A recent survey asking for input from residents on the future of the Municipal Park elicited an overwhelming response. The information and recommendations contained in the survey’s answers will be used as a tool for village and town officials to generate further development of that wonderful community asset.
It is beyond this column to expand on that survey’s data, other than to note that it has opened the door for the community at large to voice their opinions, which they did with great fervor.
It should also be noted that the survey, framed by village trustee Mike Demar’s study committee on the park’s future, had a high rate of response, far in excess of the 10 to 15 percent, which is the average for mailed surveys. Given such a high rate of concern, perhaps it would be of general interest to offer a series of brief articles that will give a historical overview of how the park was first acquired by the community, the cost, the former use, etc. After all, not every community is fortunate enough to own such valuable shoreline and extended property.
Let’s begin by observing that Racquette Pond is NOT a result of a backwater created by Setting Pole Dam. This popular misconception, which is contained in Seavers’ History of Franklin County, can be disproved by the fact that early travelers such as S.H. Hammond, the literary editor of the Albany State Register, described in glowing terms its existence on an 1849 trip to this region. Since no dam was built at Setting Pole or anywhere else in the area at this time, historian Seavers was apparently in error. (Setting Pole Dam was built in the 1850s.)
The following description was excerpted from unpublished early notes
found in the Free Press and written by former editor and historian
Louis Simmons:
“Raquette Pond has borne at least three other names over the years,
including Whitney Pond, after an early surveyor, Cyrus P. Whitney,
who helped survey the area; The Lothrop Stretch, after a member of
the Lothrop family of Saranac Lake who lived for awhile on its shores,
and Lough Neagh, after a beautiful lake in Ireland, a name given it
in nostalgic memory or the Ould Sod by one of the early Irish landowners
of the nearly four-million-acre Macomb Purchase. ‘Lough Neagh’ was
promptly corrupted into ‘Long Neck’ by area Adirondackers, who finally
settled for Raquette Pond instead.
“The earliest logging operations in the Tupper area centered around the east shore of Raquette Pond, where the clearing that was left after the virgin pine was cut off in the 1850s by the Pomeroy Lumber Co. became the site some 40 years later for Tupper Lake village.
“Probably no other body of water in the Adirondacks was the setting for more intensive or extensive lumbering operations. Starting around Civil War times and continuing down through the 1920s, spring river drives brought logs cut throughout the Raquette River watershed. Cold River, Bog River and numerous smaller tributary streams down to the sawmills clustered around Raquette Pond shores. A good idea of the size of the annual timber cut is offered in the annual report of the New York State Forest, Fish and Game Commission for 1900, which shows that the A. Sherman Lumber Co., which operated a mill opposite the site now occupied by the OWD, Inc., sawed more than 17 million board feet of softwood lumber that year, while the Norwood Manufacturing Co., then operating the “Big Mill” on Raquette Pond, had a total cut of nearly 22 million feet.
“Lesser cuts were handled at other mills then operating around Raquette Pond, including the pulp mill operated by Champlain Realty near the outlet, where a little separate village, Underwood, complete with school district, flourished from 1899 until the mill shut down in 1910. The foundations of the homes and roofless brick walls of the plant, largely concealed by second growths, are all that remain to mark the site. Gone, also, is almost all trace of a pulp mill operated by the Santa Clara Lumber Co. near where little Wolf Creek empties into the pond.
“Raquette Pond was a headache for boaters in the heyday of logging, the network of log booms, anchored by rock cribs and piles driven deep into the bottom, making navigation a hazardous business. At the point where the Racquette River, swinging north after crossing the foot of both Lake Simond and Big Tupper, begins its roundabout course through Raquette Pond, the “Sorting Gap” was a key link in the logging operations of the past.
“Here, logs in the thousands converged after the long river drive.
Over the years, many major lumbering firms harvested timber along the
Raquette River watershed, and to distinguish their own cut, stamped
the end of each log with marking hammers, which imprinted the owner’s
mark in the wood. Log marks, registered with the state, included many
familiar to Tupper old timers, among them the marks of G.W. Sisson,
Augustus Sherman, Burnham, Loveless Co., Norwood Mfg. Co., Export Lumber
Co. and others.
Keen-eyed lumberjacks manned the floating catwalks of the Sorting
Gap around the clock during the closing days of the spring drive, spotting
company marks and shunting the logs into the owner’s holding booms,
from which they were herded, in an Adirondack version of the western
roundup, to the firm’s mill on the pond shore, or on down the 70 or
so miles of river to the mills at Potsdam. International Paper Company’s
“Sorting Gap” leanto, open to public use, stands on the shore nearby
today as a memorial to a colorful operation of an earlier era.
“Indians made the leanto location one of their favorite hunting, fishing and trapping goals. Old timers here referred to it as Indian Park. Merrit’s map of 1858 shows the Indian encampments, were arrowheads and bits of pottery have been found. However, there was never a year-round Indian settlement in the Tupper sector.”
Next column: the community originally votes NO to the shoreline purchase.