USA > New York > Franklin County > Historical sketches of Franklin county and its several towns > Part 57
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each. A staff of six persons is in attendance at Santa Clara through the season, and consists of the following: Dr. Anna K. Davenport, resi- dent physician ; Miss M. Ribble, assistant; Miss M. E. Walsh, nurse ; Mrs. M. A. Bingham, matron or house mother; Miss Nellie Holmes Bingham, assistant; and Miss Jean Hamilton, domestic science teacher and instructor in the study of birds and wild flowers. Mrs. Bingham has been in charge at Santa Clara for fifteen years. The society has an endowment of about seventy thousand dollars, of which about forty thousand dollars was received in bequests and contributions during the year 1915. The part of this fund applicable particularly to Santa Clara's needs is about twenty thousand dollars. One hundred dollars makes a contributor a patron, twenty-five dollars a life member, and one dollar a member for one year. There are one hundred and twenty-two patrons, more than three times as many who are life members, and about two hundred yearly members, payments by many of whom are more than one dollar each. Mrs. William Herbert of New York is the presi- dent of the society, and Mrs. Thomas Denny one of the board of man- agers. The Santa Clara committee includes Mrs. John Jacob Astor, Mrs. Gifford Pinchot, Mrs. Walter Webb, Mrs. Lucius Wilmerding and Mrs. J. Sergeant Cram. Gifts to the work here need not be in money, and household goods and provisions would undoubtedly be gratefully received and advantageously used. The institution is unquestionably doing a grand work, and deserves support. To take more than a hundred poor girls, some of them sick and all of them worn almost to the break- ing point, out of the heat, impure air and the grind of department stores, factories and sweat shops and offices and give them opportunity to revel for at least a month in outdoor life in the cool of the mountains, where invigorating atmosphere, kind care and good food are afforded, is surely a fine philanthropy, and should appeal strongly to all who are better circumstanced.
FACTS AND CONJECTURES ABOUT MILITARY OCCUPANCY
Referring to the prevalent local belief, noted on a preceding page, that there was military occupancy at two points in the town long ago. that belief rests upon the fact that traces of such occupancy have been found in the vicinity of Oneita (formerly Waite's) and also at the Jennings clearing, which lies six or seven miles to the cast and south of the hamlet of Santa Clara. At Oneita in particular, when Arthur Phelps was proprietor, he ploughed up at different times parts of gun barrels, a bayonet or two, canteens, and also canister shot. This point
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is on the Port Kent and Hopkinton turnpike, which had not been built at the time of the war of 1812; and the only plausible explanation of the existence of military relics there is that troops traversing the Northwest Bay road, which in this vicinity is three or four miles to the south, were quartered there simply because it is a good natural camping ground. The Jennings place is on the Northwest Bay road, which was cut through the forest as early as 1810, and which local tradition holds was built in part, or at least improved, by soldier labor. It is known positively that troops were moved in 1813 from Plattsburgh to Sacket Harbor, but the records of the war department at Washington fail to show by what route they proceeded. However, it does not seem at all improbable that it may have been by this highway, as it is known that there was con- stant apprehension that if the old military road from Plattsburgh to and through Ellenburgh and Chateaugay were followed there would be danger of attack by the enemy from Canada, for at some points this road ran near the border. Hopkinton is the western terminus of the North- west Bay road, and official and other records establish the fact that that hamlet was rather a center of activity in the war of 1812. Three regi- ments were there (one of them commanded by Zebulon Pike, for whom Pike's Peak in Colorado was named) in March, 1813, on their way from Plattsburgh to Sacket Harbor, and in November, 1814, four hundred dragoons passed through the place from French Mills, while during the winter of 1913-14 as many as a hundred sleighs arrived there in a single day, all loaded with military stores, bound for French Mills. With such activity at Hopkinton, the local tradition that bodies of troops wintered a few miles to the east, at Oneita, at the Jennings clear- ing, and at Sand Hill in the town of Waverly is not incredible, especially when we have tangible evidence of such occupancy in the discovery of arms, etc., at Oneita, and in the presence of ancient graves in the Jennings clearing. "Old Bill " Edwards, a former well known guide, used to tell that such occupancy was unquestionably a fact, and that at Sand Hill measles prevailed among the troops in a virulent form, resulting in a number of deaths. One story runs that the beginning of the graveyard at Santa Clara was with the interment of soldiers so dying, but is to be discredited, as a more trustworthy account makes Mrs. John Hurd the first person buried there.
Another possible explanation of the presence of military relics in the town is that they may have been from the equipment of Sir John Johnston on his flight from the Mohawk through the Adirondacks to Canada in 1777, though this expedition is believed to have followed the valley of the Racket rather than that of the St. Regis.
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FATAL FIRES AND MURDERS
Santa Clara has not been without its tragedies. In 1887 Chas. LaRocque, Zip Murray and Chas. LaFleur, all of Moira, reported one day at Everton for work in the mill. They were assigned to quarters in a boarding house, which burned the night of their arrival, and all three perished in the flames.
A few weeks later the store of W. J. Glassbrook at Brandon burned. Joseph Garrow, wife and two children occupied rooms overhead, and all were burned to death.
October 16, 1905, Herbert Miller, formerly of Saranac Lake, shot his wife in the kitchen of the Saranac Inn with a rifle, literally blowing the top of her head off. He then attempted to shoot himself, and later to cut his throat, but bystanders interfered and prevented consummation of his purpose. Miller was a very decent and likable fellow when sober, but when in drink imagined all kinds of evil and was of a madly jealous disposition. Upon indictment he pleaded alcoholic insanity, but after the evidence was in withdrew the plea, and pleaded guilty to man- slaughter in the first degree. He was sentenced to imprisonment at Dannemora for sixteen years.
At the home of Mrs. Charles MeCaffrey, near Saranac Inn, on Novem- ber 30, 1905, George Carpenter killed Capitola Gilmett, crushing her skull with a hatchet, and nearly severing her head from the body. He then cut the throat of Henry McCaffrey, a boy of sixteen years of age, and committed suicide by shooting. Discovery of the crime was not made until two days later, and its particulars had of course to be con- structed wholly from circumstances. Miss Gilmett's room showed that a terrible struggle had taken place, and it was doubtless the fact that Carpenter had attempted to ravish her, and that then, fearful of dis- covery, had killed McCaffrey while he slept, and taken his own life. Carpenter was a nephew of Mrs. McCaffrey, for whom he had been working for a year. His home was at Bridport, Vt. Mrs. McCaffrey was absent for a day or two, and Carpenter had been left in charge of the place.
CHAPTER XXI
WAVERLY
Waverly was erected from Dickinson in 1880, and then comprised six townships, or 146,466 assessed acres. By the forming of Altamont in 1890 its area was reduced by almost exactly one-half, or to 77,254 acres as assessed - which, quality considered, is quite sufficient, as the land generally has little value after the removal of the timber. It is uneven, rocky, almost sterile in parts, and even where the soil is seemingly fairly good it is often cold, repaying cultivation but poorly, though affording reasonably good grazing. The entire south third of the town is included in the William Rockefeller private park or preserve; most of the middle third and a part of the north third are in the condition that extensive lumbering operations would naturally leave a wilderness tract; while two-thirds of the north third, or less than a quarter of the whole, is nearly all cleared and in cultivation, with a number of good farms, though mostly rough and rolling, so that it is not feasible to use machinery advantageously, and a good deal of hand work is required in planting, cultivating and harvesting the crops. Thin and acid in some localities, the land nevertheless produces good hay and most, kinds of grain, as well as potatoes as fine as are grown anywhere in the world - two prizes having been awarded to Waverly growers at the Cornell potato show in 1916. Though the seasons are sometimes too short for potatoes to ripen fully, that disadvantage is more than compensated if the product be marketed for seed, as the unripe potato sprouts quickest, and enables southern growers to produce earlier, when prices are highest. In the hope of affording suggestion for safeguarding the future, after the dis- appearance of the forest, H. E. O'Neil has given local agricultural problems no little study, and from personal actual demonstration believes that the growing of potatoes for seed, which always commands ·a better price than for consumption, and stock raising along given lines can be made to yield handsome returns. Calves bought in midsummer, grazed on cheap lands until winter, then fed economically, grazed again the following summer, and finally grained for a few weeks have paid a hundred per cent. and more on the original investment - the inter- mediate care and cost having been trivial. Dairying on a large scale can not be expected to be prosecuted profitably, though affording promise of fair success in certain inclosed areas. With climatic and
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soil conditions such that lands are rarely too wet for working in the spring, and never crust or bake, while underlying moisture minimizes drouth effects, it is believed that with due enterprise and employment of intelligent methods farming in the northern part of the town could be brought to realize quite as much as is at present paid out for wages by the mills in the village. But even this could not be counted upon to preserve the village itself in its present size, for with the exhaustion of the timber the mills must close, and there would remain no sufficient employment for the common labor which constitutes so large a part of the municipal population.
NATURAL RESOURCES AND REFORESTATION
Apart from the soil the natural resources of Waverly consist almost altogether in its forests, of which the industries upon which the business activities in the village of St. Regis Falls depend are destructive. The cooperage company is dennding large tracts of hard timber at a rapid rate, and the pulp mill consumes great quantities of the soft woods. Mani- festly this can not continue forever unless there be replacement other than that which Nature can supply, and with the forests gone, and three-quarters of the town's area practically worthless for agricultural purposes, the conclusion is inescapable that Waverly's then future would be precarious in the extreme. Consequently unless there be instituted and determinedly prosecuted a policy of reforestation, the mills must become idle in the course of a few years, and St. Regis Falls lose its prosperity and a large percentage of its population, regardless of how agriculture be developed. The alternative to such decay is of course a stupendous proposition, but men who are experienced and skilled in forestry insist that it is not only altogether feasible, but that it promises actual profit. A thousand young pine or spruce per acre are required to reforest a tract, and forty to forty-five years will be required for them to attain a growth which would fit them for merchantable uses. But foresters tell us that at the end of such period the harvest would have a money value which, reckoning every item of cost, including land and compounding the interest on the investment, would give a return of five per cent. to the operator. A generation or more is undeniably a long · wait, but it is certainly preferable to hopeless barrenness and utter loss of lands, which, treated as suggested, might make an industry per- petual instead of short lived, with the tract worth incalculably more than it was even as virgin forest, because with the steadily decreasing timber area stumpage can not fail to gain in value. Besides all that,
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HISTORY OF FRANKLIN COUNTY
one needs but to visit the neighborhood of Wawbeek in Harrietstown, where there is a replanted forest fifteen to eighteen years old, to be delightedly impressed by the attractiveness of lands thus treated as com- pared with those that have been stripped and practically abandoned. The Brooklyn Cooperage Company is already putting out half a million young trees on lands owned by it in St. Lawrence county, and like action must be had in Waverly if there is to remain anything of consequence in the town besides a memory and its name. Everybody in the town who has its welfare at heart and possesses any denuded land unfit for cultivation should practice the policy here suggested in some degree at least, and those who can not themselves so operate ought not to neglect opportunity to urge action upon others. If neglected the town will be a waste within a measurable period, and must lose most of its population. The same proposition is applicable equally to Altamont, Brandon, Duane, Frank- lin and Santa Clara, the truth of which is exemplified by Waverly's own experience. Comparing conditions there in 1895 with those which had obtained earlier, the late Hon. William T. O'Neil wrote that where there had been two mills at Shanley there were then none and the houses for the operatives were deserted and empty; that a planing mill and box factory at St. Regis Falls which had employed thirty hands had gone into disuse; that a saw mill which formerly worked a hundred men was employing only eleven; that the railroad shops, with sixty workmen, had removed elsewhere; and that lumbering operations that had had camps containing five hundred workers had ceased altogether. The tan- nery was then running, but closed later, and has not been replaced, and more recently the rossing mill has closed because the preparation of pulp wood by that process has been found to be too wasteful. All of these changes except the loss of the railroad shops were due solely to the fact that the pine and large spruce in the vicinity had all been cut, and most of the hemlock stripped of its bark. The outlook for the time seemed black enough and hopeless and only that industries using hard woods and cutting the smaller spruce for pulp wood came into existence there could not have been much more of a future for St. Regis Falls than for Everton, Santa Clara, Shanley and Brandon. But within a dozen or fifteen years the supply of hard wood and pulp stock will have been exhausted, compelling abandonment of the mills and leaving no field of employment open to labor. Can such conditions mean anything except one more practically deserted village in the event that reforestation is not undertaken soon?
True, a summer resort business might be rebuilt up to some extent if
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capital and enterprise for it could be enlisted, but vacationists and pleasure seekers will not favor a locality that lacks woods and water.
CHOOSING NAMES
It appears from the supervisors' records that Waverly twice escaped by a narrow margin a different christening. In 1861 the proposition was put before the supervisors to set off six townships from Dickinson, and to call the proposed new town Hammond's Falls - Charles F. and John G. Hammond of Crown Point having purchased large tracts of wilderness lands in the vicinity a short time previously, and erected a saw mill at what is now St. Regis Falls. The supervisors voted adversely, however, and no further suggestion for the partition of Dickinson was presented until 1880. The proposed act as then offered gave to the new town the name Greenville, in compliment to Ira C. Green, a pettifogger, a justice of the peace, and an active worker in local politics, but busy rather than strong. The measure failed of passage by one vote. A few days later Hon. William T. O'Neil, who became the first supervisor, and who was for more than a quarter of a century the leading citizen of the place, appeared before the supervisors in advocacy of the proposition except that he suggested substituting Waverly for Greenville as the name which the town should bear. His arguments and personal influence induced one supervisor to change his vote, and the measure carried.
Yet another incident of name designation attaches to the locality which it is worth while to chronicle. During the civil war, when prac- tically everybody in all that section was an ardent Unionist and admirer of the President, it was desired to have a post-office established, to be called Lincolnson. A Democrat of a neighboring town was engaged to draw the petition, and in the narrowness and bitterness of partisanship then so prevalent he wrote the name " Linkinson," and, rather remark- ably, it slipped through the post-office department with approval. In consequence the place was known for years as "Linkinson," but with change eventually to St. Regis Falls.
BEGINNING AND GROWTH OF ST. REGIS FALLS
The year when activity began at St. Regis Falls can not be fixed with certainty, but probably was 1858 or 1859. Beginning in 1855 and con- tinuing yearly to 1859, the Hammonds made extensive purchases of timber lands in the vicinity, and certainly not later than 1860 had a mill in operation, which had been built for them by Amos Harvey, with Hiram Cook, Julius Rising and Kirby and Josephus Titus comprising
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a part of his working force. Until then the present town of Waverly had had no inhabitants at all except perhaps two or three hunters and trappers. There were no roads other than trails and the Northwest Bay road leading into it, and forests shut it in for miles on every side. The first school was taught in 1860 by Miss Amy Saunders (afterward Mrs. Philip Shufelt) at a compensation of one dollar a week and board! The rear of a log house, in the front part of which a family had living quar- ters, was the school room, and the only frame structure in the place, with the exception of the saw mill, was the dwelling house of Benjamin Babcock, who was the mill superintendent. Other than these there was nothing except a few log cabins on Main street and the lumber camps back in the forests. Mr. Babcock remained as superintendent until 1865, when he was succeeded by his brother John, who was the father of Dr. L. W. and Brigham W. John died in 1867, and Oren Grimes, who came from Crown Point, afterward engaged in lumbering in Duane with his son-in-law, Fred O'Neil, and now resides in Malone, then took charge, and so continued until the Hammonds sold to Orson Richards of Sandy Hill in 1870. Mr. Richards associated Thomas O'Neil with him as resident manager and partner in the business, but without pro- prietary interest in any of the lands. They expected to cut eight million feet of lumber per year. Mr. Richards was interested in large enterprises elsewhere, and some of these going wrong he failed in 1879 for two and a half million dollars. In consequence the property here passed to the ownership of S. F. Vilas of Plattsburgh, and Vilas & O'Neil ran the mill until 1882, when it was sold to Hurd, Hotchkiss & Macfarlane - the latter a Michigan lumberman of large experience, and the other members of the firm being capitalists from Connecticut, who had been associated in a similar business with Mr. Macfarlane in the West, and who had become convinced that the field here offered opportunity for profitable investment and operation. Their original purchase compre- hended a tract of some sixty square miles, to which they added soon afterward half as much more. Their plans were so large and their action so energetic that most people in the locality received them with amaze- ment and incredulity, unable to comprehend that lumbering could justify the building of a railroad through a difficult and sparsely settled coun- try. Nevertheless by the autumn of 1883 they had completed a railroad from Moira to St. Regis Falls, greatly enlarged the old Hammond mill, opened a store, and established logging camps which were to turn out vast cuts of timber. Their expenditure within half a year of the time that work was begun, including land purchases, was said to have reached a million and a half of dollars; and this proved to be little more than
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the beginning. Besides enlarging the old mill, they added steam for power, installed machinery for making clapboards, lath and broom- sticks, built a machine shop and box factory, and conducted a general store which had a trade of seventy-five thousand dollars a year. The effect upon St. Regis Falls was marked. Real estate values quadrupled, and the population was multiplied by five or six, with more money cir- culating than at any other place in the county. In the course of the next two or three years the railroad was extended southerly through Waverly into Santa Clara. The pace having become apparently too swift for Mr. Macfarlane, he withdrew from the concern in 1885, and Mr. Hotchkiss dropped out a little later. Mr. Hurd, having become absorbed in the work of extending the railroad and in the operation of mills which he had built elsewhere, sold the St. Regis Falls plant to Dodge, Meigs & Co. of New York, or the Santa Clara Lumber Co., which sold later to the St. Regis Paper Co., the present owner.
Following the history of the Hammond mill, Watson Page and B. W. Babcock leased it from the St. Regis Paper Co. in 1896 and operated it for a short time in the manufacture of hard wood lumber, after which the Watson Page Lumber Company was incorporated by Mr. Page, William T. O'Neil and H. E. O'Neil, and continued the business successfully until 1904, when the Brooklyn Cooperage Company, seeking opportunity to do business here, was permitted to take over the mill under lease - the gen- tlemen composing the Watson Page Lumber Company consenting to the arrangement out of pure public spirit, so that the hamlet might benefit through the establishment of a larger industry. The cooperage com- pany is still in possession, operating the plant as a stave and heading factory. Though it owns no lands in the immediate vicinity, it buys big lots of stumpage or immense quantities of logs from others. It has a railroad running half way across Waverly into and through Santa Clara, and half way over into Brandon for hauling stock. It has on its pay- rolls in connection with the St. Regis Falls business about three hundred men.
In 1865 the Hammonds sold a parcel of land at and adjacent to St. Regis Falls to Solomon R., Edward and Francis Spaulding of Boston, Mass., and. James H. Young (the father of Mrs. W. T. O'Neil and Frank R. Young of St. Regis Falls and of Charles H. of Malone) proceeded at once to build a sole-leather tannery for them, and then to operate it as superintendent. The firm became Spaulding & Bumstead a little later, and did business until 1878, when it failed. The tannery was then operated under lease for a year or two by Perley D. Moore & Co. Shaw Brothers of Boston bought it about 1880, converted it into
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an upper-leather works, and, including bark peelers and teamsters, gave employment to a hundred and fifty hands. Mr. Young retired from the superintendency in 1882 after seventeen years of practically continuous service. Shaw Brothers had other large tanneries in Hamilton county and in Pennsylvania, and had so overextended themselves that they failed in 1884 for five million dollars. The establishment was sold to Arey, Mad- dock & Locke of Boston, and was run by them, first in the firm name, and then under the title of St. Regis Leather Company, with Samuel Smith as superintendent, until they also failed in 1901. The building was bought soon afterward by William T. and H. E. O'Neil, who converted it into a chair factory, which had a capacity of six hundred chairs per day, and later transferred to it the electric lighting plant which had been established originally in the Page lumber mill. Both chair factory and the electric works were run successfully until 1909, when fire wiped them out. The name was changed to the Cascade Wood Products Company, and Alexander Macdonald and Dr. L. M. Wardner became interested in it. A dam and pulp mill were erected on the tannery site, and an elec- tric railroad five or six miles in length constructed out into timber lands for hauling logs. While the concern's supply of timber lasted it sold the hard wood to the cooperage company, and itself worked up the soft wood. The railroad is no longer in existence, the rails having been taken up and sold for old iron; and the pulp mill is temporarily idle. H. E. O'Neil is the president and general manager. Acceptance of the office of deputy conservation commissioner compelled Mr. Macdonald to part with his interest in the property. The company owns also a small saw mill down the stream from its principal works, which it operates for custom business.
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