Annals of the Beaver River

A new and unwelcome sight confronted local outdoor guides and their clients at the east end of the Stillwater Reservoir in the summer of 1891. At the foot of Little Rapids the long-established carry trail was blocked off and all along the river there were placards that read: TRESPASS NOTICE All persons are strictly forbidden to trespass upon these grounds. Any violation of the above will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. The waters of Smith’s Lake are also included in this notice.    CAUTION The hotels on Smith’s Lake and Munsey’s are closed. No one will be permitted under any circumstances to camp on Smith’s or Albany Lake, or in that vicinity.   These No Trespassing signs were posted at the direction of Dr. William Seward Webb, who had just purchased about 120,000 acres of mostly undeveloped forest including all the lands surrounding the upper reaches of the Beaver River. The purchase included dozens of picturesque lakes and ponds historically favored by s...

Leander M. Shaw and John P. Rapalje were the principal founders of Rap-Shaw Club. Details of the story of how the club came into existence can be found in my book , The History of the Rap-Shaw Club  (2019) and more briefly on this blog in a post on 5/16/21. In order to form a better idea of the personalities of the men who founded the club, I’ve written brief biographical sketches of them. I previously posted my biography of John P. Rapalje on October 14, 2021.  Leander Meade Shaw was born on June 1, 1837. His father, Edward Shaw, established the Shaw Funeral Home in Fairport, NY, a short distance east of Rochester along the Erie Canal. His mother, Melissa Shaw, was directly descended from the original founders of Fairport. Leander married Josephine B. Pearse of Columbus, PA on Oct. 14, 1867. At the time of their marriage Ms. Pearse was the principal of the Fairport High School, the first woman to ever hold that post. They had no children.   Leander took over the funeral ...

John P. Rapalje and Leander M. Shaw were the principal founders of Rap-Shaw Club. Details of how the club came into existence can be found in my book , The History of the Rap-Shaw Club  (2019 ) , and more briefly on this blog in a post from 5/16/21. In order to form a better idea of the personalities of the men who founded the club, I’ve written brief biographical sketches of them. My biography of Leander M. Shaw will be posted in the near future. John Proctor Rapalje was born April 27, 1848, in the town of Farmington, Ontario Co., NY. His father, William S. Rapalje was a farmer. His mother was  Helen Elizabeth Spencer. When John was in his early teens the family moved to  Durham, Town of Port Hope, Ontario, Canada where his father worked selling seed to farmers. His father’s older brother owned a successful seed store in Rochester at the same time, of which the Ontario store may have been a branch. In the mid-1860’s the family returned to the family farm in western New Y...

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...