Early in the 1900s, there was a change occurring in the town of Hunter. Actually, a revolutionary change, way up on the Southwest (back side) of Hunter Mountain. No one alive today seems to know exactly why, but two enterprising brothers from Steuben County, New York found their way to the Catskills and began purchasing land and timber rights up on that lofty mountain. Deeds show that the Slawson brothers, Alfred and John, in 1903 bought approximately 2,000 acres from Hiram and Anna Whitney, land in the town of Lexington, at about three dollars an acre. 
There were other acquisitions, including rights-of-way, timber rights and a mill site on the "old Harrison Benjamin lot" in the town of Hunter near Edgewood. It might have been a wonderful money opportunity to log that side of the mountain for the brothers, but unfortunately, their idea for bringing the logs down the steep grade (approximately 28%), via a log chute, did not work out well. The logs gained such momentum that upon reaching the bottom of the chute, everything was torn apart.
In 1906, the Slawsons sold their operation to the Tennant-Richards Lumber Company, who in turn sold it to the Fenwick Lumber Company. It was said the Slawson brothers went bankrupt, but the author herein found several newspaper articles that may indicate otherwise.
  The Fenwick Lumber Company was a newly formed corporation in 1906, and at that time they were capitalized for half a million dollars (a value today of $16,895,944.44) and had taken over the holdings of the Tennant-Richards Lumber Company. The company had offices in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania and in Fenwick and Weston, West Virginia, with the main principals of both companies from those three areas.
The Fenwick Lumber Company brought in what was at that time a state-of-the-art band mill with a capacity to saw 25,000,000 feet of lumber a year. They enlarged and modernized the existing sawmill, and utilized the Ulster and Delaware Railway, using their private industrial siding located between Edgewood and Lanesville, approximately one and a half miles from their mill, to move their lumber.
As Karl Van Valkenburgh wrote in 1981 in an article for the Windham Journal: "the Fenwick Lumber Company was not only a great industry which changed the face of the land - it was a momentous event that signaled revolutionary changes in the lives of a generation of Greene County residents."
  In the mid to late 1970s, a flurry of articles appeared in local newspapers about The Fenwick Lumber Company operation, no doubt spurred by forester, surveyor and engineer Ed West's 1976 article in the Catskill Canister entitled, "The Railroad at Devil's Acre." He called the Fenwick operation "the scene of one of the most spectacular lumbering operations in the Catskills." Ed first noticed the tram roads in his early years of surveying for the Conservation Department around 1919. (Fenwick had ceased operations by 1917.) Now, over 100 years later, it's hard to believe such an operation took place near the summit where the Hunter Mountain fire tower and cabin reside. Old tram paths, haul roads and old logging roads are now New York State trails through Devil's Acre, the Diamond Notch and Becker Trail.
Rick Brooks, a surveyor and historian who grew up in East Jewett, has given presentations on the Fenwick operation, devoting many hours to researching and visiting the Fenwick site since the early '90s. Rick first became interested in Fenwick when, as a Boy Scout, he went on a field trip up to the old site. Rick is no doubt the ultimate authority on Fenwick today, along with local train enthusiast and historian John M. Ham and botanist/historian Michael Kudish, as well as Lanesville resident and lifetime logger Beecher Smith, all interviewed in the book.
  It can be said there were many conditions just right for Fenwick's success:  availability of water on Southwest Hunter, not only for human and animal consumption, but also for the steam donkey engine and mill pond for floating the logs to the mill, availability of timber for a sizeable contract to supply lumber for the Ashokan Dam that was being constructed at the time, and the nearby railroad for transporting the lumber. If all those variables had not come together, the operation would probably never have occurred.