Town of Fremont - History page7

wolves in the town. These found a refuge in the Fremont wilderness. A giant passenger pigeon roost crossed the town near Long Pond. The Fremont streams even this day are known as trout streams. The Delaware River always abounded in shad, bass and salmon. Salmon disappeared many years ago and shad are all but gone due to the contamination of the stream near its mouth. Shad and salmon are fish that spent part of their lives in salt water. Today wall-eyed pike and small-mouth black bass are caught in the river.

Ponds Became Lakes

When summer boarders began to come to Sullivan County, a movement swept over the county to change the names of many ponds. A pond overnight became a lake and received an attractive name - an Indian name - or something that passed for one. The Long Pond residents counseled with the sage of Callicoon Center, William J. Harding, who came up with the name Tennanah Lake. This was about the time of the Yukon gold rush and a river high in the mountains of Alaska had been given a name which the Indians said meant mountain river. This Mr. Harding selected for the Long Pond residents. In Alaska it is spelled Tanana.
I recall that I taught the Windfall school in 1906. A tobacco company placed a chewing tobacco on the market under the trade name of Tennanah. There had been some discussion as to whether there was a double “n” in the word. The company settled the question by getting a post office cancellation under the office stamp. The postmaster got two packages of chewing tobacco for his trouble. Why any tobacco company would want to use the name of its package, I cannot understand, but then great quantities of chewing tobacco was used by the woodcutters working around Tennanah in that day.
My recollection of my year at Windfall is an epoch in my life. Fred Poley had a hotel, Charles Schmedes was a wood turner, employed by Christian Maur. He turned out ten pins as a hand turner. Today it is a machine job. Schmedes could turn almost anything by hand. In the winter, the snow was scraped off the ice and harness horse racing staged on the ice. This was on a Saturday. The following day - a Sunday - I walked down to the scene of activities the day before and found that to some the affair was not yet finished.

Tennanah Now Summer Resort

There is no post office at Tennanah today but it cannot be called a ghost town. The mail comes in over a rural delivery route out of Roscoe, but the place has changed from a wood cutting center to a summer resort of the finest order. Chief among these is the hostelry developed by the late Peter Wolf, who was easily one of the leading summer hotelmen in Sullivan County. On the top of the mountain at an elevation of over 2,000 feet, he built up what seems to be an entire village, golf course and all, fronting on the lake, yet isolated from other resort hotels.