Annals of the Beaver River

According to his grandson Donald Thompson, Will Kempton began his life-long railroad career by working on a section gang based in Chicopee Falls, Massachusetts. At the time, this was a thriving mill town on a tributary of the Connecticut River adjacent to the city of Springfield, a railroad hub. Will later worked on a section gang of the Adirondack Division of the New York Central Railroad based in Childwold, NY., a short-lived station that opened in 1893. The exact dates of these jobs are unknown. Will may have tried farming first because by the time he went to work on the railroad he was probably already in his 20s. Will married his N. Bangor, NY neighbor, Etta Wagner in 1897. Their child Gladys was born the next year. While Will was temporarily working away from home, his new wife and their infant daughter, Gladys, continued to live on the Wagner farm in N. Bangor. Then, about 1905 Will got the section foreman’s job at Beaver River Station and moved there with Etta and young Gladys.

When Mary Kunzler-Larmann first told me about Etta Kempton’s journal, I was not particularly interested. I had never heard of Etta even though I had already spent two years researching Beaver River history. Checking my notes, the only mention of Etta Kempton was on page 48 of Bill Donnelly’s   Short History of Beaver River   (1979) where he briefly noted that a “Mrs. Kempton” once ran the Beaver River Post Office. Etta Kempton was overlooked because she did not do anything earlier historians considered particularly remarkable. They didn’t think it was remarkable that she lived in Beaver River for over thirty years. They didn’t consider that she was appointed postmaster in 1917 and held that job for twenty years, longer than anyone before or after her. They didn’t know she kept a daily journal detailing life in that remote place.     Etta’s daily journal entries generally follow a pattern. During the winter months she recorded the temperature at 7 am. She made note of the weather and th

Etta Kempton’s journal provides incredibly detailed descriptions of the lives of the working people who lived at Beaver River Station between late 1909 and late 1916. It describes her daily activities as well as those of her husband Will and their teenage daughter Gladys. Along the way it inadvertently references a treasure trove of valuable historical information not recorded elsewhere. It gives a great deal of information about the lives of railroad workers, but also includes snippets of the lives of the other women living in the hamlet as well as the hotel keepers, lumbermen, and outdoor guides. Etta was an intelligent, observant woman. Her journal gives intimate access to her daily life and in doing so provides exactly the sort of information needed to fully imagine and understand the texture of those interesting times.   Etta’s journal begins without preface on December 9, 1909. The last entry is for December 8, 1916, exactly seven years later. She wrote her earliest entries in a