FROM: HISTORICAL SKETCHES OF FRANKLIN COUNTY AND ITS SEVERAL TOWNS BY: FREDERICK J. SEAVER
In 1865 Martin M. Moody built the hotel at the point on Big Tupper lake now known as Moody, which he managed until he sold to Pliny Robbins about 1888, when he moved up the lake about a half a mile and built the Waukesha, owned later by Jabez P. Alexander. “Mart’s” fund of stories was inexhaustible, and made him one of the best known characters of ‘the wilderness. Fact or even probability entered into few of them, and the more grotesquely imaginative or wildly extravagant he could make them the more characteristic they were. A single one may be quoted: Seeking to impress a visitor with the intensity of the cold which was sometimes experienced, he told of having started one morning for the barn with a pail of boiling water, which froze almost as soon as the door closed behind him. Re-entering the house, he discovered that the water had congealed so quickly that the ice was actually hot!