It stands as a prominent landform of this community. Rising 1,621 feet above the level of Tupper Lake, its familiar profile has been a welcoming beacon to generations of residents and visitors alike. The very earliest maps indicated it and listed its name as Mt. Morris.
Our most friendly mountain is located in what is known as Great Tract One of Alexander Macomb’s 6-tract purchase. Great Tract One consisted of nearly 4 million acres, for which he paid the giveaway price of eight pence an acre. It lies wholly within Franklin County and was originally owned by Daniel McCormick, a silent partner of Macomb who was simply the front man. It was purchased with the intent of selling parcels at a profit. To encourage settlement (and sale), McCormick divided the tract into 27 townships of about 32,000 acres each.
The townships were given names as well as numbers to identify them. Most of the names were Irish, accounted for by the nationality of the namers. Macomb and his two silent partners, McCormick and Constable, were all from Ireland.
Some examples include Township 4, named Moria, “a place in Ireland,” or Township 22, named Lough Neah, also a lake in Ireland. An exception was Township 25, named Morris for “a mountain in that township.” (In 1892, Township 25 became one of three townships that would comprise the Town of Altamont, now legally known as the Town of Tupper Lake.)
Incidentally, only a few of those original names became perpetuated in the designation of later formed towns, as Township 21 – still Harrietstown – Harriet being a daughter of Constable. Bangor, Moria and Malone are also names of the few remaining from the original list of 27 townships marked for sale.
So who was Morris, and why was our mountain named for him? I have no written authority or factual information, only a strong suspicion that the mountain was named to commemorate a man named Gouverneur Morris (note that his first name is spelled correctly; he was not a governor).
Gouverneur Morris was a staunch member of the Federalist Party, as were his friends, William Constable, John Jay, Daniel McCormick and Samuel Ogden (Ogdensburg). All of these friends believed in the rules of the rich, the wellborn and the able, and they enjoyed gambling in “wild lands,” which had become a pastime of the wealthy in those days.
Morris owned wide tracts of land in the North Country and first visited his St. Lawrence County holdings in 1809 (with his French chef) at a place called Morris Mills, but now known as Natural Dam.
He also owned land that was a settlement called Cambray. He changed that name in 1810 to Gouverneur – after himself – and, of course, that name remains today.
Morristown, outside of Ogdensburg on the St. Lawrence River, was also named after Mr. Morris. Mountains were often given names to honor individuals (Marcy, Colden, Seward, McIntyre, etc.), and would you agree that McCormick, who owned the land, named one of the mountains located there after his good friend Morris, probably in the early 1800s?
It was the era of settlement, but it would not be until 1840 before anyone settled near Mt. Morris, and even then the nearest neighbor was 20 miles away through trackless forest.
There have been many title changes in Township 25 since the McCormick ownership – too many to detail here, but several may be of interest to readers of this column.
In 1893, Edward H. Litchfield purchased from the Robert Gilchrist estate the southern third of Township 25 in order to create a private park of some 9,000 acres. Initially, he had a slight problem – some deeds to parts of his purchase were questionable tax titles. Mr. Litchfield spent considerable time making sure they were unchallenged. And, in fact, the miles of 8-ft. tall fence that later enclosed the park were placed there as much to provide legal status as they were to protect the many species of game, such as elk, caribou and wild boar, that he imported to stock his game preserve.
If you were to view Litchfield Park in its forest setting today from the summit of Mt. Morris, you would spot a clearing with a cluster of white buildings. This clearing was originally a summer pasture of some 100 acres, cleared for the logging horses of the Sisson operation that was lumbering the tract under contract with Gilchrist. This pasture was later operated as a farm for many years by the Litchfields before it was discontinued in 1956. It is today still referred to as “The Farm,” and in my youth the Ed Fletcher family lived on the premises. I believe Mr. Fletcher managed the farm along with his other duties as foreman.
The focal point of the property, called Jenkins Pond (now Lake Madeleine), also presented a problem to Mr. Litchfield’s purchase. It was owned by Thomas Barbour’s wife, Sarah, who had a camp on the lake called The Crow’s Nest. Thomas Barbour, who owned 20,000 acres, including 15 miles of shoreline on Tupper Lake, and Mr. Litchfield were acquainted and a trade was made. Mr. Litchfield obtained the property on Jenkins in exchange for Lot 42, which was the only lot Barbour didn’t own in his surrounding property on Tupper Lake.
Mrs. Aurore Alexander, whose family ran the Waukesha Hotel and who was a friend of the Barbours, once told me that Mrs. Barbour then built a camp on Tupper Lake that she called The Leaning Maple, or sometimes The Crow’s Nest. It was located a quarter mile toward Bog River Falls from what was then known as the Sprague Camp on Tupper Lake’s southwest shore (now the Slater property adjacent to the Martin family camp).
Next Transitions: More on Sarah Barbour and other Township 25 owners. Also Read Preserve, OWD, Liquid Properties and Preserve Associates, LTD.