Sources can be scarce when tracking down information for a region where precious few histories have been written.  We are fortunate that the few we have are wonderful works, even though too many need reprinting.  Such a work is David Beetle’s Up Old Forge Way.  Originally published in 1948, this book provided readers with a humorous, introductory history of Fulton Chain lakes, hamlets and people.  His sources were books, newspaper accounts and people’s recall of events in some cases fifty years after they occurred.

From Beetle’s book, we read that John Dix, a former governor, needed to float his company’s piled logs from the north branch of the Moose River (Township 8) through deCamp lands (Townships 1 & 7) to the company’s McKeever mill.  Beetle wrote that Dix did not want to pay deCamps’ tolls for this river use, so Dix took them to court and repeatedly lost.  Consequently, he needed to build a logging railroad from Clearwater to Rondaxe Lake.  Dix got attorney Charles Snyder to get “Railroader” Thomas C. Durant to buy the right of way from deCamp with Dix’s money.  W. S. deCamp would later wonder how Dix received this right of way in 1897.

Let’s correct two errors.  Two later books also include this story and mention that this John Dix was governor before and after this episode.  John Adams Dix was governor 1873-1874, died in 1879, and John Alden Dix, the one above, was governor 1911-1912.   Also, Thomas C. Durant, William West’s father, had died in 1885, dead for twelve years by the time of the event described.  What follows is what I have learned about the events, the people involved and the transaction itself. » Continue Reading.