Martin Moody was angry. He was so angry that he clamped down hard on the pipe in his mouth and broke the stem. It was his favorite pipe and he had just loaded it with his best tobacco, a hard-to-get brand called Climax, and that didn’t help his disposition.
Muttering something that sounded like, “enough is enough, I’m going over to Johnson’s,” he sloshed through ankle-deep water that had reached above lake level to the verandah of his modest hotel located on the shore of Tupper Lake.
Jumping into his guide boat, Mart rowed furiously to his neighbor’s cabin, the ash oars that he had handcrafted yielding in a subtle arc under the skillful rowing of strong arms accustomed to pulling such a craft across miles of Adirondack waterways. This was the same boat that he had used to arrive at remote and isolated Tupper Lake 10 years ago in 1861. Despite his present upset mood, Mart chuckled as he remembered that trip. He and 16-year-old Minerva Reid from Bloomingdale had recently married in Saranac Lake. Mart recalled how she had insisted on adding a fancy oak parlor table that had been a wedding gift to their already overburdened boat as they started their long trip across the Saranacs to their new homestead on the isolated and largely unsettled shores of Tupper Lake.
Note: Some years ago, I remember seeing this table in Aunt Helen’s, a combination boat livery and store that is now the Garrelts’ summer camp at Moody. “Aunt Helen” was Helen Minogue Cutting, a grand niece of Aunt Minerva. She had lovingly restored this family heirloom.
We’ll have to turn to the Chronicles, as they say in the Prince Valiant comic strip, to understand why Mart, this gentle Adirondacker, was so angry.
Up until 1850, only the lower part of the river had been used to drive logs to the mills located at Potsdam, Norwood and South Colton. As the need for a greater supply of timber that was close to the river became recognized, the industry began to eye the vast timber resources largely untouched in the upper watershed.
Potsdam, some 50 river miles downstream from this community and the first permanent settlement founded in 1803 on the river, had ambitions to become a great manufacturing center and became one of the first to seek that resource.
Mill owners there, led by influential resident Dr. Henry Hewitt, began intensive lobbying with the New York State legislature to pass a law making the Racquette a public highway. Dr. Hewitt’s legislation was passed in April 1850, together with authority, to spend $10,000 on improving the river channel (a huge sum of money when you consider that the average hourly wage was between 50 and 75 cents, and a dozen eggs cost 10 cents).
Almost immediately, lumbermen swarmed further up the Racquette, now protected by law from riverfront property owners’ objections to the log running that prevented local navigation and often caused flooding damage. Charles Bryant Jr., in The Raquette: River of the Forest (1964), notes that “at the peak of operations on the river from 1880 to 1910, groups from some fifty odd camps were cutting in the area tributary to Tupper Lake and the neighboring Raquette waters.” The ink was hardly dry on the legislative paperwork before a dam was built to ensure an ample reservoir of water needed to sluice the spring log drives downriver. The first dam was located above a section of fast water known as Setting Pole rapids, two miles below Racquette Pond. This was a low dam, temporary in nature, that proved inadequate to the task of flushing logs through the rapids and falls that marked the 1,000-ft. drop to Potsdam.
My great-grandfather, Ezra Frenette, who lived in South Colton during the late 1800s and was a boatman on the river drives, notes in his memoirs that the section of the river below Colton, known today as Stone Dam, and Jamestown Falls below Sevey’s Corner, were the most troublesome and dangerous.
Low water also often hampered operations, and in 1870, a number of prominent Potsdam lumbermen formed the Racquette River Reservoir Company to build a new and larger dam at the same Setting Pole rapids site.
Seaver, the Franklin County historian, records that with no mill in the vicinity, all of the timbers that went into the dam had to be hand-hewed: “These were mostly 12 by 14 inches, and 200 acres were stripped of all the trees that would square to that size. Including the wings, the dam was 300 feet long and had ten gates. Its height was ten feet above still water, and 38,000 cubic feet of stone went into it.”
The result was a flooding of lands for nearly 30 miles upriver, the land where Faust sits was totally under water, as was most of uptown. Trees on the flooded land died, leaving a ruined forest and desolate-looking slime and mud-covered flats. The river corridor to Racquette Falls became completely despoiled, and the docks and boathouses along the lakeshore were either washed away or at other times left high and dry when the dam gates were opened to flush logs downstream.
When the dam was built in 1871, only 10 families were settled here. Four families were located along the river next to what are now the Gontowich farmlands below LeBoeuf’s bridge. They were Reuben Stetson, Wm. McLaughlin, Simeon Moody and Mose LaFountain. Further downstream, along what would later be known as Moody, were the pioneer families of Geo. McBride, Wm. Johnson, Fred Moody, Judge P.M. (Pop) Freeman, Ernest Johnson and Martin Moody. All of these families had arrived here by boat, and the Racquette River was their prime artery of transportation. In addition, most of them were guides, depending on the river’s charm and scenery to make a living.
This village and Faust had yet to be settled, so there was no objection raised to the dam’s destructive potential in that quarter. However, the pioneer settlers at Moody became seriously impacted by the dam. After 15 years of protests that fell on deaf ears, a secret “vigilante” meeting was held. (Now you know where Mart was headed, muttering “enough is enough” that day in 1885.)
In the next Transitions, we will relate how the men from Moody – all tough, independent pioneers – took matters into their own hands with a “vigilance committee.”