Beaver Kill - History

History

The combination of its remoteness and contentious disputes over land titles in the Catskills stemming from the Hardenburgh Patent kept the Beaver Kill area unsettled and undeveloped well into the 19th century. Only loggers and trappers visited the area, on a road built in 1815. They told others of the river's clear waters and ample supply of trout, which Washington Irving wrote of in 1819, noting that its isolation kept it out of easy reach of city dwellers attracted to the new sport of angling.

Later in the century the valley's first significant industry adversely affected the water quality the trout depended on. Tanneries opened up, harvesting tannin from the bark of the extensive Eastern Hemlock stands on the mountain slopes. There were eventually eight in the valley, their effluents clouding the river and making it less attractive to trout. Charcoal makers also released acids into the river, further affecting its quality. The industries were properous enough to sustain the settlements of Beaverkill, where the oldest extant bridge over the river was constructed in 1865, and Shin Creek (today Lew Beach).

Those industries faded away due to changes in technology and depletion of forest resources in the 1880s. That same decade, New York created the Forest Preserve, by which state landholdings in the Adirondacks and Catskills were to be kept forever wild. This shift to conservation helped the region sustain a new tourism economy, as rail connections, and later the automobile, brought dry-fly fishermen to the valley. Many of the new sport's early publicizers, like Theodore Gordon, wrote about the trout of the Beaver Kill, particularly the Junction Pool, rich in fish because the trout could not decide which river to swim up, and the waters from there down to the East Branch.

The new attention caused different problems. Overfishing led conservationists and private clubs to buy large sections of the river's banks all the way up to almost its headwaters. The state built Beaverkill campground in the 1920s, one of its first in the Catskill Park, to concentrate angler impact in one area.

In the years after World War II, the river faced the prospect of being dammed by New York City for its water supply, along with the Willowemoc. The fly-fishing community opposed this strongly, and eventually when test borings showed that the bedrock in those valleys could not support the necessary dams, the city relented. It chose to acquire land along both branches of the Delaware and build Cannonsville and Pepacton reservoirs instead.

Anglers later protested the construction of the Quickway, the expressway section of Route 17, along the river. Their efforts resulted in some slight rerouting, and a section near Cooks Falls where the two roadways were stacked on each other in a narrow passage between state Forest Preserve land and the river. It does not appear to have had, by itself, the adverse impact on runoff and stream flows that was originally feared, although both have increased since the highway's construction.