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The Jordan River, which was mentioned in our last column (the ballad of Tebo falls), has a humble beginning.

It is born only a few miles north of this village in a tiny eyedrop of water known locally as Marsh Pond, or by its more poetic name, Sunset Pond, quite near the Pitchfork Pond Road.
It begins its voyage to the sea via the Raquette River as a narrow, crooked, alder-choked stream. All access here is private (Township 19 Hunting Club), not that it matters because even the most fanatical canoeist would require a machete or chain saw to navigate its convoluted passage that persists for several miles downstream. Perhaps there is a grand design to this initial impenetrability, a kind of cordon that keeps the river solitary, remote, and protected from overuse.

In its middle reaches, however, almost as though it didn’t want to join its cousin, the Raquette, as a puny and shallow stream it widens out and wanders between towering conifers; white pines over 200 feet tall, virgin aristocrats whose ancestors were sought after by the King’s servants, English and French in their turn, as ship masts, for only in a few places did the pine grow tall and straight. For long stretches the river courses through marshland, where numerous whitetail have taken refuge from flies and where they feed in a true aquatic garden, a specimen treasure of what the real north woods is all about.

Just as the upstream portion of the river is private, so is its mouth, and a steep series of rapids and falls over a mile in length discourages upstream travel.

You have already paddled half way down the seven-mile long Carry Dam reservoir from the Parmenter site below Seveys to reach the Jordan’s entrance into the Raquette, so continue north another three-fourths of a mile where blocks of state land allow you to carry your canoe a mile or so along a woods road to the stillwater above Tebo Falls.
Most people deplore dams and reservoirs, but Carry Falls Reservoir is worth a visit. It is only a short drive from this village, and Niagara Mohawk has provided a launch site, picnic grounds, places to swim and a campground.

You will find lots of sandy beaches along wooded shorelines, attractive islands, and at three miles wide and seven mile long, you won’t feel crowded. If you do visit this man-made lake, you may want to reflect that under the hull of your boat, now covered by up to 70 feet of water, not very long ago (1951) there was an entire settlement that was once known as “Hollywood.”
Yep! Hollywood, and it was so named in 1886, the year before the California movie capitol was also named Hollywood!

As a boy I used to ride along on my father’s soda truck when he would make deliveries to the renowned Hollywood Inn located there. Oh boy, such memories.
Orange Crush in the “crinkly brown bottle,” birch beer, sasparilla. Steel tubs of Frenette’s Ice Cream, safely ensconced in bulky kapok-insulated containers, surrounded by ice from Dolph Trudeau’s ice house to prevent melting.

The Hollywood Inn, which had become one of our valued customers, was built in 1889 by Jerry Reynolds, who recognized the need for a halfway tavern between Potsdam and this village. Remember, it was then a two-day trip by stagecoach drawn by four horses over a poor sand and corduroy road. The following year Reynolds became postmaster at Hollywood as well as innkeeper.

Later the inn was operated by the Day family and in the 1930s by Al and Marion Luchs as a resort hotel and dude ranch.

Little did I realize while riding in that old, hard rubber-tired Reo truck that during the fall months of 1951, while driving frequently between Canton and Tupper, that I would experience the “eerie scene of 1,000 flaming stumps touched with fuel oil. Below the inn, all across what was known as the Great Bog (a wide bottom land between hills with the river running through it), not a tree was left standing. The burning stumps looked like the campfires of a large Iroquois war party on some stern mission against the Hurons of Canada. When the proposal to flood the Hollywood settlement surfaced, the owners of the property there put up a strong battle, but they lost the war.

As a county supervisor said to one of the settlement homeowners after his testimony at the courthouse in Canton,”I cannot help but admire your grit in this fight, but for the common people, trying to fight big business for their seeming-just and collective rights is usually like bucking a stone wall.” It took six years to complete the project, and in 1957 the dam towered 70 feet above the natural bed of the river, a reservoir of water seven miles long with a shoreline of about twenty-five miles.

Admittedly, the lake created is, yes, I’ve got to say, beautiful. However, penstocks, dried up sections of river, power plant buildings, tailraces, concrete dams (six in all) have changed the character of the second-largest river in the state.

Today, only a few short sections have retained the vitality and beauty of this once vigorous mountain torrent that rises in a small pond near Blue Mtn. Lake and flows northward to swell the St. Lawrence. One such example: One recent summer my wife and I paddled the river from its source to where it enters the St. Lawrence at the St. Regis Indian Reservation. On that trip the river below Hannawa Falls disappeared completely and we had to portage our canoe alongside a huge pipe that towered above us (and held the river) until finally it was disgorged through a turbine and we regained the river bed near Potsdam and were allowed once more to return for a time to the ancient and true passage.

The drowning of the settlement called Hollywood is just another entry, like Brandon, Derrick, Underwood, Kildare, in the legacy of short-lived Adirondack community settlements. The Raquette will not be as easily vanquished. It will one day return to its natural free-flowing form. Methods of providing power will (and are) changing. The dams will outlive their usefulness or choke on their own unflushed (?) situation in a hundred years or so. A mere blib in geologic time.

Copyright William C. Frenette Collection