Annals of the Beaver River

Ed leaned his chair back until he was propped against the front of the building at a comfortable angle. It had been almost five years since he last sat on Aunt Ella’s front porch. The view was just as he remembered it. Norridgewock Lake sparkled in the late afternoon sun. A loon surfaced and disappeared again. The low hills in the distance had that dark green glow that only unbroken forest possesses. It was good to be back. Edwin “Ed” Butcher was born in Canada in 1872. He grew up in Beaverton, Ontario, in the countryside north of Toronto on the eastern shore of Lake Simcoe. As a young man he married Nellie White and they had a daughter, Clara. For some unknown reason Nellie abandoned Ed and Clara and moved to Buffalo, NY. Ed went to work as a molder in a steel mill in Hamilton, Ontario. His parents raised Clara. Around 1900 Ed also moved to Buffalo to try to reunite with Nellie. Apparently, they did not reconcile, but they never divorced.     Ed loved the outdoors. Sometime b...

On February 11, 1925 the Black River Regulating District closed the gates at the greatly expanded Stillwater Dam. Spring runoff soon filled the reservoir behind the dam. By the summer of 1925 the water level was almost nineteen feet higher than it had ever been before. As the water rose, the tallest hills upstream of the dam became islands. Lower hills and ridges became shoals. Twenty-two twisty miles of the original Beaver River vanished underwater. The massive ten-mile-long Stillwater Reservoir, much as we know it today, had been born.   One of the consequences of the expansion of the reservoir was the flooding of about four thousand acres of marsh and forest, some of which was private property containing camps and other buildings. The private property was concentrated in two widely separated areas. One group of cottages, two hotels and a small farm were located at the far western end of the reservoir near the dam. The other camps and buildings were in the immediate vicinity of t...