The Station Agents
Everyone recognized the Beaver River station agent.
In the fifty years between 1893 and 1943 the Adirondack Division of the New York Central Railroad employed a full-time station agent at Beaver River Station. There were only two Beaver River station agents during those years: John E. Dowd for the twenty years between 1893 until 1913 and William R. Partridge for the thirty years between 1913 until 1943.
The two-story depot building at Beaver River was designed so that the station agent and his family could live upstairs. The agent needed to be present at the station around the clock. Emergency communications could come at any hour. Night trains sometimes had to be flagged down. In winter the station agent had to stoke the stove and be sure the platform was cleared of snow. Although the station agent played a key role in railroad operations, it was not a particularly prestigious job. The only job requirements were a sound mind, a friendly personality, some ability in bookkeeping and demonstrated proficiency in operating a telegraph station.
As the title suggests, a station agent was the railroad company’s local representative and as such handled all the railroad’s local day-to-day business. The agent sold train tickets, handled baggage for passengers, posted the train time tables and answered questions about the schedule. The agent maintained a set of signaling lanterns that were used to inform engineers about a needed flag stop or about safety issues down the line.
In a remote location like Beaver River, the station agent was responsible for virtually all communication with the outside world. Most communication in those days was by letter or postcard. Between 1893 and 1917 the post office was a desk in the train station and the agent served as the community postmaster. The agent received and sorted in-coming mail, and distributed mail to recipients. The agent sold stamps, received out-going mail, and when necessary, hung the mail bag for pick-up. On Feb. 28, 1917 Etta Kempton was appointed postmaster and did that job until Nov. 2, 1939.
The agent was also the station’s primary telegraph operator. The agent was in regular communication by telegraph with the management of the railroad including the train dispatcher and the other station agents on the line. The agent knew whether trains were on-time or delayed. The agent was first to know about accidents and rail maintenance issues. It was the agent’s responsibility to relay information to the local section foreman to arrange for repairs when necessary. The station agents at Beaver River were also agents for Western Union. In this capacity they provided telegraph message service for local residents and visitors. They also handled any money sent by telegraph.
Railroads were early adopters of the telephone. We know from the journal of Etta Kempton, wife of the railroad section foreman at Beaver River, that by 1910 the Adirondack Division of the New York Central had telephone service up and down the rail line using magneto phones. Telephone wires were hung next to the telegraph wires on the existing poles. The railroad installed telephone sets at various places: in the stations, sometimes in the tool shops and even nailed to posts outside. The railroad published a list of these locations for employees. The station agents and other railroad employees used these phones for railroad business. The public typically did not use the railroad’s telephones except in an emergency, otherwise they relied on the telegraph for ordinary communication.
Almost everything arrived and departed from Beaver River by train. The agent was responsible for receiving freight and arranging for its delivery. Quite a lot of freight was shipped from Beaver River especially during hunting season when there could be enough dead deer to fill a box car. Loggers shipped their horses and equipment in and out by rail. Train cars full of lumber departed from Beaver River in the early years. Arrangements for shipping all manner of out-going freight were handled by the station agent. This included working with private shipping companies such as American Express and Wells Fargo as well as with the U.S. Postal Service’s parcel post after it was established in 1913. When railroad shipping was consolidated into the Railway Express Company in 1918, the station agents handled that business.
All business was transacted in cash so by necessity the station agent served as a sort of community banker. Any money the agent received for train tickets and freight shipments had to be accounted for and periodically handed over to the railroad. A railroad paymaster would arrive in a heavily guarded train car to pick up receipts and distribute wages to railroad employees. When Western Union established its system to wire money, the station agent handled that business. The agent also usually handled the cash involved in selling stamps and parcel post for the US Post Office. The agent recorded all transactions and kept the cash in the station’s safe.
John E. Dowd
John E. Dowd [1859 - 1927] got the station agent’s job at Beaver River almost as soon as the trains began to run. He moved into the newly built station in early 1893 with his wife, Florence Marshall [1861 – 1918], and their ten-year-old son, John Wesley. They were from Madison County, in Central New York. Florence was from Pratts Hollow where her father worked in some capacity for the Ontario and Western Railroad [O&W]. John’s parents, Michael and Sarah Dowd, immigrated from Ireland. John’s three older siblings, Mary, David & Ellen, all were born in Ireland, but John was born in New York. In 1870 the Dowd family was living in DeRuyter, NY.
John Dowd married Florence Marshall in 1880. He was 21. She was 19. It seems reasonable that he started working for the railroad around the time of their marriage. According to the 1890 Census John, Florence and their son Wesley were living in Hamilton, NY where John worked as a telegraph operator for the O&W. He probably learned the basic duties of a station agent while working for the O&W.
When the Dowds first moved to Beaver River Station there were few other people living there. Ouderkirk’s sawmill was under construction as was Elliott’s camp. There was a section gang of a few Italian workers and a section foreman, but no other full-time residents. The passengers getting off the train would have either been wealthy families going to the Beaver River Club or sportsmen headed to Elliott’s.
The number of outdoors tourists arriving at Beaver River Station increased dramatically in 1896 after the state purchased 75,000 acres of Webb land and opened it to the general public. Even more tourists arrived after the Norridgewock Hotel opened in 1899. By the turn of the century the population of local residents had swelled to forty.
When the Kempton family moved to Beaver River about 1905 William Kempton the new section foreman, his wife Etta, and Gladys, their precocious daughter, quickly became close friends of the Dowds. Florence Dowd gave Gladys piano lessons. Wesley Dowd accompanied Gladys on walks exploring the area. The Dowds and the Kemptons spent many evenings together playing cards, listening to records on the Victrola or singing around the piano.
Wesley Dowd did not live in Beaver River for long. As a teenager, he was often away from home attending school. In his early twenties, he moved to Norwich, NY and began to work as a dentist. He married Edith Marie Hudson of Ellisburg, Jefferson County, NY in November 1908. Wesley and Edith visited his parents frequently for a time following their marriage, until they moved to California.
Major logging by the Mac-a-Mac company started at Brandreth Park in 1912. A town complete with a new railroad station and company store started to grow up along the track about four miles east of Beaver River. John Dowd was appointed the first station agent at Brandreth. He and Florence moved there in early 1913 even before the new station was complete. For a short while they lived in an outfitted train car on a siding. Etta’s journal records how she and Gladys, accompanied at times by Will, continued to regularly socialize with the Dowds.
William R. Partridge
Grand Valley was a farming town, so presumably James worked at some agricultural job. By 1891 the family had moved to South Glengarry Township, also an agricultural area, on the north side of the St. Lawrence River. By the time of the 1901 Census of Canada, the family was living in the small mill town of Huntingdon, now part of Quebec. It’s located on the Chateauguay River about 50 miles southwest of Montreal and about 10 miles north of the New York border.
I’ve been unable to find any information about what sort of work William did as a young man. Given where he lived, it’s possible that he worked on a farm, or in a textile mill. It seems likely that as a young man William worked in some capacity on railroads in Canada. Huntingdon had a railroad connection to Montreal starting in 1883 and became a station stop on the Canadian section of the Adirondack Division of the New York Central in 1893. Once young William decided that working as a station agent would be a good occupation, he must have learned Morse code and how to operate the telegraph.
The US Census of 1910 tells us that William immigrated from Canada to northern New York in 1909 at the age of 28. He obtained the job of station agent at Piercefield, the next stop south from Tupper Lake on the Adirondack Division line. It was a busy place at the time since International Paper had a large papermill on the banks of the Raquette River just downstream from where the Raquette River pours out of Tupper Lake. The location was ideal for IP since softwood logs were already regularly being driven there.
In 1912 William took over as station agent at Horseshoe Station at bit further south on the Adirondack line. Although the Horseshoe Station had been a busy one from 1893 until 1908, by the time William arrived it was in steep decline. A. A. Low owned a vast tract of land around Horseshoe Lake and operated a diversified forest products industry that at one time employed hundreds of workers. His primary product was maple syrup. In 1908 a massive forest fire triggered by sparks from locomotives destroyed thousands of acres of Low’s sugar bush. Low decided it was impossible to continue production. By 1912 only a small number of people lived at Horseshoe Station and the primary economic activity was selling off Low’s remaining assets.
Also in 1912, possibly earlier, William Partridge met and fell in love with Ethel Maude Wetmore. She was born Aug. 14, 1895, in the town of New Bremen, in the hamlet of Petries Corners along the Number Four Road. It’s impossible to know how or where they met. We know from the 1910 Census that Ethel was living in Inlet NY, probably working at Wood’s Hotel. Her father, Ezra Wetmore, was an Adirondack guide working along the Beaver River. It appears that he sometimes guided for members of the Beaver River Club at Stillwater. A few years before it was flooded, Ezra Wetmore purchased and salvaged some Beaver River Club buildings including furnishings and a sawmill.
William and Ethel were married in Utica, NY on Dec. 5, 1912. He was 30, she was 17 and already pregnant on their wedding day. William became the station agent at Beaver River on Jan. 14, 1913. Ethel, his new wife, and their furniture arrived a few days later. At first the new station agent and his wife did not socialize very much with other Beaver River residents. According to Etta Kempton’s journal, the Partridges only infrequently visited with the Kemptons. It was not until Feb. 1914 that Etta started to refer to the Partridges by their first names.
Perhaps the reason for Ethel Partridge’s limited socializing has to do with her child-rearing responsibilities. Her first child, Dorothy, was born only five months after Ethel moved to Beaver River. Ethel went home to Petries Corners to have the baby. When she returned, William’s mother Elizabeth came to help her during the first month. That pattern was repeated with Ethel’s next pregnancy. In fact, over the next twenty years, she was frequently pregnant with one of their nine children, six girls, and three boys, all of whom she raised at Beaver River Station. For the record, they were: Dorothy Frances [1913 - 2004], Ruth Ethel [1914 - 2019], Margaret Ernestine [1916 - 2018], Shirley Winifred [1920 - 2017], William Wetmore [1922 - 2007], Robert Benjamin [1923 - 2017], James Ezra [1928 - 2015], Joyce Elizabeth [1930 - 2009], and June Eleanor [1934 – 2021].
The parents of the children living at Beaver River quite naturally wanted their children to be educated. There were only a small number of school-age children in January 1913 when the school district in Old Forge dispatched Mabel Hall to be the first teacher in Beaver River. She boarded with the Kempton’s during the week and returned home to Old Forge on the weekend. The number of school age children fluctuated over the next few years, so a teacher was sent out only when necessary. According to Donnelly, p. 29, the Marcantonio log cabin served as the school room. As the Partridge family started to grow and the Thompson’s started to have children, a purpose-built one room school house was erected on the south side of the railroad tracks in 1920. It served children from near-by Brandreth Station as well as those from Beaver River. In 1935 the schoolhouse was enlarged so there could be one room for elementary students and a separate room for high school students. In 1938 classes were moved to the downstairs of the Norridgewock Annex, just across the Grassy Point Rd. from the hotel.
The teachers at the one room Beaver River School changed frequently. According to Donnelly, early teachers included Helen Fallon of Old Forge, Harriet Purdy, Mrs. Sparasine, Mary Puffer and Nellie Riley. After a two-year stint in the early twenties, Nellie married Carl Rowley, the dam-keeper at Stillwater. Other teachers were drawn from the local residents including Mrs. Hurley, Howard Hurley's mother; Lucille Thompson, Clint and Jennie Thompson’s daughter; and Dorothy Partridge, oldest child of William and Ethel Partridge.
As described in my post of 11/14/22, things got quite lively at Beaver River Station in the years between 1920 and 1925. Then, during the 1930s things slowed down quite a bit. Passenger service on the railroad was gradually reduced and freight shipments transitioned to trucking. On October 14, 1940 the station building burned to the ground. Because of the reduction in business, the railroad decided not to rebuild the station. Instead, the railroad moved the old bunkhouse for the section gang onto the station's foundation to serve as a temporary office.
Following the station fire, the Partridge family was first housed in living quarters upstairs in the Annex that Walter and Gladys Thompson and their children had recently vacated. They also briefly inhabited the section house that the Kemptons left in 1939. Finally, they purchased the now vacant schoolhouse and moved there. Ethel Partridge ran a small grocery store in part of the building and made maple sugar to be sold on the trains. William raised chickens in a chicken coop nearby. William and Ethel and the children still at home lived in the old schoolhouse building until 1943. The old schoolhouse building still stands, now used as a summer camp by Partridge descendants.
In 1943 the railroad decided that a full-time station agent was no longer required at Beaver River Station. The temporary station was closed and the building sold to the Edic family who still have a summer camp nearby. William Partridge was offered the station agent’s job at Sabbatis a bit further north on the line and he and Ethel moved there. Ethel Partridge died May 11, 1945 at age 49. William R. Partridge died October 25, 1948 at the age of 66. He worked as a station agent until just two months before his death.
Sources:
Journal of Etta Kempton (unpublished) courtesy of Donald Thompson and Scott Thompson, family records courtesy of Kathy Partridge, William B. Donnelly, Short History of Beaver River (1979), and data from Ancestry.com, U.S. Census, and Census of Canada.
Comments
Post a Comment