Rufus J. Richardson
“Hello, is this Ed Pitts?”
“Yes, it is. Who’s calling.”
“This is Joe Reeder. I have a camp near the Stillwater Reservoir. Does the name Reeder or Richardson mean anything to you?”
“I can’t say for sure. Richardson rings a bell but I’m not sure I can place Reeder.”
“Thought so. I’m calling because I read your book on the Beaver River and I’m surprised that you didn’t mention my camp. I believe it’s probably the oldest continuously occupied camp in the whole Beaver River area.”
“Really? I’m sorry, Joe. I remember now that Terry Perkins once told me I should investigate the history of your camp, but I never got around to it. To be honest, I had the impression that it was just a typical hunting camp. I’d be very happy to look into the history of your camp and, with your permission, write about it on my blog.”
“Why don’t you come up to visit? I’m at camp right now. I’ll be here through the first week of November.”
A week later, with my wife Merry at the wheel of our VW Golf, we picked our way up a very rugged woods road following Terry Perkins’ truck. Terry is a retired forest ranger who has known Joe Reeder for a long time. Terry has keys to the gates that block access to the road by unauthorized parties. It was the day before the opening of deer season. Terry told us there would be a few hunters at the camp. When I told him we were invited to stay overnight he said, “That should be interesting.”
Terry introduced us to Joe and left. My wife and I and our dog settled down by the fireplace next to Joe. We talked for hours that afternoon and the next morning. He showed us around, got out old photographs and the camp guest books and told me stories. I hope this article makes up somewhat for my earlier oversight.
Private hunting and fishing camps have played a significant role in the history of the Beaver River Country. My book, Beaver River Country, and previous articles on this blog have discussed the Beaver River Club [1893 – 1920] and the Rap-Shaw Club [1896 – present]. Many other hunting and fishing camps and clubs have existed in the area over the years. Most of these camps have been family-based and have not survived for more than a few generations. The Richardson / Reeder camp founded about 1870 by Rufus J. Richardson of Lowville, NY has existed for much longer.
Rufus J. Richardson was born on New Year’s Day 1843 in Martinsburg, Lewis Co., NY. He attended school at the Lowville Academy. In 1865 at the age of twenty-two he married Clara J. Salmon [1847 – 1869] whose family also owned a farm in Martinsburg. Following their marriage, Rufus worked on his wife’s family farm. There is no record that he was in the army during the Civil War.
In 1868 Rufus and Clara left the farm and moved to the village of Lowville where Rufus went to work in a grocery and drug store. The very next year, in 1869, Clara Richardson and her infant son died during childbirth. Rufus remained in Lowville, continued to work as a merchant and moved into a boarding house.
It was quite common for hunters from the Lowville area to head for the upper Beaver River during hunting season. By the fall of 1870 there were accommodations for hunters at the recently expanded Fenton House in the tiny hamlet of Number Four [see my post of 03/17/21] and at the Wardwell place at Stillwater [see my post of 03/23/21]. Rufus would have walked the 29 miles from Lowville to Stillwater and lodged with Wardwell while he explored the area searching for deer. At some point, Rufus must have crossed to the north shore of the still undammed Beaver River and followed a small stream to a little pond called the Kettlehole, then climbed up a steep hill to a beautiful natural body of water now named Raven Lake. It would have been a location known only to local hunters as Raven Lake did not appear on maps of the area until the 1893 Map of the Adirondack Forest and Adjoining Territory by J.B. Koetteritz.
It is impossible to know exactly when Rufus built his first camp on Raven Lake. From family stories we learn that at some point before 1870 he built a simple hunting shanty on the north shore of Raven Lake near an imposing old white pine. Hunting shanties of that time were often small log cabins of one room with a fire ring at one end and a hole in the bark roof to let smoke escape.
Rufus Richardson married his second wife, Jennie Rogers [1852 – 1892], in 1871. They had two daughters: Clara Jennie, born in 1873 and Cora May, born in 1874. Joe Reeder, the great-grandson of Rufus and Jennie Richardson, remembers that his grandmother Clara told him that when she first visited the Raven Lake camp as a child in the late 1870s there were two cabins on the high bank on the south shore. One was the original hunter’s shanty that had been dragged across the lake in the winter over the ice. The other was a small frame cabin built with finished lumber. The existence of a second cabin suggests that Rufus was sharing the camp with at least one other sportsman, possibly his older brother Luther.
About 1872, Rufus and Luther, then a Lowville clothing merchant, became business partners. They founded R.J. Richardson & Co. a firm that specialized in buying and selling produce on the wholesale market. Dairy farms were proliferating in Lewis County at the time, so milk and cheese became one of the new business’s principal products [see Business Directory of Lewis County for 1872-3, p. 243]. Rufus, now commonly known as R.J., devoted a great deal of time during the 1870s to building this business.
Not much is known about R.J.’s use of the Raven Lake camp during the 1870s. There can be no doubt, however, that he continued to have an active outdoor life. On July 16, 1877 the Lowville Journal & Republican reported that he won a prize at a state-wide shooting contest in Rochester and on August 1, 1877 it noted that he was the president of the Lewis County Sportsmen’s Association and came in second in a local shooting contest. The paper also frequently published long lists of wholesale cheese purchases made by R.J. Richardson & Co.
During the later 1870s and early 1880s sporting tourism increased substantially in the Beaver River Country, as it did throughout the Adirondacks. The fact that men were now often accompanied by their wives and children further increased the flow of tourists. The Fenton House at Number Four expanded and added cabins to accommodate this clientele. New sportsmen’s hotels were built further upstream. Joe and Mary Dunbar opened a hotel at Stillwater in 1879 on the site of Wardwell’s old place. It became so popular that it was soon expanded with several log cabins added especially for families. Andrew and Clemsia Muncy opened their hotel at Little Rapids in 1877. S. Boyd Edwards, a well-known guide, built a hotel at Smith’s Lake [Lake Lila] in 1878, that was later successfully operated by Jim and Ella Lamont. R.J. Richardson likely spent some time at each of these hotels, especially the Dunbar Hotel at Stillwater.
Joe Reeder’s grandmother, Clara Reeder, remembered that about 1888, R.J. Richardson built an improved larger camp on the site where the old cabins had once stood. The frame cabin was moved down to the shore and converted into the current boat house. If anything was left of the original log shanty, it was demolished. A new camp building was constructed with finished lumber. The new building was a simple rectangle fronted by a porch facing the lake with a sleeping loft upstairs. The new camp was specifically designed to accommodate the whole family. This camp was used by the family for a variety of outdoor activities like swimming, fishing, boating, and hiking, as well as for deer hunting in the fall.
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| S. Brown Richardson |
As the Richardson’s business grew the brothers became more involved in community life. S. Brown entered local politics as a member and then president of the Lowville village board. R.J. used his love of the outdoors to advance his social and business standing. In January of 1891 he joined with 15 or so fellow businessmen led by Lowville druggist William H. Morrison to purchase a large tract of land surrounding Smith’s and Albany Lakes at the headwaters of the Beaver River. These two lakes have since been renamed Lake Lila and Nehasane Lake respectively.
According to the Lowville Journal and Republican, January 29, 1891, their plan was to found a sportsmen’s club called the Smith’s Lake Park Association that would create a public game preserve and a fish hatchery. They made improvements to Lamont’s Smith’s Lake Hotel including a new two-story addition “designed more especially for ladies who visit the place.” They also constructed a telephone line connecting the hotel to Lowville. They made an agreement with the state that they could stock fish from their projected hatchery all along the upper Beaver River from Smith’s Lake to Beaver Lake, all along the Red Horse Chain of Lakes and, significantly for Richardson, in Raven Lake where he had his camp.
These grand plans never came to fruition. Only six months later, in June 1891, Wm. Seward Webb purchased their holdings as part of his plan to create his own private great camp. Webb closed the hotel and soon tore it down. When Morrison and Richardson tried to stop Webb from closing off public access to Smith’s and Albany Lakes, Webb sued them and won [see Lewis County Democrat March 8, 1892]. Webb then successfully closed off all public access to his property [see my post of 10/29/21].
R.J. Richardson’s second wife, Jennie Richardson died in a tragic carriage accident in the spring of 1892 [see detailed account in Lowville Journal & Republican, May 26, 1892]. There is scant evidence of R.J. Richardson’s sporting activities during that year. He probably was mourning the death of his beloved wife. Even so, he did not give up his interest in founding a sportsmen’s club on the upper Beaver River.
In December 1892, he and Morrison joined with thirty other well-to-do businessmen from Syracuse, Utica and Lowville to purchase the Dunbar Hotel at Stillwater. They not only acquired outright 200 acres surrounding the hotel but also signed a multi-year lease for 6,000 additional acres of forest and lakes from Mary Lyon Fisher. This lease of lands on the north side of the Beaver River included Raven Lake, giving Richardson his first legal right to the land where he already had a camp. At the first meeting of the Beaver River Club, R.J. Richardson was elected vice president. He and his brother S. Brown both bought cottage lots from the club, but they never built cottages on those lots. The brothers remained members of the Beaver River Club for about fifteen years.
Although the Richardsons used the Beaver River Club for socializing, they continued to use the camp at Raven Lake for family gatherings, fishing and hunting. In 1899 the widowed fifty-six-year-old R.J. Richardson married thirty-six-year-old Francis “Fannie”’ M. Blye, his third wife.
In 1902 crossing to the north side of the Beaver River became a problem. Prior to the damming of the river, it was fairly easy to cross it by fording the river at Stillwater in a shallow place to a narrow road on the north side that Richardson had cleared as far as Kettlehole Pond. From there a hiking trail followed the Raven Lake outlet up hill to the camp. In 1887 the state constructed the first dam at Stillwater. This wood and earth dam raised the water level upstream by 9.5 feet, but it did not affect use of the ford downstream from the dam. In 1892 – 93 the dam was raised another 5 feet, but this too did not disturb the ford downstream. Then, in 1901 - 02 the state built a concrete dam a bit further downstream. This dam flooded the original river bed between the two dams, cutting off Richardson’s access across the ford to the north shore.
When the 1901 - 02 dam was being planned, the state hired James Dunbar to be the dam keeper at Stillwater. He was the son of Joe and Mary Dunbar, builders and proprietors of the Dunbar Hotel. After the Beaver River Club bought the Dunbar Hotel, Jim and his wife Clara stayed on as guides and caretakers. R.J. Richardson knew Jim Dunbar well. Doubtless Jim had often guided for the Richardsons over the years. To solve the access problem created by the 1901 - 02 dam, when the Richardsons wanted to cross the river, Jim simply opened the gates at the new dam and closed the gates at the still present 1893 dam. With the flow temporarily shut off, the river bed drained and the old ford could again be used. This practice continued until the reservoir was expanded in 1924 – 25. After that it was necessary to use a boat to reach the trail to the camp from the Kettlehole.
R.J. Richardson & Co. was flourishing at the turn of the century and the brothers had become wealthy. Their primary competitor was the Lowville Milk and Cheese Co., established in 1899 by Brayton B. Miller and his son Leon. In 1901 the Richardson brothers purchased half interest in the Miller’s company. In short order, the combined company built the Lowville Cold Storage Plant capable of storing a million pounds of cheese, said to be the largest in the world at the time [Harney J. Corwin, Lewis County, p. 43]. This plant along the railroad tracks was sold to Kraft Cheese in 1928. A much-expanded Kraft plant is now one of the largest employers in Lewis County.
In August 1905 newspapers in Utica, Rome and Lowville carried identical articles claiming that a group of sportsmen had purchased 6000 acres of forest just north of the Beaver River from Fisher Forestry in order to form a sportsman’s club [Utica Herald Dispatch, August 16, 1905, Rome Daily Sentinel, August 16, 1905 and Lowville Journal & Republican, August 24, 1905]. This tract must have been the same one that the Beaver River Club had been leasing from Fisher since 1893. R.J. Richardson was one of the organizers of the new club. It was to be based at the James Dunbar property. With the steady income from his dam keeper job Jim Dunbar had acquired a sizable piece of property along the road leading to the 1901 dam. He built a two-story farm house, barn and outbuildings. The article went on to say that members of the new club would have access to the adjoining Beaver River Club’s property, presumably based on Richardson’s continuing membership and Dunbar’s guiding work.
It's unclear why Richardson helped organize this new club. Perhaps he wanted a base at Stillwater for fishing and hunting that was more modest than the Beaver River Club with its grand clubhouse and an increasing number of cottages owned by very wealthy families from Syracuse and Utica. The new Dunbar Club did actively engage in negotiations to buy 6000 acres from Fisher, but failed to make a deal. The problem was probably not lack of money, but was more likely due to the large stand of marketable timber on the tract. One successful outcome of these negotiations, however, was R.J. Richardson’s 1906 purchase of ten acres surrounding his camp at Raven Lake.
After acquiring title to the land, Richardson substantially expanded the camp building at Raven Lake. The existing building was moved a short distance back from the lake and rotated 90 degrees. It was remodeled into a large kitchen with a separate entrance and employees’ quarters upstairs. A new two-story main camp was built in front of the kitchen wing. It had a wrap-around porch with views across the lake, a large field stone fireplace in the main room, a dining room, and an impressive rustic birch staircase leading to the bedrooms upstairs. It had no running water, no electricity and no indoor bathroom. It remains essentially the same today.
The size and configuration of the camp show it was intended for family outdoor recreation. By this time the Richardson family had expanded. R.J. and Jennie Richardson’s daughters were married, Clara to Charles Reeder and Cora to Harry Gould. Their families including their children spent considerable time at the camp. The Richardson’s also frequently entertained guests at camp. One of these guests suggested the camp should be named “Camp Wanda.” R.J. agreed and had a custom name plate made for the front door. Guest books that were started in 1888 are still maintained and now include more than 7,000 entries.
The situation at the Richardson camp remained basically the same for the next ten years. As R.J. aged, he kept coming up to camp, but by 1913 when he turned seventy, he had resigned from both the Beaver River Club and the Dunbar Club. He died Sept. 6, 1917 at the age of 74. The camp he built was inherited by his daughters and later by his grandchildren, and even later by his great-grandchildren. Only one great-grandchild is still alive. C. Joseph “Joe” Reeder was born in 1927. He is now ninety-six years old and spends as much time as he can at camp. Joe has deep ties to the place. He still remembers being told that his first trip to camp was in 1930 when his father carried him up in a pack basket. He’s come to the camp almost every year since.
Unlike most other camps, the Richardson / Reeder camp is located on a tract of private land totally surrounded by state-protected wilderness. Access is strictly limited to the owners, their families and invited guests. The road is gated and there is no public access whatsoever. I ask the readers of this article to respect the privacy rights of the owners and not trespass beyond their gate.
Information for this article was graciously provided by Joe Reeder, Larry Dolhof and Terry Perkins. Color photographs are courtesy of Meredith Leonard, my wife.
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