Letter from Betty Nelson to the Schottmillers – August 8, 1985

Dear Anne and Jack,

We haven’t forgotten how you graciously invited us onto your dock at Float Is. (Downie) when we wandered up to you this time last summer in a rented canoe. I promised to send you some old photographs from my family’s albums. The first pictures taken at Float were dated 1916.The hotel had been a boy’s school, but Mr. MacFarland (from Scotland originally and a friend of my grandfather) bought it and started a small summer hotel. Of course Mr. MacFarland owned the whole island, which he kept devoid of underbrush. Trails were marked to all the points, which were also cleared. Each had a stone fireplace. In the center of the island the horse and cow grazed in fenced fields. Behind the hotel were vegetable and flower gardens (to supply the dining room) and a tennis court. A little distant to one side was a croquet ground with hammocks swung in the trees around it. Water was pumped up from the river for drinking. The hotel was furnished with gas burners for lighting, and there was no telephone. Mr. Macfarland owned a motor-boat (the Lady), which met the guests arriving by train at Clayton, N.Y. They and their huge wardrobe trunks were piled aboard the Lady. After waving to the Canadian Customs on the way over, they were finally unloaded at Float, where the horse dragged the trunks on a sledge up the hill, while the new guests hiked up. I remember all this from the 1920’s & 1930’s. Eventually the Lady was retired to rot in a small cove at the back of Float. Mr. MacFarland then used the Merry Widow driven by Gordon. Many pictures in the old albums were of my mother and father before they were married with their parents, brothers & sisters and friends. Most of the guests were from Baltimore, and the women came for the summer. These were pictures on canoe trips up the Indian River, thru the Gananoque Narrows, Swift water. That generation in 1916, at least my parents to be, lived on the river in canoes and loved to swim in it. My mother and father thought nothing of swimming from island to island. In the pictures the young women posed glamorously on rocks hair hanging below their waists, dressed in dreadful looking well covering swim suits. There are several pictures showing them sitting on top of East Rock (at the other end of Float from you) looking over Mulcaster to where the International Bridge now is.

After I was born, I remember we did an awful lot of skinny-dipping. If we were off to some uninhabited island or in the back of Float, Peg and I never wore suits. If it was just the family or only friends of your own sex, you didn’t bother with suits. No one ever swam in the buff around the hotel, at least that I can recollect.

In 1923 there are pictures on the beach of my sister, Peg, and me. I was three years old and had on my first swimming suit. A large H adorns me from my neck to my knees. Mother had made this swimsuit from father’s old Hopkins’s varsity lacrosse jersey. The beach was a lovely sandy area between Float and the small peninsula (now island) across from your dock. It was cleaned of river debris each spring. The fine clean sand built up. On the far side from your property, the canoes and St. Lawrence skiffs were drawn up. The other side was for sunning and swimming. We hope you have a wonderful summer. I wish now we had never let my aunt sell Owen Is. right after the war. You have a beautiful spot.

Sincerely,

Betty Nelson