Annals of the Beaver River

Back in the 1920s when newcomers first arrived at the Rap-Shaw Club camp at Beaver Dam Pond deep in the woods north of the Beaver River, one of the first club members they encountered was a rough-looking fellow, dressed like a bum, noisily cutting the grass in front of the clubhouse. At suppertime a man who called himself Professor Hartnett would appear in the dining room dressed in sartorial splendor and try to convince the guests that he was same man who they met earlier cutting the grass.   No doubt, the befuddled guests wondered, “Who is this oddball?”   Dennis Edward Hartnett was born July 19, 1872 in Catskill, NY, son of Dennis and Mary Ann Byrne Hartnett. His father worked in the local wool spinning mill. His family was of modest means. As soon as they were old enough, he and his siblings also went to work as spinners in the mill. Dennis was born with an artistic temperament and a free spirit that did not equip him particularly well for factory work. Instead, he applied himself

Ouderkirk's Mill, c1893, Goodsell Museum collection Where the hamlet of Beaver River Station now stands, there once was a beaver pond behind an esker fed by a brook that plunged in from the west. Below the outlet of this pond the brook met its sister from the south and together they flowed into the mother stream that we now call the Beaver River. On the south branch close to where the two streams merged there was a spring hole with a sandy bottom filled with native brook trout. The area around the confluence of the two streams was a large marshy meadow filled with native grasses and shrubs. In 1891 and 1892 a trans-Adirondack railroad was built through this area. It originated at a junction with the New York Central Railroad main line in the Mohawk Valley and reached north to Malone near the Canadian border, thus it was originally named the Mohawk to Malone Railroad, or the M&M for short. The railroad was designed and financed by Dr. William Seward Webb. Only a year after train