Annals of the Beaver River

The Miller family in 1923, Theodore on the left   It all started with a chance Facebook message from a man in Wisconsin named John Miller. His message simply said he has some items that might be of interest to me as the historian of the Rap-Shaw Club. As it turned out what he has are dozens of photographs of the early Rap-Shaw Club taken by his great-grandfather, Theodore H. Miller. The photos date from 1908 until 1938. They show activities at the club camps, then located deep in the woods on the north side of the Beaver River [see my blog post of 5/16/21]. Theodore Miller [born 1872 – died 1971], was a self-taught mechanical engineer. He and his wife Florence MacDonald Miller [1881 – 1954]  were the parents of three children: John MacDonald Miller, Elizabeth Lee Miller and Erik T. Miller. In 1903 they  moved to Poughkeepsie, NY where Theodore became  superintendent of the DeLaval Separator Company, a business that manufactured milking machines and machines that sepa...

Thanks to a tour organized by Adirondack Architectural Heritage [AARCH] this past July my wife and I were able to visit the original “great camp,” Camp Pine Knot on Raquette Lake. The camp was designed and built by William West Durant between 1876 and 1882. W. W. Durant was an heir to a railroad fortune who devoted much of his adult life to creating buildings of a distinctly Adirondack architectural style. After completing Camp Pine Knot, Durant went on to design a series of other similar vacation compounds including Camp Uncas, the Sagamore, and Camp Kill Kare. Each of these camps has its own distinctive features. What they share is Durant’s artful melding of natural materials with sophisticated amenities that catered to the tastes of the ultra-wealthy who could afford to spend the summer season in the Adirondacks relaxing with their family and friends.   Camp Pine Knot is located on a point of land adjacent to where the Marion River flows into Raquette Lake. St. Williams Church, ...

Stillwater Reservoir is dotted with a number of small islands. Almost all of them are part of the state-owned Adirondack Forest Preserve. The islands that exist today were once hilltops along the course of the upper Beaver River. When the state created the current reservoir in 1925, it acquired the private property lying below the projected high-water line as well as the many of the hilltops that were judged too small for any future use. Only a few of the larger hilltops became privately owned islands.   Williams Island, situated about a third of a mile east of the current Stillwater boat launch, is one of these private islands. It was named for Roger Butler Williams, Jr., an investment banker from Ithaca NY. Between 1925 when it first became an island and his death in 1938, Williams owned most of the four-acre island that bears his name as well as its small nearest neighbor, Chicken Island.     Roger Butler Williams, Jr. was born in Ithaca, NY on Dec. 29, 1879. He was th...