Andrew J. and Clemsia Muncy

By all accounts Andrew Muncy was a modest man. He lived his life as a pioneer farmer on the western edge of the great northern forest. For fourteen years between 1877 and 1891 he and his wife operated a successful sportsmen’s hotel along the upper Beaver River. It is mentioned in numerous published first-person accounts and guidebooks, but those accounts say little about the hotel and its proprietors. Unlike the neighboring hotels operated by the Dunbar family at Stillwater and the Lamont family at Smith’s Lake, nothing much of note seems to have happened at Muncy’s.

I think the Muncys are interesting precisely because they were such ordinary people. They were hard working and well regarded. They knew tourist travel to the Beaver River country was increasing during the 1870s and seized the opportunity to supplement their farm income. I have tried to find out more details, but they have proved difficult to research. One problem is although the spelling of their names on official records is Muncy, alternate spellings such as Muncey and Muncie occur in some publications. The biggest problem, however, is that they just did not attract much attention to themselves. Here’s what I’ve been able to glean about them from widely scattered sources.

 

Andrew Jackson Muncy was born September 10, 1836 in the Town of Lincklaen in Chenango County, NY. Presumably he was named for the 7^th President of the United States who was still in office at the time of his birth. Most likely he was born to a farming family. Nothing has been recorded about his childhood. By the time he reached adulthood, he and two of his brothers were living in the Town of Watson, Lewis County.

 

In 1860, at the age of 24, he married a neighbor, Clemsia Bates. The Civil War broke out the next year and in August 1861 Andrew enlisted in the Union Army. After serving his time, he returned to Lewis County apparently uninjured. The couple settled on a farm near Petrie’s Corners along the Number Four Road about eight miles outside of Lowville. A daughter, Harriet, was born in 1864. In 1874 their son, Herman, was born.

 

By 1877 Andrew J. Muncy had built a basic wilderness hotel at Little Rapids, a narrow section of the Beaver River just downstream from Albany Lake. The hotel was located right along the carry trail that led around two sets of rapids. Anyone headed from Stillwater to the favored campgrounds at Smith’s Lake would pass right by. The location proved to be perfect. It was about a five-hour row upstream from Dunbar’s Hotel at Stillwater. Travelers who left Dunbar’s in the morning often stopped at Muncy’s for dinner, their mid-day meal. The hotel sat on land that Muncy leased from C. W. Sanders, who owned a large forest tract in the vicinity and who informally employed Muncy as his fire warden.

 

The two and a half story rectangular hotel building measured fifty-two feet by thirty-six feet. As can be seen from the F. E. Slocum photo at the head of this post, the hotel was unremarkable in design. In addition to the hotel Muncy also built a barn and two rough outbuildings, probably to house his horses and cattle. The two women on the right in the photo are most likely Andrew’s wife Clemsia and their teenage daughter Harriet.

 

Although most tourists arrived by boat, Muncy’s Hotel could also be reached by the spur off the Carthage-to-Lake Champlain Road. Muncy maintained the road from Stillwater as far as his hotel because he used his horses and wagon to bring in supplies from Lowville. After the 1887 dam destroyed what was left of the old Twitchell Creek bridge, he used a homemade ferry and a floating bridge to get his team across the creek. He remembered the crossing was 35 rods wide in one place, and 40 rods wide in another with an island in between. Since a rod equals 5.5 yards, if Muncy’s memory was accurate, each stretch of open water was about 200 yards wide.

 

The Muncys operated the hotel, presumably while also working their farm, until the spring of 1891. Early that year Dr. William Seward Webb purchased all the land surrounding the upper Beaver River. He paid the Munseys about $2000 [$60,788.79 in today’s dollars] for the hotel buildings and for fifty acres Muncy owned along the South Branch. Webb immediately closed Muncy’s Hotel to the public. Andrew and Clemsia remained at Little Rapids until that fall to provide room and board for some of Dr. Webb’s employees. Webb then had the hotel demolished. In its place he built a small hunting lodge for use by his guests and guides [see my post of 8/27/21].

 

Not much has been recorded about the Muncys’ later lives. According to census records they returned to farming. It seems that Andrew also operated a small canning factory for fruits and vegetables. The Lowville Journal and Republican noted in its edition of Aug. 10, 1893 that Muncy was buying a large quantity of red raspberries and putting them up at his factory and that he planned to can several thousand cases of beans, peas and corn during the harvest.

 

Perhaps one of the most significant post-hotel events in Andrew Muncy’s life occurred in 1895 when he travelled to Albany, NY to testify before a committee of the Fisheries, Game and Forest Commission on behalf of Dr. Webb, who was negotiating the sale of about 75,000 acres of his land to the state. Much of the information about Muncy’s Hotel in this post is drawn from the transcript of his testimony, Documents of the Assembly of the State of New York, pp. 989 – 1011.

 

Clemsia Bates Muncy died in August 1913 at age 72 after a protracted illness. Andrew J. Muncy died in January 1920 at the age of 87. The newspaper article announcing his death simply noted, “He has been a resident of this place for many years, where he followed farming and other pursuits and was respected by all.” There is no mention in either of their brief obituaries that they once operated a sportsmen’s hotel at Little Rapids. Andrew and Clemsia were both buried in the Petrie’s Corners Cemetery. 

 

 

The F. E. Slocum photograph of Muncy’s Hotel is from the collection of Michael Hess.