Before there was Inlet I: Farrand Benedict, the Shedds and the Munns
PART THREE
Two years after Benedict submitted his report (1848), the railroad baton was passed as the Sacketts Harbor and Saratoga Railroad was chartered and its directors accepted Benedict’s data for their route through the Eckford Chain, Raquette Lake and Fulton Chain in the western Adirondacks.
Also in 1848, Benedict with David Read purchased Township 40 (Totten & Crossfield Purchase) from the state which includes Raquette Lake. Read later sold his interest to Benedict.
Lack of surveys of this acreage later resulted in the uncertain title issues of that region for property owners today.
In 1855, Benedict provided survey data to groups looking for additional supplies of water for the Erie and Black River Canals. Benedict recommended dams for storage reservoirs at Old Forge and Sixth Lake that were not built until 1880.
In 1860, Benedict’s 1846 study was listed as a source for a successor to the Sacketts Harbor and Saratoga R. R., the Adirondac Estate and Railroad Co., which planned to use Benedict’s “proposed system of inland navigation.”
Three years later, this company dissolved and its lands and rights were obtained by the Adirondack Company, builder of the railroad to North Creek.
The Utica Morning Herald in 1865 referred to Benedict as that company’s “engineer.”
At this time, Utica was seeking railroad extensions of the Black River R. R. to the Fulton Chain to obtain cheap fuel for the city and lumber for construction and railroads.
Benedict advised this “Wilderness Project” leader, Rutger B. Miller, in December 1865 that the Adirondack Company railroad from Saratoga was complete for 14 miles and another 25 miles would be finished in a month.
He urged the group to complete their railroad and join the success of the Adirondack Co.’s railroad heading north from Saratoga.
He would report their plans to his board for possible coordination. His brothers Abner and Joel Benedict became stockholders for the “Lake and River Improvement and Railroad and Land Company of the New York Wilderness” (Ch. 683, 1865).
This legislation authorized railroad connections with the Adirondack Company R. R. and the Utica and Black River R. R. Benedict, having moved to Parsippany, NJ in 1855 due to his wife’s poor health, would return to the Adirondacks one more time in 1874 for a new survey.
The state selected Benedict over local applicants not only for his “known ability to grapple with the important questions involved,” but also for his personal study of the region “instrumentally” for over a period of forty years.
The new study was to determine how the waters of the Adirondacks could be dammed and “improved” to provide water flow for the canals of the state.
Benedict was among the first to advocate clear cutting lands to be flowed when dams were constructed. Warder Cadbury informs us that Benedict also was the impetus for the earliest books on the region. Rev. John Todd, commencement speaker at the
University in 1841, had Benedict bring him along on his next trip to the Adirondacks.
Todd would write “Long Lake” in 1844. Benedict encouraged cousin Joel T. Headley, suffering a physical breakdown, to seek health in the Adirondacks. Headley would write about his adventures in “The Adirondack, or Life in the Woods” in 1849. Farrand Northrup Benedict died in 1880.
We now return to 1844. Three years after the joint purchase with Marshall Shedd, Jr., Benedict began a period of selling his lands to his family, Shedd, to Constable, Wood and Beach on Raquette Lake, and large portions to the Sackett’s Harbor and Saratoga R. R. and its successor, the Lake Ontario and Hudson River R. R.
In 1847, Benedict conveyed his title to the 6000 plus acres at the Head of Fourth Lake, and other lands to Marshall Shedd. In this transaction, dated June 10, 1847, Shedd provided Benedict with a mortgage note for $6000.
Marshall and his brother Henry turned to lumbering.
To be continued…
