Stories from Etta Kempton's Journal, Part 1 - Introducing Etta, Will and Gladys

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 bound “Physicians Memorandum for 1907” with an American flag on the cover that she was probably given by a doctor or druggist. The pages are dated but her entries are not for those dates. Advertising for what passed for medical remedies occupy the top of each page. After she filled the first book, she obtained another. In all she made 1,903 entries over the course of seven years.

 

Etta’s journal chronicles daily life at Beaver River Station during an important time. The railroad that started running late in 1892 had spawned a booming tourist business. By the time the Kemptons arrived in 1905, there were four regularly scheduled passenger trains stopping daily with extra trains during the summer. Almost every train carried a sizable contingent of outdoor enthusiasts eager to explore the wonders of the Beaver River Country. To accommodate these visitors, enterprising outdoor guides had established a dozen or more camps and modest hotels. Not far away at Stillwater, the Beaver River Club, an exclusive retreat for wealthy families from Central NY, was in full swing. Deep in the woods north of the river, the Rap-Shaw Club hosted scores of members and guests for fishing, hunting and summer vacations. Right next to the depot, the original Norridgewock Hotel with room for up to 100 guests was the site of large summer parties with a house orchestra and dancing.

 

Because of the flourishing tourist trade, from 1900 until 1920 the year-round population of Beaver River hovered at around 40 people. According to census records, this population consisted of about ten year-round resident families and a fluctuating number of single men who either worked in the woods as guides or loggers. There was also a constantly changing small contingent of Italian men who worked on the railroad and a handful of single women who worked seasonally at the hotels.

 

It was also a time of great change. There was an economic recession in the early teens that led to the decline and bankruptcy of the Beaver River Club. In 1914 the grand Norridgewock Hotel burned to the ground. In 1916 the state Conservation Commission evicted all the outdoor guides from the camps they had built and maintained on state land, upending that entire business. Etta, Will and Gladys were there for it all.

 

Etta, Will and Gladys, the basic facts

 

Etta Florence Wagner was born Feb. 25, 1873 in the small farming community of North Bangor, NY located near the Canadian border in Franklin County about 5 miles west of Malone. Her parents were farmers, Nicholas and Emaretta Wagner. She had three younger siblings:  Clarence [born 1879], Herman [born 1889] and Agnes [born 1890]. All four of them grew up on the family farm and probably attended primary school in near-by Brushton, NY. On the family farm Etta learned all the skills needed for running a rural household: cooking, cleaning, sewing, home maintenance, tending livestock, and gardening. Etta Kempton, in short, was a fairly typical farm woman of her time, except for the fact that she didn’t marry a farmer. 

 

Etta Wagner married a neighbor, William John Kempton, on Aug. 18, 1897 when she was 24 years old. William J. Kempton was born May 23, 1868 in N. Bangor, NY, the first child of Truman Kempton and Eliza R. New. Will was almost five years older than Etta. He had four younger siblings: Lillian [born 1871], Cora [born 1879], Frank [died in infancy] and Daisy [born 1884]. Almost exactly one year after their marriage their only child, Gladys N. Kempton, was born on August 14, 1898. 

 

Rather than choosing a life farming in the north country, mechanically-minded Will decided to go to work on the railroad. He had to temporarily move away from home to establish himself in that business. During those years Etta and Gladys remained on the family farm in N. Bangor. Etta helped her brothers Clarence and Herman with the farming and cared for her aging parents. She needed a stable place in raise infant Gladys, and must have appreciated having the help of her family and friends. 

 

About 1905 Will landed a job as a section foreman on the Adirondack Division of the New York Central Railroad and moved to Beaver River Station. According to the 1905 NY Census he was living there alone, but it wasn’t long before Etta and seven-year-old Gladys moved to Beaver River. They lived with Will in the “section house” provided rent free by the railroad.

 

 

The railroad buildings lined the northwest side of the tracks. Approaching from the south on the train a visitor would first glimpse the section gang camp (called the “Italian camp” by locals), then the tool house, then the section house, and the water tank, before pulling into the station. The above photo of the scene must have been taken after 1916 since it shows the second, more modern, section house. The original section house was a simple frame building of one and a half stories located immediately along the tracks right next to the water tank. The Kempton family lived there for about ten years until 1916 when the original section house was deemed too antiquated. The railroad then built them a more modern replacement that included indoor plumbing.

The first section house

The second section house

 

 

During her school age years Gladys Kempton lived in Beaver River during the summer but during the school year she lived on the Wagner farm near N. Bangor with her grandfather and attended school in Brushton, travelling back to Beaver River on holidays. Gladys graduated from primary school in the spring of 1912. After that she lived full-time at Beaver River.

 

Will Kempton remained the section foreman at Beaver River Station for the rest of his working life. He retired from the railroad in 1937. Etta F. Kempton became the postmaster for Beaver River in 1917. She retired from that job in 1937. Gladys Kempton married Walter Thompson in 1918. She and Walter both worked for the Thompson Brothers partnership at Beaver River until 1938 when they moved to Cambridge, NY. After Etta and Will retired, they moved back to N. Bangor, their hometown. William J. Kempton died in 1943 and was buried in the Sunnyside Cemetery, Brushton, NY. Etta F. Kempton died in 1946 and was buried beside her husband.

 

Decoding Etta’s journal

 

Etta’s original handwritten journal is the possession of Scott Thompson, one of the current owners of the Norridgewock Lodge in Beaver River. Scott’s great aunt was Gladys Kempton Thompson, Etta and Will’s daughter. The journal was painstakingly transcribed by Mary Kunzler-Larmann, a friend of the Thompson family who owns a camp at Beaver River. A copy of Mary Kunzler-Larmann’s transcription of Etta’s journal is now available at the Town of Webb Historical Association’s Goodsell Museum in Old Forge, NY donated courtesy of Scott Thompson. Here is a copy of the cover of the journal with Etta signature and a copy of a random sample page.

Journal cover

Sample page

 

 

As can be seen in the sample page, Etta’s handwriting can be hard to read. The journal uses many abbreviations, some of which are obscure. Individuals are referred to variously by full name, surname, nickname or initials. For these and other reasons the transcription process stretched from 2014 until 2016. Mary gave me a copy of her transcription in May 2022 and the Thompson family later gave me permission to use Etta’s journal as the basis for this series of stories.

 

In order to make sense of Etta’s journal I first created a new version of the transcription that combines all the entries into a single, computer searchable document. I annotated that copy with one hundred footnotes to clarify the most obscure references. The resulting single-spaced transcript runs 268 pages including footnotes. Because most entries mention people Etta knew, I made a long list of all the names, attempted to decode her abbreviations and nicknames, then categorized them. For the most commonly occurring names, I did deeper research using Ancestry.com and historical newspaper archives.

 

Once I had a good grasp of the journal entries, I realized that each member of the Kempton family had their own unique story to tell. Of course, the primary story is about Etta’s daily life during the seven years covered by her journal. That story offers an intimate view of one rural woman’s life during the early years of the twentieth century. Coupled closely to Etta’s story is the story of her husband Will’s work as a section foreman for the railroad. Gladys Kempton’s experiences as a teenager growing up in Beaver River offers a unique view of that bygone time. The following series of articles strives to bring Etta, Willie J. and teenage Gladys back to life so far as possible.

 

None of this would have been possible without the herculean efforts of Mary Kunzler-Larmann. She quickly recognized the historical value of Etta’s journal and spent countless hours making sense of it. Even before she completed work on her transcript, she brought the existence of the journal to my attention. At the time I was hard at work on another project that ultimately produced my regional history book, Beaver River Country. I promised Mary that I would return to study Etta’s journal as soon as I had the time. That time has come.

 

 

Note on the sources: In addition to Mary Kunzler-Larmann’s transcription of Etta’s journal, I gained valuable insights into the history of the Adirondack Division of the New York Central Railroad from John Taibi, Silver Rails Through to Heart of the Park (2019). I also relied on a transcript of a 2015 Mary Kunzler-Larmann interview with Donald Thompson, Gladys Kempton Thompson’s son. Unless otherwise noted in the captions, all photographs illustrating the articles were made by Gladys Kempton Thompson from the collection of Donald Thompson.