles Fenton stopped at Wardwell’s on March 10, 1875 on a trip to Albany Lake guiding two sportsmen from Massachusetts who wanted to go ice fishing for lake trout. They picked up a small stove at Wardwell’s that Fenton had stored there to use for winter camping. Wardwell, his wife and seventy-year-old mother were happy for company as they had not left home since the first of January. On the way back to Number Four, Fenton met Wardwell and his daughter Rosa on the road. They were walking home on snowshoes from Lowville where Rosa had been attending school. According to Fenton, Rosa covered the eleven miles from Number Four to Stillwater in just three and a half hours without feeling tired.

 

Sometime in 1875 or 1876 Sarah Wardwell fell seriously ill and was confined to bed. The Lowville Journal & Republican for April 5, 1876 reported that the Wardwells had moved back to Martinsburg and hired Edmund Burdick and his wife to run the hotel at Stillwater. Shortly thereafter the homestead was sold to Joe and Mary Dunbar, whose story will be the subject of a future post.

 

Wardwell’s was last listed as a sportsmen’s hotel in Wallace’s Descriptive Guide to the Adirondacks in the 1876 edition. Once settled back in Martinsburg, Sarah Wardwell recovered from the illness that forced the family to leave their Stillwater homestead. After the untimely death of Rosa in 1882, William and Sarah Wardwell moved west to Wisconsin. 

 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Norridgewock Saloon

-
Image
The photo above shows me talking to   members of Adirondack Architectural Heritage inside what was once the Norridgewock Hotel saloon. That room played an important part in social life at Beaver River for more than 50 years from 1912 until 1964. Its story deserves to be remembered.   The saloon started out as a rather grand, multipurpose stable. These days livestock is pretty rare in Beaver River, but back in the early decades of the twentieth century  there was a considerable herd in and around the hamlet. There were three small sportsman’s hotels, Elliott’s, Darrow’s and Pop Bullock’s, each of which had at least one team of horses and a cow or two. The Norridgewock Hotel needed a small herd of cows to furnish guests with fresh milk.  Some of the teamsters from nearby lumber camps would occasionally come to town with their horses. In addition to these animals there were a considerable number of wagons and buckboards that needed protection from the weather. ...
Read more

Ouderkirk's Sawmill

-
Image
Ouderkirk's Mill, c1893, Goodsell Museum collection Where the hamlet of Beaver River Station now stands, there once was a beaver pond behind an esker fed by a brook that plunged in from the west. Below the outlet of this pond the brook met its sister from the south and together they flowed into the mother stream that we now call the Beaver River. On the south branch close to where the two streams merged there was a spring hole with a sandy bottom filled with native brook trout. The area around the confluence of the two streams was a large marshy meadow filled with native grasses and shrubs. In 1891 and 1892 a trans-Adirondack railroad was built through this area. It originated at a junction with the New York Central Railroad main line in the Mohawk Valley and reached north to Malone near the Canadian border, thus it was originally named the Mohawk to Malone Railroad, or the M&M for short. The railroad was designed and financed by Dr. William Seward Webb. Only a year after train...
Read more

Guides' Camps along the Red Horse Trail

-
Image
  J. Wilder's open camp at Crooked Lake 1896 The Iroquois established the Red Horse Trail centuries ago for use in their travels between their southern territories and the St. Lawrence River valley. It is one of the oldest footpaths in the Adirondacks. The southern part of this trail still exists. It begins on the north side of the Beaver River, now the Stillwater Reservoir. It follows the Red Horse Creek, connecting Big Burnt Lake, Trout Pond, Salmon Lake, Witchhopple Lake, Clear Lake and Crooked Lake. It formerly continued on northeast to the High Falls of the Oswagachie River, but this segment was buried by the big blowdown of 1995 and has not been reopened. I posted an article on this blog back on 03/01/21 giving the basic history of the trail.   https://beaverriverhistory.blogspot.com/2021/03/the-red-horse-trail.html   Detail from H. Beach postcard map, about 1910   In the early 1870s sporting tourists and their guides began to use the old trail. The first publi...
Read more