Drawdown
The current Stillwater Reservoir dam was built in 1922 – 24 and put into use in 1925. It is maintained by the Hudson River - Black River Regulating District, an agency of the State of New York, usually called HRBRRD. I posted a brief history of the Stillwater dams on this blog back on 08/11/21. https://beaverriverhistory.blogspot.com/2021/08/a-brief-history-of-stillwater-reservoir.html A more complete account appears in Chapter 8 of my book Beaver River Country.
HRBRRD first determined that repairs to the Stillwater dam required a drawdown in 1954, twenty-five years after the dam was built. When the water level dropped, many features that had been underwater were revealed. One of the most interesting features was the emergence of a section of the old Carthage to Lake Champlain Road, completed in 1850, a hundred years earlier. In this photograph from the collection of the Adirondack Experience, we can see the old road seen from what is now the Stillwater boat landing.
In order to reach what is now State Island, the road had to cross a substantial creek, once named Alder Creek, but now submerged. There was a decorative bridge in this location. Here’s a postcard that shows the bridge in 1915.
The Alder Creek bridge was totally flooded in 1925. When the water fell in the 1954 drawdown, what was left of the bridge appeared again. The two rock and gravel abutments were mostly intact. The wood deck was still there, but the decorative railing was gone. The next photo from the archive of the dam keeper Carl Rowley shows a dog’s eye view of the bridge looking toward State and Chicken Islands.
The Rowley archive also contains a winter view that shows the bridge in profile with State Island in the background. In this view it’s possible to see the wood deck and the log cribbing used to construct the abutments. Carl’s dog again makes a guest appearance.
The dam repairs made in 1954 were effective. Some minor repairs were made in the following years but it was not until 2001, nearly fifty years later, that HRBRRD decided that major repairs were needed that required another drawdown. An interesting feature exposed by this drawdown was the wood and earth dam on the Beaver River a short distance upstream from the current dam that was built between September 1892 and August 1893. This dam was in service until it was replaced by the 1902 dam. It was never demolished, so it must have been exposed at the time of the 1954 drawdown, but I have not been able to find a photo of how it looked at that time. The photo of the old wood dam below as it looked in 2001 was taken from his kayak by Nate Vary, who has a cottage at Stillwater. Even today, this old dam periodically appears in times of very low water in the fall and winter posing an attractive obstacle for snowmobilers crossing the reservoir on the ice.
The 2001 drawdown posed a significant problem for members of the Rap-Shaw Club who planned to vacation at their camp on Williams Island. The club’s docks sat high and dry. The island could not be reached by boat. Here is a panoramic view of the scene showing the Rap-Shaw boathouse on the right.
It was possible to walk along the old road from the parking lot at the landing as far as Alder Creek, but no further. There was no trace of the old wooden section of the bridge, although the rock and gravel abutments were still mostly intact. To get the rest of the way to the club, Rap-Shaw members and staff needed to get into a boat for a short ride across Alder Creek, climb up the abutment on the other side, then proceed to the club with their gear and supplies. The process was not that much fun. Nate Vary was there to capture the scene.
As the old saying goes, “necessity is the mother of invention.” Jerry Perfetto, Rap-Shaw’s steward at the time, was particularly annoyed by the inconvenience, not to mention the extra work, involved in crossing Alder Creek. Why, he reasoned, couldn’t he just rebuild the missing bridge deck? After considerable consultation, he did just that. For the remainder of the summer the club’s golf cart made the trip to the island by gingerly edging across his make-shift bridge. Here’s a look at that bridge with the landing and the Stillwater Hotel in the distance.
The number of people that visited Stillwater Reservoir in the summer of 2001 was considerably lower than average. The campsites were largely inaccessible. Boating was difficult, but not impossible. Fewer people were able to make the boat trip to Beaver River Station down at the east end of the vastly diminished reservoir.
However, as the mud dried and plants sprung up, new amusements were possible. Rap-Shaw set up a rough golf course on the land that previously held the cottages of the Beaver River Club. Residents and visitors took great pleasure in exploring the newly exposed areas looking for relics of a long-gone era. According to an article in the June 2002 edition of Adirondack Life titled “A Reservoir Revealed” by Michael Cunningham, “Artifacts were bountiful, and scavengers were in a fever. The silt disgorged a Model T carcass, lawn chairs, soggy cameras and expensive lenses. A silver tray appeared, and so too a 275-pound anvil. Outboard motors, an eighty-five-foot logging chain, wagon wheels and buckboard springs, all muddied and rusted, eventually turned up in the muck.”https://www.adirondacklife.com/2016/05/04/a-reservoir-revealed/
Unfortunately, I did not witness the 2001 drawdown myself. My wife and I first visited Stillwater Reservoir in 2005 and joined the Rap-Shaw Club in 2007. These days I often sit on the Rap-Shaw dining hall porch looking over the water toward the landing as the sun sets behind the western hills. Thanks to photographs like those shown here, I can easily imagine the scene as it must have looked before the Beaver River was dammed.
Credits – Most of the color photographs in this article were taken by Nate Vary who shared them with me. The photo of the road as it appeared in 1954 is courtesy of the Adirondack Experience. The other 1954 drawdown photos are from the Rowley album courtesy of Virginia Thompson. The remaining photos are from the Rap-Shaw Club photo archive.
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