Annals of the Beaver River

While looking through the photo collection of my friend Tim Mayers a few years back, I was struck by a series of photos that show the family of Dr. Edward Livingston Trudeau gathered at the Little Rapids flag stop on the Adirondack Division of the New York Central Railroad. Until that day, I had no idea that Dr. Trudeau, the tuberculosis treatment pioneer of Saranac Lake, had any connection with the Beaver River country. Little Rapids was and is the name of a series of shallow rapids on the Beaver River that lie between what is now the eastern end of the Stillwater Reservoir and Nehasane Lake. The rapids are not navigable, so early travelers skirted them on a well-established carry trail along the south bank. Sometime in the later 1870s, Andrew J. Muncey built a modest sportsmen’s hotel next to that carry trail. In 1891, Dr. William Seward Webb bought all the property in that area as part of his grand plan to build the railroad and establish his own great camp at Lake Lila. He closed o...

The Stillwater Reservoir is the fourth largest body of water in New York’s Adirondack Park. It is an impoundment of the Beaver River in the Town of Webb on the west central edge of the Adirondacks. This post sets forth the basic facts of when and why the reservoir was created.     Possible log-driving dams: 1850 – 1885   The earliest dams on the Beaver River were probably log-driving dams intended to collect adequate water so logs could be floated downstream to market. Log-driving dams were relatively inexpensive to build since they were constructed out of local timber and earth. Logging along the Beaver River was widespread enough by 1853 that the state legislature declared the Beaver River a “public highway” for floating logs.   In 1864, the New York legislature appropriated $10,000 to improve the channel of the Beaver River. The channel was modified from the mouth of Sunday Creek, about six miles downstream from Stillwater, all the way upstream to the headwaters a...