From settlement times onward there have always been sporting camps on Clarksville Pond. During the WWII, a local boy put aside enough money to buy the camps. His name was Rudy Shatney, and he was destined to come home a hero.

Twice decorated for valor and awarded the Silver Star for leading his embattled division to safety while severely wounded, Rudy came back from the war ready to make the Clarksville Pond camps a going concern. He and his war-bride Joan improved the camps, provided rustic accommodations and home-cooked meals and offered a Big Woods tenting experience and excellent trout fishing just as the postwar generation was ready to hit the outdoor scene with paid vacations and the means to get there.

Rudy became a legend in his own time, justifiably famed for his ability to run down deer, find game when nobody else could, throw knives and hatchets with unerring accuracy and stand on the gunwales of a canoe to cast 75 feet to a rising trout. A man of medium stature but amazing strength and agility, he could stand on one hand and out-Indian-wrestle anyone he ever locked hands with. He could beat just about anybody at just about anything he ever tried, but always with a smile and never with an mean bone in his body.

He was a dead-reckoning navigator of the woods who thought nothing of traveling through the wilds from Clarksville to Rumford, living off the land as he went. A natural-born carpenter and jack of all trades, he is responsible for the many creative uses of local woods, gnarls and roots one sees in the camps today.

There was never one like him before and there will never be one like him again. Rudy Shatney died in 1992, but his legend, spirit and mark on the people who loved him live on.

--John Harrigan
Editor, Colebrook News & Sentinel