A Brief History of Beaver Lake — Derry Museum of History

It is not known for certain what the first Anglo-Americans called the body of water when they settled here in 1719, nor what the Indigenous Peoples called it before them. But by the 1720s or 1730s, it was known as “Beaver Pond,” according to an undated plan of Londonderry (it must have been made after 1722 when Old Londonderry was incorporated as a town but before 1742 when a dated copy of the map was made).

Its outlet, which travels over thirty-six miles before emptying into the Merrimack River at what is now Lawrence, Mass., was even then called Beaver Brook. (Not coincidentally, the name of the museum’s beaver mascot is Brook Beaver). The name change from Pond to Lake occurred sometime after 1857 and before 1937, according to maps from those years.

1742 map of old Nutfield showing Beaver Pond and Beaver Brook.

Valuable Beavers

Brook Beaver, mascot of the Derry Museum of History.

The North American Beaver (Castor canadensis) was tracked west across the northern United States and Canada over the course of early American history. Beaver pelts—the main product of the colonial fur trade harvested by Native American hunters and trappers—brought much wealth to some seventeenth-century New England settlements and British investors, but not to Derry. The trade had already moved north and west by 1719, when the Reverend James MacGregor and sixteen Scottish Presbyterian families from Northern Ireland settled here on the Nutfield grant.

But beavers were valuable to Derry’s settlers for other reasons than their furs.

Generally, early Europeans cutting roads through the New England wilderness would cross streams on abandoned beaver dams rather than build bridges elsewhere. They often chose those same dams as mill sites. The dammed ponds became spawning grounds for shad, salmon, and other fish, which could be consumed as food or used as fertilizer.

After the beavers were gone and their old dams had collapsed due to lack of maintenance, the ponds’ bottoms of rich black soil―composed of years of fallen leaves and bark, rotten wood, and rain-washed silt―were exposed to the sun and eventually grew tall natural grasses. The people of Haverhill were well aware of Nutfield’s rich natural meadows, and no doubt informed their temporary neighbors from Northern Ireland of them. When the Ulster Presbyterians became Nutfield’s first permanent European settlers in 1719, they were easily able to provide fodder for their cattle, thanks to the earlier labors of the hard-working beavers.

Geological Formation

Although beavers were apparently present here in the early 1700s, the lake named after them was probably initially formed about 10,000 years ago by greater forces.

This occurred when the Laurentide ice sheet retreated from New England as the climate warmed in the late Pleistocene Epoch. From 18,000 to 20,000 years ago, this ice sheet, a mile thick in places, covered New England and the upper Midwest. At the rate of about four miles every century, the retreating ice created drumlins and kettles in the New England Uplands, the gently rising plateau west of the seaboard section of southern New Hampshire. Drumlins were ice-molded streamlined hills of unstratified glacial sediments that give the region a rolling topography. Kettles were pits where broken ice remains were partly or wholly buried in outwash sediments before they melted.

Huge boulders dragged along by the ice scraped and carved out other shallow basins. These became lakes and ponds as they filled with water. Smaller rocks were also left behind, to be cussed at by colonial farmers as they turned over the soil of new fields and piled them into stone walls.

Beaver Lake apparently originated as one of many meltwater lakes formed in the area as the ice sheet receded at the end of the last Ice Age, fragmenting as it thinned over large areas of uneven terrain. Scobie Pond, Benjamin Adams Pond, Ballard Pond, Harantis Lake, and Island Pond are other Derry bodies of water probably formed at the same time.

Native Americans

No evidence of permanent Native American settlement along Beaver Lake’s shores has been uncovered.

Archaeological excavations in Keene recently discovered the oldest human settlement in New Hampshire, approximately 12,570 to 12,660 years old, but the only archaeological evidence of Paleoindians and later Pennacooks in southeastern New Hampshireso far discovered are fifteen miles from Derry: north on the Merrimack River at today’s Manchester and on Massabesic Lake; west in Litchfield; and east in Sandown, Kingston, and Atkinson. It is not unlikely that Pennacook people were also in Old Londonderry before pandemic diseases spreading from European coastal settlements decimated the Native populations, and some artifacts have been found here.

Old Nutfield had probably earlier been a rich hunting ground because of the natural breaks in the forest, the waters teeming with fish, waterfowl, and aquatic mammals, and the abundance of acorns and nuts that supported small game. Every summer it is likely Abanaki men traveled here to hunt deer and harvest Nutfield’s natural bounty until the Ulster Presbyterians arrived.

Beaver Lake was not on any of the major Native trails that crisscrossed southern New Hampshire, but was connected to the Merrimack River watershed. Tradition has it that at least one Native American remained here in 1719: Old Ezekiel.

Old Ezekiel lived about 140 yards from the pond near the current Derry-Windham line that has borne his name since at least 1741. He was said to have dug a canal from his cabin door to that body of water, which today is much reduced and more marshy. The first historian of Old Londonderry, the Reverend Edward Parker, mentioned an Indian informant who assisted the first white settlers by telling them of the rich fishing at the Amoskeag Falls of the Merrimack River. but did not identify Old Ezekiel by name.

Suspected Abanaki canoe found in Beaver Lake. — Unconfirmed Abanaki canoe found in Beaver Lake.

Historic Artifact

One of our most significant artifacts may have been created and abandoned by the Abanaki. This is one of seven surviving dugout canoes discovered in New Hampshire’s inland waters over the last 182 years (another one was found in Derry in Scobie Pond in 1933).

The 10-foot-long watercraft, apparently made of sweetgum wood, was 80 percent intact when it was raised from about 25 feet of water several hundred yards off Comeau’s Beach in August 1972. When the divers, Ernest and Roger Cote, were able to drag the waterlogged 200-pound canoe to Donald Mafera’s wharf and out of the water, everyone assumed it was a Native American artifact.

Its rounded ends are characteristic of canoes that have been burnt out in the typical Eastern Woodland style, but its thick bow and stern construction and high sides curving slightly inward resemble later, Euro-American, specimens. Franklin Pierce College Professor Howard R. Sargent concluded in 1972 that the presence of iron adze cut marks on one end of the deck clearly identified it as eighteenth or nineteenth century construction. But it is very possible that the wielder of that tool could have been a Pennacook person, as there was a lively trade between the English and the original inhabitants of New England, and European manufactured goods like firearms and metal tools were often acquired by Native Americans to make their work easier. Only further research using new scientific methods might determine who made the Beaver Lake canoe.

First European Settlers

There are no contemporary accounts of Reverend MacGregor’s first sermon. We do know it was attended by at least sixteen of his countrymen who gathered under an oak tree in a clearing on the north shore of Beaver Lake on April 13, 1719. It is doubtful that Old Ezekiel or any Native Americans attended.

The McMurphy House on North Shore Road was built not far from the location around 1723. After the oak tree died and fell in 1844, an apple tree was planted in its place, and then a cairn of stones was erected to mark the site after that tree died. That stone memorial was removed before 1919 by the landowner who did not want sightseers tramping across his property.

Original Name?

Local historian Harriet Chase Newell wrote in 1959 that around 1896, local boosters thought a more romantic name for Beaver Lake would attract more tourists to town. Leonard A. Morrison in his 1883 The History of Windham was the first to claim that the original Abanaki name for Beaver Lake was Tsienneto, or Shoneeto. Ralph Henry Shaw (1860–1937) adopted this as the title of his poem, published in Lowell in 1885.

Tsiento Boathouse popstcard — Postcard promoting the Lake.

Historian Thaddeus Piotrski in 2002 stated the Abanaki word was Shoneeto, and tentatively translated it as “big outlet” or “rocky place.” The early 20th-century romanticists borrowed the name “Tsienneto” (which they “translated” as “Sleeping in Beauty”) in an attempt to call up notions of the noble savage and picturesque primitive landscapes. Robert N. Richardson gilded the lily in 1907 when he published locally Tsienneto: A Legend of Beaver Lake, a total invention that had no foundation in actual Algonquin mythology.

Newell noted that the attempt to rebrand the lake eventually failed, and “the name ‘Beaver Lake’ continues to hold first place in the minds and on the tongues of the majority of townsfolk and visitors.” Her point is proven by a circa 1934–35 tourist flier. It sold Derry as a convenient “VACATION LAND” only 40 miles from Boston (and 9 miles north of Rockingham Race Track) with “First Class Hotels, Inns and Tea Rooms, High Land, [and] Pure Air Among the Pines,” with “Five Lakes [for] Hunting and Fishing.” The pamphlet featured six photos of Beaver Lake and its establishments. Not once in its 16 pages is the name Tsienneto mentioned.

Development on the Lake

An 1832 map of Derry shows ten houses in the vicinity of Beaver Lake, and an 1857 map had the same number. These were still essentially farmhouses. On a 1937 map, however, we see for the first time cottages, camps, hotels (Beaver Lake House), and the Pavilion. Beaver Lake had become Derry’s preeminent recreational area.

The Lake’s Golden Age began in 1896, when the newly opened Chester and Derry trolley company erected the Beaver Lake Pavilion. This was to encourage weekend travel on its line, which was chiefly used during the week by commuters to the shoe factories and students going to Pinkerton Academy. After that building burned down in 1915, a second Pavilion was built and opened the following year.

Steamer boat Agusta on Beaver Lake — Steamer boat *Agusta* on Beaver Lake

The Pavilion enclosed a dance hall, changing rooms, bowling alleys, a restaurant, and an arcade. The longtime proprietor, James Comeau, made the New Beaver Lake Pavilion and Beaver Lake Park a major destination that survived another fire during World War I and the failure of the trolley line in 1928. In addition to the indoor attractions of the first Pavilion, Comeau had added a petting zoo, canoe rentals, and a steamboat that took paying customers for tours around the lake.

A circa 1920 pamphlet drummed up business for the steamboat by telling yet another “Indian legend.”

Cat o' Nine Tails Beaver Lake resort sign — Later sign of a popular eatery displayed in the Derry Museum.

This concerned Anona, the beautiful daughter of the chief of the Chateaneau tribe that lived along the lake, and her fiancé, Malito, a warrior who perished while rescuing a member of his hunting party. She wasted away and died of grief, but “During the summer, when the stars cast their reflections in the waters of the beautiful lake and all is quiet, a mournful sound is heard very distinctly--a sound resembling the call of a moose. The Indians claimed it was the lovers, Malito and Anona, assuring the tribe that they were united in the Great Beyond.” The piece concludes: “Many excursioners are taken on the lake under the guidance of Captain Jim Comeau on his trim launch Augusta and visitors are brought to the point where they can hear the call of Malito and Anona.”

The beginning of the end for the resort was in 1947, when ownership changed hands three times. The end finally came in 1960, when it burned to the ground. This time the phoenix did not rise from the ashes.