Have You Heard of Stump Lake?

Baflour’s Bridge is located just a hop skip and a jump on the road between Snow Road and Elphin. It was named after the Balfour’s because it was located on on their property and built close to the year of 1857 before the Crotch lake disaster. In 1929 the bridge collapsed when Willaim Balfour and his steam engine went through the bridge.

Below Balfour’s Bridge lies what is now called Stump Lake. Originally, it was called Smyth’s’s Bay after the Smyth family that lived on the Balfour farm. When the High Falls generating plant was built down the river it caused great flooding. To salvage the trees the local folks were invited to cut down as many trees as they wanted. All winter long when they could get out on the ice they cut so many trees down that all that was left were a mass of stumps peering out of Smyth’s’s Bay.

They say sometime you can hear the lake bottom as it crisps and cracks in the late summer sun, turning to sticky mud as the autumn rains arrive. It’s no surprise that the stumps in The Drowned Lands now belong to the lake now, not the forest.