USA > New York > Essex County > Westport > Bessboro: A history of Westport, Essex Co., N.Y. > Part 5
Note: The text from this book was generated using artificial intelligence so there may be some errors. The full pages can be found on Archive.org (link on the Part 1 page).
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 | Part 10 | Part 11 | Part 12 | Part 13 | Part 14 | Part 15 | Part 16 | Part 17 | Part 18 | Part 19 | Part 20 | Part 21 | Part 22 | Part 23 | Part 24 | Part 25 | Part 26 | Part 27 | Part 28 | Part 29 | Part 30 | Part 31 | Part 32 | Part 33 | Part 34 | Part 35 | Part 36 | Part 37 | Part 38 | Part 39
In the old town records, in 1815, it is spoken of as "Mollins brook," and afterward as "Mullens" and "Mullin" brook, as though a man by that name lived near it, which was perhaps the case. It is well-known that the heroine of Longfellow's "Courtship of Miles Standish" was named Priscilla Mullen. Possibly a de- scendant of the family of arch and lovely wife of John Alden settled in early days upon this rushing mountain torrent. It is an odd coincidence that there is a hill- side, just where the highway crosses this brook, which 1 have always seen covered with the stiff, untidy, poverty-stricken leaves and stalks of the common mul- lein, and I had believed from childhood that this hill- side gave its name to the stream. Later years brouhgt the reflection that it was likely to have been named before the forest was eut from that hill, and now I cherish an original theory of my own. Near the end of the French and Indian war, one of the men of Robert Rogers, the Ranger, was sent on a dangerous and dar- ing errand up this side of the lake, from Canada to Lake George. His name was Lieutenant Patrick MeMallen, and I like to believe that he had some romantic ad-
53
HISTORY OF WESTPORT
venture near this stream which caused it to be called after his name.
It rises high in the Iron Ore Tract, probably thir- teen hundred feet above sea level, and flows down the side of Bald Peak with a swift, tumbling current. In the early days it had strength to run a mill at "Steven- sou's," but now it can be used only a little while in the spring floods. From the mill it drops into a deep, dark ravine, at the steep foot of Bald Peak. Between this ravine and the road lies the little cemetery, with its wide outlook over the lake and Vermont to the south, and the gloomy mountain rising high behind it, a most picturesque and lonely spot. The brook is crossed by the highway and the railroad near its mouth. From the highway bridge you can catch the prettiest glimpse of the water of the lake, framed in by the arch of the culvert under the railroad. The little valley is very deep, and the "fill" of the railroad very high and dangerous. Engineers know that the embankment here is treacherous, and never to be trusted after a heavy rain.
Beaver Brook.
South of Raymond brook is a stream comparatively short, and with many tributaries, called on the Govern- ment map of 1896 "Beaver Brook." It rises in the hills west of the "back road," and flows into Presbrey's bay at the stone bridge, on the lake road. One brauch of it comes down the hillside back of Oren Howard's in a pretty fall, and runs under the great fill in the rail- road there, Another branch supplied the water for
-
54
HISTORY OF WESTPORT
the reservoir where the locomotives watered on the switch, before the large reservoir was built at the sta- tion and supplied by the Mountain Spring. There is a ford at the mouth of this brook, and when the bridge was up for repairs, a number of years ago, people who had not been forewarned to go by the back road would sometimes drive through the shallow waters of the bay to reach the road on the other side again. After an east wind has been blowing, you will find the water under the stone bridge running up stream, from the lake into the brook.
This brook is not shown in the large atlas of 1876, which is a strange oversight for so accurate a work. On the Government map of 1896 the bay into which it flows is called "Mullen Bay," which is manifestly wrong, and will, I have been assured, be corrected in the next edition.
There is another Beaver Brook in the northern part of the township. It rises on the western slope of the Split Rock range, and flows north through the Mather and Whallon farms into the Boquet river, in Essex. The name is a common one, and indicates that the first settlers found the beavers and their dams in great num- ber on these streams. And now I suppose there is not one beaver left for this generation to kill.
Many little streams How into the lake all along the shore, some of them dry a part of the year. "Holt's brook" was formerly "Rogers's brook" and is crossed by two bridges near the stone house at the fork of the roads. It runs through the cedar woods into a sandy
HISTORY OF WESTPORT
bay, and at its month was an encampment of Indians when Hezekiah Barber came here in 1785. A little stream sets in to the head of Sisco Bay, running through a deep wooded ravine after it crosses the road on Mrs. Lee's land. Another, near Hunter's Bay, makes its slender way down the side of the mountain and runs into the lake aeross a flat, bare rock, smoothed by the netion of water and ice for ages.
When old people have talked to me of the streams of our town as they knew them in their youth, they have always striven to impress me with the fact that all this country was far botter watered then than it is now. Some short streams have entirely disappeared, Mrs. Harriet Sheldon, daughter of Hezekiah Barber, has told me of a brook which in her girlhood's days ran into the head of Young's bay, of volume sufficient to run a spinning wheel which had been made to work by water power. It is known in the family now as "the spinning wheel place." And Mrs. William Richards, daughter of Ira Henderson, has told me how high the water used to come up behind her father's house, cov- ering all the marsh at the mouth of the brook, so that his boats came to the foot of his garden to load and un- load their freight, Old boatmen will tell you the same.
MOUNTAINS.
Of mountains surely we have good store, but of single peaks with a distinctive history hardly one. Through the centre of the township lies a valley of irregular
-
56
HISTORY OF WESTPORT
shape, running back to the northwest, from the lake to the Black and Boquet rivers. This valley is widest ou the lake front, and extends from Head lands on the north to the southern extremity of Bessboro. It contains all the tillable land of the township, of which the most valuable are those of the southern lake front and the rich bottom lands of the Boquet. The few farms between Coon mountain and the Split Rock range, in the valley of the Boquet, should be added to this area. All the rest of the town is rough, mountainous country, covered with timber, with here and there a high, sandy farm, cleared when the country was new, whose light soil is easily cultivated, but pow- erless to make rich returns. We may be said to have two mountain systems, although when the Adirondacks are viewed as a whole, both belong to the Schroon range, which extends from Schroon Lake to Split Rock. The mountains to the south-west of our fruitful and inhab- ited valley we call the Iron Ore Tract. Those to the northeast we call the Split Rock range.
The valley mentioned lends a beautiful variety to the sky line as seen from the lake, as it slopes upward from the head of the bay, where the village lies, back to the highlands of Elizabethtown, dividing the dark mass of bills which form the Iron Ore Tract from the rugged spurs of the Split Rock range, pushing boldly into the lake. Through the gap are seen, sketched in the clear, fine blue of mountain distances, the outlines of Mount Hurricane and the Jay peaks. Against a sunset sky,
57
HISTORY OF WESTPORT
and reflected in the still water of the bay, it is a sight to be thankful for.
The highest mountain in town has no name, of its OWI. It lies in the south-west corner of the town, and is nineteen hundred feet high. It is between Stacy and Mullein brooks, and its summit may be pointed out as the one next north of that of Bald Peak. Between it and Ball Peak lies the high valley through which passes the "Bald Peak road."
The Schroon range attains its highest elevation in Bald Peak, which rises two thousand and sixty-five feet above tide. It is now in Moriah, though it belonged to ancient Westport. Seen from the lake road, near, the cemetery, it seemsa noble height, rugged and grand. It is easily ascended from Mineville, on its western slope. Its summit was an important point in the meas- urement of distances in the Adirondack Survey of Ver- planck Colvin, as you may read in his report. Upon the map of the Geological Survey of 1892, (edition of 1898) it is named "Bald Knob" instead of Bald Peak. This is, I think, to distinguish it from the "Bald Peak" of Elizabethtown, which is nearly a thousand feet higher, The change of name is a very reasonable one, and my mind was fain to further it, but I have found local usage so persistent that I have subsided from the reformer to the mere unreasoning chronicler.
The people who live nearest neighbors to the mount- nius have names for all the heights, like the Harper mountain, (named after a family who lived at its foot in early times,) the Nichols Poud mountains, etc. I.
58
HISTORY OF WESTPORT
believe the height back of the old Bromley place, where William Smith now lives, is called the Bromley mount- ain. It is over a thousand feet high, and even from the foot of it, where the house stands, a remarkable view is obtained, looking over the Split Rock range down the · lake. At the top it must be magnificent. The mount- ain back of Nichols pond, where the iron mines are, is Campbell mountain, named, from an early owner of the ore bèds.
The Split Rock range forms one continuous mass from Headlands to Split Rock, penetrated by but one carriage road, in the whole distance the one going in to Rock Harbor. There are a number of well worn tra'Is across the mountains, following the valleys, and the heights are by no means inaccessible. The highest point is one thousand and thirty-five feet, and is called Grand View. It rises almost sheer from the waters of the Jake. This is the mountain which frowns upon you as you emerge form the mouth of Otter Creek, dark with its iron rocks and its evergreen trees, and with the buildings of the old Iron Ore Bed works clinging to a narrow shelf half way up the side.
A spur of the Split Rock range to the westward, its base washed by the Boquet River, is Coon mountain. Its name is descriptive even now, as it is not at all un- common for a raccoon to be killed within its shadow. Its beight is one thousand and fifteen feet. Standing on the ramparts of Crown Point fort, you may see its scalloped outlines against the sky, and it is a well- known landmark up and down the lake.
5.9
HISTORY OF WESTPORT
Local names are Higginson's and Lee's mountains, and Merlin's Peak, a fanciful name for a hill near the road, on the west of the Split Rock range.
PONDS.
Nichols Pond.
Our ponds cannot be said to be numerous when one considers that we are reckoned as belonging to the Adirondack country. All that we have lie within the Iron Ore Tract. The largest is Nichols pond, lying well back in the, mountains, not far from the town line. ("Back," in our parlance, may always be understood to man "toward the west," or "away from the lake.") It lies fourteen hundred feet above sea level, and is sur- rounded by high forest-clad mountains. It is less than a mile in length, and has two islands. upon one of which is a permanent camp. No highway ruus hear it, but it is reached by two trails, one from the east, the other from the south, each about two miles long. If you go in from the east, you will leave the highway near Ed. McMahon's, not far from the place where the charcoal kiln stood for so many years, and follow up the track of the old tram road, which will lead you direct to the pond. This tram road was built to carry ore from the mines to the highway, but was never finished. You will find the ruins of the separator which separated the ore after it was raised from the mine, near the northern end of the pond.
.60)
HISTORY OF WESTPORT
The original John Nichols, after whom the pond was named, lived where Ed. McMahon now does. He came in sometime during the first decade of the nineteenth century, and now lies buried, with others of the same name and race, in the Hoisington cemetery. Within the past few years I have heard some people who were not acquainted with the history of this region call the pond "Nicholas pond," an error caused by a misunder- standing of the name. The earliest name given it was "Spring Pond," as is shown on the map of the Iron Ore Tract, made in 1810. This name is very appropriate, as there is no doubt that the pond is fed main'y by springs in the bottom. There are but a few small iu- lets, quite insufficient to maintain such a body of water. The outlet according to the latest Government survey, is through Cold Brook, flowing from the southern end of the pond, westward to the Black river. On the Platt Rogers map of 1785 the Stacy brook is made to rise in two ponds not far apart, and of nearly the same size, one of which is no doubt intended for our Nichols poud. That part of the map was not based on actual survey, and is manifestly inexact. On the map of the Iron Ore Tract it is impossible to find the outlet, as the pa- per was folded across the pond, and has worn entirely away in the creases. A gentleman who camped for several summers at the pond has assured me that the Government survey is right, and the older maps wrong.
The trail to the pond from the south goes in from the road to Seventy-five, a little way east of Levi Moore's.
61
HISTORY OF WESTPORT
This way it is possible to drive in with a loaded team. Both these trails you will find well worn, as they are used a great deal all through the season, camping par- ties sometimes staying late in the fall. The pond is a favorite resort for convalescents or for those threatened with lung troubles, on account of its elevation, and some cures have been thought to date from a sojourn here. The famous Willey House, in Keene, so well- known as a refuge for victims of hay fever, has an ele- vation of only seventeen hundred and sixty feet, and many popular places in the Adirondacks have no great- er elevation than Nichols Pond.
Women seldom visit the pond, because of the rough walking through the woods, but parties are sometimes made up for their especial convenience.
For an invalid with any predisposition to heart trouble, fourteen hundred feet is a much safer elevation than eighteen hundred or two thousand.
North Pond.
The pond next in size is North pond. This lies in the southwestern corner of the township, and its name indicates that its first discoverer came in from the south. It is the most northern of three ponds which feed Bart- lett brook, in Moriah. Its outlet flows south through Seventy-five into Bartlett pond, which lies just over the line in Moriah. Mr. Walter Witherbee of Port Henry has a summer cottage on North pond, occupied in the hunting season. The pond lies higher than the main road, and is not in sight from it.
62
HISTORY OF WESTPORT
There is a small pond, called by that often used and most blighting name of "Mud pond," half a mile or more south of North pond, which is also one of the head waters of the Bartlett brook. It is reached by a trail from the highway. On the northern side of Camp- bell mountain is a tiny pond, hardly worth mention, and on the eastern side of Coon mountain is a shallow, marshy pond, reached by a road which turns in north of Monteville's. Doubtless there are others in town which have never come to my notice.
The ponds at Hoisington's are artificial, and were made by Marcus Hoisington, I have been told, by dam- ming natural springs. They lie by the side of the road, at the turn near the old Hoisington place, and for many years it was a pretty sight to look down upon them as Que passed by, but of late they are somewhat over- grown by underbrush. One empties into the other, and the outlet flows into the Hoisington brook. They were originally intended for the breeding of fish.
In one respect the Hammond (sometimes called the Pooler) brook is the most remarkable of all our streams, and the one of most importance to the village of Westport, in that it rises in the Mountain Spring. Most of the brooks have innumerable tiny sources high on the sides of the mountains, little trickles out of pockets of wet moss, dripping down the cliff's to join other tiny streams until a brook is formed, but here a large spring, fully a rod across and three or four feet deep, bursts out at the foot of a hill, and flows away a full stream. The elevation is less than six hundred
63
HISTORY OF WESTPORT
feet, and there must be reservoirs of supply somewhere in the valleys of the mountains which rise so dark to westward. I once heard some of the mountain dwel- lers, whose fathers and grandfathers roamed these bill- sides all their lives, knowing little of any other part of the world, gravely discussing the question whether this spring might not be an outlet to Nichols pond. A river flowing two miles and a half underground, with a fall of eight hundred feet, makes a picture delightful to one's imagination, with its suggestion of Coleridge's "Kubla Kban,"
"Where Alph, the sacred river, ran,
Through caverns measureless to man, Down to a sunless sea."
And I heard too, at the same time, legends of a "Lost Brook," which might be followed for a long way by some lone fisherman, who would at last come to a deep pool beneath overhanging boulders, and there the brook would disappear entirely, and never could be traced mother rod. I have cherished these tales for their hint of a folk-lore among our prosaic people.
This mountain spring was early a precious posses- sion, well-known to the first settlers, and no doubt to the Indians before them. I think it was Joseph Stacy who cleared the forests from the field near the spring, and he gained but a barren pasture thereby. But the little glen around the spring, and through which the brook flows away down the hills, is still shaded with trees. The water is very clear and soft, and supplies all the village through pipes. The place
64
HISTORY OF WESTPORT
is not so wild and pretty 'since the pavilion has been built over the spring by the water company, but the flow of water in the brook is not perceptibly dimin- ished by the large quantity drawn away daily, especi- ally in the summer. The water is carried to the railway station, where it fills the great stone reservoir, to Stony Sides and to Jacksonville.
In the southeastern corner of the town, about a half mile from the lake and not far from the railroad, lie the Adirondack Springs, four in number. I believe the analysis shows them to be very similar to the famous springs of Saratoga, and I am sure they have much the same forbidding taste. They have had great local celebrity sinco the first settlement, especially in the eure of skin diseases. Twenty years or more ago Mr. George Spencer bought the property, built spring houses over the springs, hung up a framed analysis of their waters, and invited fame and prosperity to the spot, but neither responded in anything but a moderate degree, and the mantle of Saratoga has not yet fallen upon us.
Almost every farm has one or two small springs for domestic use, though iu some places the tell-tale windmill proclaims the poverty of the water supply.
·
.
65
HISTORY OF WESTPORT
FLORA.
Our short summer is full of luxuriant life. Though we call our mountains barren, because they produce so little with which to support human life, they are covered with the richest foliage everywhere except upon the steepest ledges and cliffs. All the country is green and beautiful with a wealth of vegetable life.
Our most common trees, are the maple, elm, birch and oak. There is the soft maple, which has every twig as red as coral in the spring, and the rock maple, or sugar maple, which furnishes a staple industry in the season of sugar making. The elm is not so common nor so large as in the Connecticut valley, but its grace- ful shape is seen in every landscape. One of our dis- tiuctive trees is the white birch, slender, with delicate foliage, apparently always young. The finest oaks that I know are those at the Hunter place, on North Shore. They look as though they saw war-dances of Iroquois, and would hold those great limbs out for ceu- turies after we are all gone. Ash and poplar are also common. On the highlands we find the white ash, good for timber, and in the swamps the worthless black ash. The shimmering poplar is one of our pret- tiest forest trees, and we have the Lombardy poplar, but that, of course, is a transplanted tree, brought in from New England, whence it came from old England, who had it from Italy, who had it first from Persia. There are only a few in town, but the fine row at Basin Harbor make a decorative effect very noticeable on a
66
HISTORY OF WESTPORT
clear day. Other transplanted trees, not native to our forest, are the locust, a favorite in old-fashioned door- yards for the sake of its fragrant blossoms in the spring; the mountain ash, brought from high mountain levels for the beauty of its great scarlet bunches of berries; the horse-chestnut, with its spikes of blossoms, the silver maple, and the "balm of Gilead." Our basswood is the English linden, I have been told, and its blos- soms are loved by the bees.
Our nut trees are the hickory, which we always call the walnut, the butternut, and the beech. We have neither the chestnut tree nor the black walnut, although a few of the latter have been set out as an experiment. In this climate many of the shells of the black walnut will be found to be empty. The hazel nut is common, growing on wayside shrubs, and the weird witch hazel, with its wild November blossoms. Hardhack, willow, alder, sumac, osier, -- I am afraid I shall not name them all.
Our evergreen trees are pine, spruce and hemlock, with some cedar and balsam, and an occasional tam- arack. The juniper sprawls untidily over barren cleared fields. Wild vines are the bitter-sweet, the clematis or smoke-vine, the wild grape, the wood-bine, and the dreaded poison ivy.
Every field has strawberries in June, and raspberries a little later along the fences, and then blackberries. You may find a few blueberries on the mountain sides, but nothing like the blueberry plains of Saranac, where they are scooped off the bushes with tin dippers
.
.
.
67
HISTORY OF WESTPORT
and brought down to the lowlands in wagon-loads to be sold.
Our cultivated fruit trees are the apple, pear, cherry and plum. We are too far north for peaches, quinces or prunes, though I have known them all to be raised as an experiment. The apple crop of the Champlain valley is acknowledged to be as good as anything in the market, and Westport raises large quantities of apples.
1 ANIMALS.
I suppose there is not a dangerous wild animal left in Westport, even in the recesses of the mountains, But I may perhaps speak too confidently, as I remem- ber that within twenty years our oldest hunter, Mr. Hinckley Coll, brought into the village the carcass of a bear which he had caught in a trap somewhere in the bills back of his farm. Late a piece of the steak cut from it myself, and very black and tough it seemed. Even as I write, is there not a lawsuit pending, in which charges are made against some person, not a bear, who stole a bear trap from a mountain side? I believe the trap was set a long time ago, and the person who stole it is dead, and the lawsuit the expression of a mountain feud, but it shows that we have not forgotten what bear traps are, at any rate, and so has its value as a picturesque incident. Panthers have been extinct within our limits a longer time than bears, but the old people can still tell you stories about wolves. Mr. Henry Betts has told me of sheep caught by wolves
68
HISTORY OF WESTPORT
when he was a young man, living on a farm on the western slope of the Split Rock range, and of bears who came around the out-buildings at night.
The moose were gone more than two generations ago, and the beaver, so harmless and so easily killed, was soon exterminated by the early settlers.
The largest wild animal which we ever see is the deer. Their gentle habits lead them sometimes to seek pasturage among sheep and cattle in outlying pastures.
Foxes and rabbits we have, the "fretful porcupine," dangerous to inexperienced dogs, the loud and fre- . quent skunk, the solemn woodchuck, the striped-back chipmunk, the pert red squirrel, the beautiful silver gray squirrel, whose tail is such a splendid plume, and, though rare, the flying squirrel. There are muskrats around the brooks, sometimes a mink or a marten. The farmer's boy has stories of the elusive weasel, and the raccoon is still occasionally killed. Swarms of wild bees are found and hived every season by lovers of the gentle craft of "hunting bee trees."
Mosquitoes we know, especially if living near the edge of the woods, but they are seldom troublesome after June. The dreaded black-fly of the mountains I have never seen here.
I think our only game bird is the partridge. We have all the northern singing birds, robin, bobolink, blue-bird, chickadee, phebe-bird, oriole and the cat- bird, or American mocking-bird, with its two distinct songs. The swallow builds under the eaves of barns, and the English sparrow is noisy in the village streets.
Need help finding more records? Try our genealogical records directory which has more than 1 million sources to help you more easily locate the available records.