In today’s column we continue our look at some aspects of the village’s past history as it celebrates 100 years of incorporation under state charter.
Following what seems to be an Adirondack custom, Tupper Lake Village is a mile away from the lake whose name it bears, and not only that but there is another lake called Racquette Pond. (Saranac Lake is on Lake Flower and Lake Placid is on Mirror Lake as other examples of this strange place-name custom.)
In his definitive History of the Adirondacks, Alfred Donaldson notes that “Racquette Pond is an artificial body of water.” Indeed another historian, Seaver, in his History of Franklin County, also erroneously describes it as “simply an expansion of the Racquette River, caused by the reservoir dam.”
The truth is, a beautiful little lake existed there before Setting Pole or any other dam was built and was mentioned by many early writers as early as 1849.
I have in my files a yellowed monograph on Racquette Pond written by Louis Simmons, editor and historian. What follows is from that paper:
“Raquette Pond is the northernmost of the three lakes fringing the Tupper area, all of which lie at an altitude of about 1,542 feet above sea level, held at that level by the Setting Pole Rapids dam on the Raquette River, a mile or so below the railroad bridge which spans the outlet.
“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 of 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. 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 22,000,000 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 district school, 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 Raquette River swinging north after crossing the foot of both Lake Simond and Big Tupper begins it 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 a marking hammer, 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, Leveless 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’ lean-to, open to public use, stands on the shore nearby today as a memorial to a colorful operation of an earlier era. A couple of generations of Tupper Lake boys rated ‘running logs’ on the pond one of the major sports of their growing-up years, and although many of them paid for their fun with a chilly bath when a log bobbed out from under them, there’s no record of one of these small fry log runners ever losing his life as a result.
“Two stories about the Raquette Pond area . . . deserve telling here: One deals with massive rocks rising out of the river just below the present Underwood railroad bridge at the foot of the pond. They were known to the earliest white visitors to the region as ‘Captain Peter’s Rock,’ and were so marked by the early map-makers. Captain Peter Sabattis, whose military title was in recognition of his services as guide during the Revolutionary War, including Benedict Arnold’s 1776 wilderness journey up the Kennereck River to assault Quebec, made the Tupper-Long Lake area his base for trapping and hunting expeditions, and he used to cache his traps and gear in recesses and crevices which now bear his name.
“The other tale, recounted by Alfred Donaldson in his History of the Adirondacks, tells how Raquette Pond got its earlier name of Lough Neagh. The story goes that an Irish nobleman, who lived on the shores of Lough Neagh in the old country, had occasion to fight a duel and wounded his antagonist, as he supposed, mortally. He fled the country and sailed for Montreal. From there, for greater safety, he penetrated into the Adirondack wilderness and settled on the stretch of water which he named Lough Neagh, in memory of the beautiful lake in his native county of Antrim, Ireland. After living there in seclusion for several years, he was discovered by friends an informed that the duel had not resulted in fatality after all. On learning this, he returned home. The name lingered after him, and the site of the Irish nobleman’s wilderness home, where the little village of Underwood flourished briefly more than a century later, was dubbed ‘Irish Clearing’ or ‘Paddy’s Choppin’ by old settlers here.”
Indian Park
“Indians made the Tupper campground on the river between the foot
of Big Tupper and Raquette Pond, as ‘Indian Park.’ Meritt’s 1858 map
of this area shows the Indian encampment, where arrowheads and bits
of pottery were picked up by early settlers and sportsmen visiting
the area. The Indians had something in common with present-day tourists
departing for sunnier climes with the first fall frost, and there was
never a year-round Indian settlement in the Tupper sector.
“The first hotel at the north end of Big Tupper Lake, the Mt. Morris House, was built in 1865 by ‘Uncle Mart’ Moody, whose fame as guide and teller of tall tales helped lure early sportsmen here. Mr. Moody sold it in 1888 to Pliny Robbins, who enlarged the place and renamed it the Prince Albert, under which name it operated until 1956. It was torn down in 1968 after standing empty a dozen years.
“Martin Moody moved up the lake a mile or so and built ‘Camp Redside’ beside the brook of that name, which provided shelter and food to some notable visitors, among them President Grover Cleveland, President Chester A. Arthur and Governor Horatio Seymour. Renamed Waukesha after its 1893 sale to Jabez Alexander, it flourished under that name until 1960.”
Note: Before the roads came, the guide’s boat was the chief means of transportation. The many waterways surrounding this village were a necessary and popular conduit for travel by visiting sportsmen and locals alike.