USA > New York > Franklin County > Historical sketches of Franklin county and its several towns > Part 15
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Altamont's principal waters are a part of Big Tupper lake, Raquette pond, Big and Little Simons ponds, Lake Madeleine in Litchfield Park (formerly called Jenkins pond), and Raquette river. The latter, having its source in Hamilton county, flows half way across the town from east to west into Big Tupper lake, near the foot of that water, and, continuing as its outlet, courses north and thence west into St. Law- rence county. There is no other considerable stream in the town, nor has any good water power ever been utilized there. Raquette pond is simply an expansion of the river, caused by the reservoir dam, which was erected by Potsdam lumber interests in 1870. These interests had experienced difficulty in making clean runs of their logs down the river, and had been inconvenienced also by low water in operating their mills. They accordingly united in crecting the reservoir at a point known as Setting Pole Rapids, three or four miles west of where Faust now is.
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There was no mill in the vicinity, and all of the timbers that went into the structure had to be hand hewed. These were mostly twelve by fourteen inches, and two hundred 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 the flooding of lands for a distance of nearly thirty miles up the river and the lake, varying in width as the high land on either side met the bottoms. At one point on the lake the width was about two miles. Of course all of the fine timber lining the shores was killed, transforming a beautiful section into a dead forest indescribably desolate in appearance. The dam broke in May, 1871, and the flood was thirty-six hours in reaching Potsdam, where it wrought great havoc. The dam was repaired in 1872, but in anger because it was believed to injure the fishing, and also because it was thought that with a recession of the waters meadows could be established along the tract that had been flooded, men from the vicinity of Moody cut away parts of the structure in 1885, and dynamite after- ward lowered it still further. The land where Faust is was at one time wholly under water by reason of the existence of the dam, as also was a considerable part of the upper section of the village known as Tupper Lake. As the locality became more settled, a great deal of the dead timber was cut by residents for fuel, and more of it by the lumber companies in order to improve navigation for their steamboats and scows, so that now much of the former repellent aspect has disappeared. Owners of water powers down the river now plan to reconstruct the old dam, though not to its former height, so as to regulate the river's sum- mer flow; and the town of Altamont has appropriated $3,500 for expenditure in connection with this project for payment of flowage dam- ages. The restoration of the dam is expected to cause a disappearance of sloughs above it and by holding the water at nearly a uniform level greatly better sanitary conditions. Incidentally it should be noted that as early as 1850 the State appropriated ten thousand dollars for the improvement of the upper Raquette for the benefit of Potsdam lumber- men. A part of the fund went into the building of a small dam at Setting Pole Rapids.
In the southern section of Altamont especially, and to a less degree in the northern part, the surface is broken by mountains and ridges, while in the central portion there is considerable marsh land. Before the reservoir was built nearly the entire town had been covered with a
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magnificent forest of both hard and soft timber, and this condition still prevails in many localities, most of the area still remaining a wilder- ness. It is, however, the fact that the big mills have taken heavy tolls from the forests during the past quarter of a century, and that fire has ravaged large areas. There is hardly a year without some destruction by fire, and sometimes the losses so caused are stupendous. In the mem- orable dry summer of 1903 the tax alone simply for fighting such fires in Altamont was $3,858.44, and individual concerns claimed to have themselves expended no less than $14,000 additional in protecting their own tracts. What the actual property losses aggregated no one can say with anything like precision, but unquestionably they were enormous. For illustration, a single owner claimed damages to the amount of one hundred thousand dollars, though his recovery was for a much smaller sum.
The " great windfall of 1845" stretches across the central part of the north third of the town, and, until fire followed, the devastation wrought by it visualized what must have been the most terrific storm that ever touched Northern New York. It developed on the Grasse river in St. Lawrence county, and forked at about the Franklin county line, one arm sweeping straight across township nineteen, and the other pass- ing to the north of where Derrick now is. Its path was from a half mile to a mile in width, and it is told that not a single tree was left standing in its track. All were snapped off or uprooted, with a result- ant tangle of trunks and limbs and tops that was impenetrable. The hunters of the time had had trails across the tract, and, desiring to con- tinue them, set fire to the slash. Ten years or such a matter afterward, when Cyrus P. Whitney, the surveyor, first saw the locality, on a hunt- ing trip, these fires had made it as bare as a pasture; but it has since become pretty well covered by second-growth timber. .
The New York and Ottawa Railroad (originally the Northern Adirondack) enters the town near its northeastern corner, and extends to the heart of Tupper Lake village, a distance of perhaps ten or twelve miles - giving the place a direct outlet to Moira on the Rutland Rail- road, and also a through line to the Canadian capital. It reached Tupper Lake in 1889. The Adirondack and St. Lawrence Railway, built in 1892, traverses the central part of the town, its mileage in Altamont being about the same as that of the New York and Ottawa, which it crosses at that part of the village called Faust, nearly two
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miles north from the terminus of the latter. Both lines are controlled by the New York Central.
Until two or three years before Altamont was erected as a town it was all uninhabited except for a section in the neighborhood of the vil- lage and at a point on Big Tupper lake that is called Moody. A half a century ago, in a presidential year, a few among the voters here would travel to the polls at Dickinson Center in order to exercise the elective franchise - sometimes going by way of Potsdam and Moira, and at others through the woods on foot along a "tote" road that was little better than a trail. Now, though Altamont has three convenient polling places, it is perhaps doubtful if a larger percentage of its seven or eight hundred electors take the trouble to cast their ballots than was the case with the little handful when it was necessary to journey a hun- dred-odd miles if they went via Potsdam, or thirty-five or forty miles if they tramped through the woods. Still, it is the fact that Altamont is one of the liveliest towns in the county politically, and its party leaders are always zealous and awake.
Still another illustration of the former inaccessibility of the place is that when Mr. Whitney was school commissioner he visited the district but once in six years, and then walked to it through the forest. When Mr. Dewey of Moira was commissioner, some years later, and visited the Tupper Lake school, he made the trip via Saranac Lake. Even as late as 1884 the entire assessed valuation of resident property in the school district, which comprised the entire town, was barely five thousand dollars, while now the school houses are estimated to be worth sixty thousand dollars - the high school building at Tupper Lake, with its furnishings, having alone cost forty thousand dollars.
A man named Michael Cole is said to have been the first settler some- thing like seventy years ago, and Epps probably the second. The latter remained for only about two years, Simeon J. Moody buying his betterments, and continuing to occupy the place until his death, two or three years ago. Other early comers were Ziba Brigham and Reuben R. Stetson with their families, and Theodorus Westcott and William McLaughlin. The latter came to be foreman for the Pomeroys, who owned lands in the vicinity which they were about to lumber, and whose operations made the Tupper Lake village clearing. Mr. McLaughlin was for many years the only resident within what are now the village limits, a large part of which he owned at one time, and where he died in 1905. George McBride came about 1860, locating about two miles
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up the river, near the iron bridge, and was a combination of farmer, guide, fisherman and trapper; and in 1865 Martin M. Moody built the hotel at the point on Big Tupper lake now known as Moody, which he managed until he sold to Pliny Robbins about 1888, when he moved up the lake about a half a mile and built the Waukesha, owned later by Jabez D. Alexander. " Mart's " fund of stories was inexhaustible, and made him one of the best known characters of the wilderness. Fact or even probability entered into few of them, and the more grotesquely imaginative or wildly extravagant he could make them the more char- aeteristic they were. A single one may be quoted : Seeking to impress a visitor with the intensity of the cold which was sometimes experienced, he told of having started one morning for the barn with a pail of boil- ing water, which froze almost as soon as the door closed behind him. Re-entering the house, he discovered that the water had congealed so quickly that the ice was actually hot !
Other familiar names in the region forty or fifty years ago are Sam. Moriarty, Nelson LaFountain, William E. LaFountain, William John- son, "Mother " Johnson, " Priest " Clark, and Donald G. MeDonald, though " Mother " Johnson was at the falls, perhaps thirty miles distant. Mr. Clark was a local preacher, but of what denomina- tion or whether an ordained minister I do not know. He held religious services in his own house and at the homes of others until the first school house was built, after which the latter served for a meeting house. McDonald is remembered as a vocalist and exhorter. William E. LaFountain came in 1876, and married a daughter of Mr. MeLaugh- lin. He was a school teacher and surveyor until his removal a few years ago to Cass Lake, Minn., where he is engaged in the mercantile business. He was one of the early supervisors of Altamont. Perez M. Freeman settled at Moody about 1878.
Theodorus Westcott and Sarah Cole, daughter of the first settler, were the first couple married in the locality, about 1850. The story runs that a surveyor or timber cruiser, who was a justice of the peace from Potsdam or Canton, chanced to visit the place, whereupon it was determined to take advantage of his presence to have the ceremony per- formed. In order to avoid any question of jurisdiction, the party repaired to a small island two miles from the Cole homestead, in Grindstone Bay, and in St. Lawrence county, where the twain were made one. The island has been known ever since as "Sally's Rock." Mr. Westcott died in 1853, and William Mclaughlin married his widow in 1855.
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" Peter's Rock," better known and more talked about in the old days, was named for Captain Peter Sabattis (the surname a corruption of St. Baptist). The legend is that Captain Peter once jumped from the rock to the shore, a distance of sixteen feet. Sabattis was an Indian hunter and trapper, is said to have served as a soldier in the war of the revolution, and is reputed to have lived to the age of one hundred and eight years.
It was the advent of the Northern Adirondack Railroad that brought real life to the region. Until that event the only activities were small farming, hunting, trapping and guiding, the entertainment of the rarely occasional sportsman who penetrated here even as early as 1855 or 1860, and logging operations early by the Pomeroys and by others in the few years immediately antecedent to the railroad. These latter reflected the reaching out by mill owners down the river for a larger supply and a better stand of timber than was left along the lower stretches of the stream, and John Snell, the father of our present Congressman, was the principal contractor and jobber along these lines. The railroad extension from Brandon or Bay Pond was distinctively a lumber project, undertaken by John Hurd, of Santa Clara, to create new business for the road and also to open a new field for, his side enterprises, but who in developing the western part of our county involved himself in ruin. Tupper Lake in particular owes its very exist- ence to Mr. Hurd, and is the best monument to his persistence and his faith in the future of the region.
At once upon the completion of the railroad to Tupper Lake, settlers began to arrive in considerable numbers, and founded industries, estab- lished stores and opened hotels. The growth was marvelously rapid for a wilderness town, but raw and rough at first. The railroad and the lumber interests imported labor, and the varieties were many, without all being attractive. A single early lot included city toughs, Italians and negroes, who were scrapping even before they had finished their breakfast. Such structures as were erected for the shelter of workers, bosses and mechanics were of the flimsiest and roughest kind, and most of the goods that the stores handled were coarse and cheap, while prices were all that " the traffic would bear." One concern had as stock prac- tically nothing except goods not salable in an establishment owned by one of the firm in an older community, and included in the lot were hundreds of pairs of heavy pegged boots that had been taken in trade through many years from country makers, and which the merchant
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would have been glad to close out at the home store at fifty cents per pair. Here, however, there was a hot scramble for them at from four to six dollars per pair. And pretty much everything else was of a similar grade, and sold in proportion. Whiskey brought twenty-five cents a glass, and beer half a dollar a bottle. A store trade of thousands of dollars a day when camp orders came in to be filled was not uncommon.
Howard H. Hobson came from Vermont, and Moses Potvin erected the first sawmill for him. He remained for only a short time - selling his plant to the A. Sherman Lumber Co. of Potsdam. At this date Potsdam and Norwood establishments had found that to get logs from a point so remote as Tupper Lake was unwarrantably expensive. The " hanging up " of a drive meant, first, that two years' cuts were on the hands of owners at the same time, thus tying up a large capital ; and, second, that a considerable part of a drive was apt never to reach its destination, because of logs lodging along the river banks, or becoming so water soaked that they would not float. Facilities for transportation of lumber having been provided, it seemed to be the better business course to locate the mills close to the source of timber supply. The Hobson mill went up in smoke after a time, but was rebuilt by the Shermans or Sissons, or both, who continued to operate it until 1915, when the structure, but not the machinery, and the surrounding lands were sold to the Oval Wood Dish Company of Traverse City, Mich. The old mill will be demolished, and one of concrete with modern and special equipment will supplant it. The machinery for this plant is to be brought from Michigan, which the company is abandoning because it has exhausted the timber on its holdings there. The company has bought lands outright or the hardwood stumpage on a good deal more than one hundred thousand acres in Altamont and vicinity, which it is claimed will keep it going for half a century; and it will drive the work of building its plant energetically. It began manufacturing in the autumn of 1917, but other mills are yet to be equipped. Its plans call for the erection of eight or ten immense structures along the high- way leading from Tupper Lake Junction to Tupper Lake proper, which will help toward closing the vacant territory between the two points, and perhaps eventually, as operatives fix their homes near the mills, fill completely the gap now not built up there. All of the build- ings are to be of concrete, and all are to be heated from a central plant. Electricity is to be generated with waste from the mill as a fuel, and it is estimated that besides having an abundance of power for itself the
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company will have a considerable surplus to sell to other interests, which it is hoped may be attracted to the locality by the inducement of cheap power. Moreover, the municipally owned electric light works do not pay the cost of operation and upkeep, and the company has con- tracted with the village to supply current for the latter's plant, which makes the distribution to consumers. One of the Oval Dish Com- pany's buildings will be exclusively for the use of operatives for recrea- tion purposes, and will contain a gymnasium, a hall for games and entertainments, and a kitchen. Here the management expects to serve free coffee to such of the employees as may lunch there. Another structure, for a warehouse, is to be two hundred and forty by four hundred feet on the ground, with two railroad tracks running into it. The roof area of the entire group of buildings will measure about seven acres. Of course the management is not itself giving out figures of the probable amount of its investment, but the talk among outsiders is that it can not fail to reach at least a half a million dollars. Opinions differ widely as to the number of people that these works will add to the population, ranging from five hundred to four thousand -the lower figures being based upon the assumption that a good deal of the help will be recruited from among those who are already residents, and the latter upon belief that the entire force will come from outside, and that other industries will develop in connection. The management states that three hundred and fifty men and about three hundred women and girls will be employed. In a way, the corporate title of the con- cern is a bit misleading, as its principal output will be hard wood lumber, probably six or seven million feet per year, and its other products will consist exclusively of clothespins and the thin oval dishes used so commonly by butchers and grocers, to be made from those parts of the logs which otherwise would be waste. Chopping bowls and other wooden ware, contrary to what many have understood, are not to be made. Railroad spurs are to be built very soon, running four miles east and an equal distance west from the New York and Ottawa at Derrick, and another line will be run later from Tupper Lake toward Axton and Wawbeek in order to tap the company's timber tract in that direction. The enterprise stands for the largest single industry that Franklin county has ever had the good fortune to have located within its borders, and it has every indication of having ample capital back of it and of being under a management that is to be considerate of its employees and helpful in many respects to the community at large.
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The second mill at Tupper Lake, a wonder in its day, was built by John Hurd in 1890, and the expenditure which it necessitated, piled upon his other undertakings and obligations, made a load heavier than he could continue to carry. As a consequence, the mill went into the possession of the Shepard-Morse concern of Boston for a year or two, and then to the Export Lumber Company of New York. Next Patrick A. Ducey ran it for a year, and C. L. & D. J. Becker and W. W. Wheeler also operated it, after which the Norwood Manufacturing Com- pany had it until 1913, when that company was merged into the Santa Clara Lumber Company. The latter has remodeled the mill, and added to it - one of its adjuncts being a large pulp and planing mill. The saw mill is the largest in the State. It cuts only soft timber, its annual product running up to ten million feet. Besides making lumber and pulp, the company turns out and sells large quantities of chips, ready for conversion into pulp by the chemical process, and cuts and ships hemlock bark by the thousands of cords to tanneries. It has another mill, near Faust, which it operated until it acquired the Hurd property, but which is now idle, though not dismantled. While no one assumes to know such to be the expectation of the Santa Clara manage- ment, outside opinion is that both local and general market conditions will have to become exceptional, not to say anything about the available timber supply. to start the property into activity again - at least under its present ownership.
In 1898 the Legislature authorized Cornell University to establish a school of forestry, and to acquire thirty thousand acres of timber lands in the Adirondacks for practical experiment and operation. The State paid for the lands, which were in the town of Harrietstown, just east of Altamont. The forester in charge of the school planned to cut all hard wood on the tract down to fourteen inches at the butt, and all soft timber down to eight inches, upon the theory that light and air would thus reach the trees left standing, the growth of which would then be more rapid. It was a part of the scheme also to fill in vacant places with young pine. The procedure would to-day be accounted good forestry provided that the territory so treated could be assured immunity from fire ravages. When about six thousand acres had been eut over as thus indicated, a wind upturned or snapped off nearly all of the trees that had not been felled, whereupon the school cleared the lands so that they were practically bare, and then undertook to reforest with seedlings. About two thousand four hundred acres were in fact so
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dealt with, and then fire swept in upon the tract, destroying many of the young plants. The practice as outlined was characterized at the time as vandalism, and action by the courts was invoked successfully to sup- press the operations, and to recover the lands from the school for the State. Of course the school had to have a purchaser for its cut timber, and found one in the Brooklyn Cooperage Company, which had there- tofore operated at Santa Clara and St. Regis Falls, but in 1900 built works at Tupper Lake, and constructed a lumber railroad seven miles in length from the latter place over toward Wawbeek in the town of Harrietstown for hauling logs from the school lands to its mill. Its contract was to pay five dollars per thousand feet for logs delivered at the railroad, which price barely covered the cost to the school of cutting and hauling, so that funds for replanting were insufficient. Operations ceased in 1904, when the courts prohibited further cutting and returned the tract to the State, whereupon the railroad was abandoned, and the rails sold for old iron.
Besides its mill at Tupper Lake for making barrel staves and head- ings, the cooperage company installed and until 1915 operated a chemical works for the manufacture of charcoal, wood alcohol and acetate of lime from the waste at the stave mill. These works 'use hard wood only, and are at present operated by the Tupper Lake Chemical Company under lease from the cooperage concern. It buys the waste from the latter, and gives employment to from fifty to seventy-five men. The cooperage company's mill and logging camp hands number one hundred and fifty or more.
C. H. Elliott, formerly at Derrick, has an establishment at Faust for making mangle rolls for laundries. He obtains his material from the Brooklyn Cooperage Company, and does a considerable business.
There is also a railroad machine shop for repair work at Faust or Tupper Lake Junction, and the fact that this point is a division ter- minal makes it headquarters for a number of railroad operatives, con- tributing to its prosperity and importance.
In 1896 Charles H. Turner, now of Malone, bought a large tract of timbered land in the northern part of Altamont, and the next summer built a sawmill at the place now called Derrick. His lumbering was on an extensive scale, the mill running both day and night for several years. Something like a hundred families comprised the then popula- tion, and the place, if of the mushroom order, partook also of a " boom " character for a time. The mill has been idle now for about ten years,
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but still stands, partly decayed, with all of the machinery in it as last used. Most of the inhabitants removed perforce with the discontinuance of operations by Mr. Turner, though twenty to thirty families con- tinued to make the place their home - occupying Mr. Turner's houses without payment of rent, and also having their gardens, pasturage, fuel, etc., free of cost. The stumpage remaining on the tract has been sold to the Oval Wood Dish Company.
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