Annals of the Beaver River

The Miller family in 1923, Theodore on the left   It all started with a chance Facebook message from a man in Wisconsin named John Miller. His message simply said he has some items that might be of interest to me as the historian of the Rap-Shaw Club. As it turned out what he has are dozens of photographs of the early Rap-Shaw Club taken by his great-grandfather, Theodore H. Miller. The photos date from 1908 until 1938. They show activities at the club camps, then located deep in the woods on the north side of the Beaver River [see my blog post of 5/16/21]. Theodore Miller [born 1872 – died 1971], was a self-taught mechanical engineer. He and his wife Florence MacDonald Miller [1881 – 1954]  were the parents of three children: John MacDonald Miller, Elizabeth Lee Miller and Erik T. Miller. In 1903 they  moved to Poughkeepsie, NY where Theodore became  superintendent of the DeLaval Separator Company, a business that manufactured milking machines and machines that sepa...

Thanks to a tour organized by Adirondack Architectural Heritage [AARCH] this past July my wife and I were able to visit the original “great camp,” Camp Pine Knot on Raquette Lake. The camp was designed and built by William West Durant between 1876 and 1882. W. W. Durant was an heir to a railroad fortune who devoted much of his adult life to creating buildings of a distinctly Adirondack architectural style. After completing Camp Pine Knot, Durant went on to design a series of other similar vacation compounds including Camp Uncas, the Sagamore, and Camp Kill Kare. Each of these camps has its own distinctive features. What they share is Durant’s artful melding of natural materials with sophisticated amenities that catered to the tastes of the ultra-wealthy who could afford to spend the summer season in the Adirondacks relaxing with their family and friends.   Camp Pine Knot is located on a point of land adjacent to where the Marion River flows into Raquette Lake. St. Williams Church, ...

Stillwater Reservoir is dotted with a number of small islands. Almost all of them are part of the state-owned Adirondack Forest Preserve. The islands that exist today were once hilltops along the course of the upper Beaver River. When the state created the current reservoir in 1925, it acquired the private property lying below the projected high-water line as well as the many of the hilltops that were judged too small for any future use. Only a few of the larger hilltops became privately owned islands.   Williams Island, situated about a third of a mile east of the current Stillwater boat launch, is one of these private islands. It was named for Roger Butler Williams, Jr., an investment banker from Ithaca NY. Between 1925 when it first became an island and his death in 1938, Williams owned most of the four-acre island that bears his name as well as its small nearest neighbor, Chicken Island.     Roger Butler Williams, Jr. was born in Ithaca, NY on Dec. 29, 1879. He was th...

While looking through the photo collection of my friend Tim Mayers a few years back, I was struck by a series of photos that show the family of Dr. Edward Livingston Trudeau gathered at the Little Rapids flag stop on the Adirondack Division of the New York Central Railroad. Until that day, I had no idea that Dr. Trudeau, the tuberculosis treatment pioneer of Saranac Lake, had any connection with the Beaver River country. Little Rapids was and is the name of a series of shallow rapids on the Beaver River that lie between what is now the eastern end of the Stillwater Reservoir and Nehasane Lake. The rapids are not navigable, so early travelers skirted them on a well-established carry trail along the south bank. Sometime in the later 1870s, Andrew J. Muncey built a modest sportsmen’s hotel next to that carry trail. In 1891, Dr. William Seward Webb bought all the property in that area as part of his grand plan to build the railroad and establish his own great camp at Lake Lila. He closed o...

The Stillwater Reservoir is the fourth largest body of water in New York’s Adirondack Park. It is an impoundment of the Beaver River in the Town of Webb on the west central edge of the Adirondacks. This post sets forth the basic facts of when and why the reservoir was created.     Possible log-driving dams: 1850 – 1885   The earliest dams on the Beaver River were probably log-driving dams intended to collect adequate water so logs could be floated downstream to market. Log-driving dams were relatively inexpensive to build since they were constructed out of local timber and earth. Logging along the Beaver River was widespread enough by 1853 that the state legislature declared the Beaver River a “public highway” for floating logs.   In 1864, the New York legislature appropriated $10,000 to improve the channel of the Beaver River. The channel was modified from the mouth of Sunday Creek, about six miles downstream from Stillwater, all the way upstream to the headwaters a...

Aunt Ella Darrow Burt Darrow in 1914 I had to wander through Section C of Syracuse’s Oakwood Cemetery for about 15 minutes before I found what I was looking for. I knelt, brushed away a handful of dried leaves and pulled up some long grass. The simple flat stone had sunk a few inches into the ground. It reads: Ella M. Darrow 1881 – 1962. Next to it on the left is a matching stone: Burt Darrow 1872 – 1924. There is nothing on the stones that even hints of the couple’s long and significant connection to the Beaver River country. Ella Maud Harris was born in Syracuse on March 4, 1881, the  daughter of John R. Harris and Alice Eastwood. Her father worked as a machinist. She had an older brother named George [born 1879], a younger sister named Florence [born 1889] and a younger brother named Arthur [born 1893].   Bernard G. Darrow was born May 22, 1871 (not 1872) in Owego, Tioga County, the son of Hill Darrow and Celia Ross. As a child his family called him Bertie, but during his a...

While scanning and cataloging the 1000+ photographs in the Rap-Shaw Club archive I came across eleven images labelled either Bald Mountain or Bald Rock. These photos all appear to have been taken between 1902 and 1916 when the club’s camp was located at Witchhopple Lake. Nine of the views show typical panoramas of forest and lakes but two of them feature a distinctive wooden tower on an open summit. Unlike most wooden surveying or fire towers of that era, this tower was built around a central post, there was no ladder, the platform at the top was minimal and the bracing horizontal rather than diagonal. My first thought was that this mystery tower might be an early version of one of the known wooden fire towers built either on the Bald Mountain overlooking Fourth Lake, now officially known as Rondax, or on the Bald Mountain in Lewis County in the Oswegatchie drainage or even possibly the wooden tower on Stillwater Mountain. I consulted with Fred Knauf and Jim Fox, two fire tower histori...