Since the late 19th century, the six-million-acre Adirondack Park – as big as Vermont, bigger than Yellowstone, Glacier, Everglades, and Grand Canyon national parks combined – has defined the northeastern corner of New York State. Established by the state in 1892 to protect water and timber resources, the Park has gifted residents and visitors with pristine woods and glassy lakes, primeval bogs, campsites, and trails beyond number, all within a half-day drive from metropolitan New York. The state owns roughly 44 percent of the park, some 2.6 million acres, which is designated as forever wild. The remainder is privately owned and is governed by land use classifications from low intensity to resource management to industrial use.
While many know the conservation history of Adirondack Park, few are familiar with the agrarian narrative from before the park’s creation, when mid-19th-century pioneers labored, mostly unavailingly, to convert the wild Adirondacks into the farmscape they presumed to be its destiny: every hand-hewed, self-sustaining freehold in the Jeffersonian agrarian tradition, every citizen-farmer the commander in chief of his own model republic. Establishing a farm was a challenge anywhere in the northern woods, but particularly taxing in the Adirondacks. The stony soil, stubborn winters, and tightfisted growing season seemed to hobble every gain. And as farms fell into ruin, as lichen crept across the hearth and the forest reclaimed the laboriously cleared fields, people forgot about the region’s early romance with the self-providing farm.
Today, the emergence of small-scale, locally supported family farms along the eastern flank of the Adirondack Park just west of Lake Champlain has revived farming’s legacy. Farmers’ markets and CSAs that offer organic meat and seasonal produce are thriving. Conservation groups, once advocates for wild land alone, now recognize farm advocacy as a key part of their mission. With the revival of the Adirondack farm has come a growing interest in the region’s farming history, from northern New York’s early Indigenous land use patterns to the fate of agricultural ventures in the region hundreds of years ago.
The efforts of mid-19th-century Black farmers in Essex and Franklin counties, in the north-central Adirondacks, have roused particular attention. Fresh scholarship, documentary films, new historical markers, and public programming have recovered and returned the stories of these Adirondack pioneers to the heart of the regional narrative, along with the name of their eager benefactor, the land baron Gerrit Smith. From the tiny village of Peterboro in central New York, Smith had been given some 50,000 acres by his father, the fur trader and speculator Peter Smith. But most of Gerrit Smith’s 750,000-acre estate he built himself, parlaying profit into the philanthropic work he loved. A champion of antislavery and civil rights causes, Smith counted New York’s Black reformers as cherished allies, confidantes, and friends.
In the mid-1800s, Smith devised a plan to donate much of his Adirondack land to Black New Yorkers in what he called a “scheme of justice and benevolence.” In recent years, interest in this plan and its beneficiaries has grown, and people want to learn how it impacted the region – and what its legacy is today.
Gerrit Smith’s Grand Plan
In 1846, Gerrit Smith shared the details of his new plan in a letter to Reverend Theodore S. Wright, Elder Charles Bennett Ray, and Dr. James McCune Smith, three prominent Black activists in New York City. Smith’s aim, he wrote his friends, was to improve and expand Black access to the vote. Since 1821, Black New Yorkers lacking $250 in landed assets had been denied the voting rights that white male New Yorkers could take for granted.
Smith hoped to address this inequity in a novel way. “Since the State has…determined [that] Black men…must become landholders that they may be entitled to vote, they will become landholders,” he wrote. To 3,000 impoverished, voteless Black New Yorkers, Smith would donate 120,000 acres, divided into 40-acre lots. A lot alone wasn’t worth the $250 needed to meet the property requirement, but if land were cleared, fields planted, and holdings steadily improved, Smith explained, the value of this acreage would surge, and the voting requirement might be met.
Smith had other reasons for giving up this land. He was weary of paying taxes on it, and this giveaway would free him of some of that burden. He would be spared the work of managing a chunk of real estate bigger than Rhode Island, an intolerable distraction from his philanthropic work. And he could join the ranks of progressive land reformers. In letters to his allies in Manhattan, Smith explained that the land gifts would relieve him of an administrative burden even while they endowed the new deedholders with access to a basic right of citizenship – and proved his devotion to real land reform. “I am an Agrarian,” he reminded his city friends. “I would that every man who desires a farm might have one.”
In prior speeches, Smith had argued against land monopoly, but his letter to his Black allies in 1846 underscored the particular plight of landless Black New Yorkers and the cruel alliance between poverty and racism, each the enabler of the other. In metropolitan New York, whole fields of working-class employment were closed to Black people. In public spaces and professions, schools, businesses, and churches, segregation was the rule. Country life, Smith believed, would enable a fresh start. And in the Adirondack region, the political culture was more egalitarian. New York had abolished slavery in 1827, and even before that time, the practice was rare in the northern part of the state. Smith believed that here, the grip of racism was not so strong.
The 12 antislavery activists Smith tapped to market his new plan to Black communities all over the state knew very little about the land they were promoting. But like Smith, these land agents had strong ideas about what the gifted land signified. Some of them had once farmed themselves, and many had been urging Black families to quit city life for the country for decades. What was new about Smith’s scheme was that it gave their longtime agrarianism a compass; poor Black families finally had a place to go to, not just a place to flee.
Vision Meets Reality
What the land was actually like, however – the kinds of soil, weather patterns, hunting prospects, tree species – was a mystery. Smith’s acquaintance with the Adirondacks was limited to the blur of green he glimpsed from his stagecoach as it traveled along joltingly bad roads. But agents and benefactor alike knew the land was forested. And in the forest was everything a resourceful homesteader required: lumber to build a home, fuel for heat, freshly caught fish and meat, good safe drinking water, and perhaps a sugarbush if you were lucky. Even the region’s epic distance from the city was an asset, offering protection from urban mobs and predatory bounty hunters on the lookout for self-emancipated fugitives.
Smith was particularly keen on what this tough “new life” could do to help his grantees “make for themselves a hard and honorable character.” Indeed, if their Adirondack land was “colder and less fertile” than they liked, perhaps this was a blessing. As they “brave[d] the rigors of the wilderness,” they would “work out a far better character than they would were they to choose their homes on fat lands under genial suns.”
Smith’s somewhat punitive idea of the uses of the land for his Black giftees was not one his agents shared. They weren’t looking for a proving ground. They were hoping for an interracial community on the frontier. Charles Bennett Ray, a minister and agrarian ideologue, believed farming in the wilderness might give rise to a multiracial social culture. Frederick Douglass (not an agent, but an influential promoter of the plan) liked Smith’s prospect for the opportunity it offered Black men to crush white expectations of Black indolence and incompetence. Let the “sharp ax of the sable-armed pioneer… be at once uplifted over the soil of Franklin and Essex Counties, and the noise of falling trees proclaim the glorious dawn of civilization throughout their borders,” he bugled in The North Star in 1848. Smith’s land agent in Troy, the radical abolitionist Reverend Henry Highland Garnet, saw in the plan a route to a Black perfectionist community that modeled Christian fellowship and faith. James McCune Smith, a Black physician and abolitionist, stressed environmental benefits, contending that far from urban blight, foul water, and sooty air, the Black grantees would enjoy longer, more productive lives.
Although it took seven years, Smith’s land agents compiled a list of 3,000 men who met the rules of eligibility: residents of New York State, demonstrably poor and landless, and resolutely sober. In Syracuse and Buffalo, Westchester and Troy, the land agents culled their picks and sent their lists to Smith’s Peterboro land office. While Smith would not get all the selections until 1853, he was able to begin deeding land to recipients as early as late 1846, and by 1847, Black pioneers were in the woods.
They did not, however, arrive in the numbers Smith had expected. From 1846 into the 1860s, no more than 200 Black people moved to the Adirondacks in response to Smith’s land gifts, and only 50 of them were his grantees. The other settlers were women, children, fellow travelers without deeds, and after the Civil War, some Black southerners, born enslaved, who accompanied their army friends heading back to the Adirondack farms.
When Smith’s great “scheme” failed to pan out as he had hoped, he moved on to other antislavery projects and campaigns without regret. As he saw it, he’d done his best; the burden of his plan’s failure was not his but his grantees’. Maybe he could have parceled out better land, he wrote the New York City newsman Horace Greeley in 1857, but the greater problem was “the character of the colored people.” They lacked the work ethic and the frugality of their white neighbors, Smith declared. And his confident assessment would dominate historical takes on the effort for the next 150 years.
In fact, what doomed Smith’s scheme was his inflated expectation for the land he gave away and his deep misunderstanding of his grantees’ economic needs. The land was no good for his giftees without the means to work it. They had no means of purchasing the tools, provision, seed, and livestock required to farm their new land. What resources would sustain them for the two years it took the average pioneer to stabilize a self-providing farm? What the grantees needed was funding to see them through their first attempts at farming. The cost of bringing a 40-acre farm into production in the mid-1800s averaged $1,500, a figure well beyond the reach of the grantees, beyond the worth of the land itself, and beyond the means even of white wage earners in this era, who made an average of $1 to $2 a day.
Smith might also have furnished his grantees with the names of sympathetic locals who could ease their adjustment to this world, but the names he gave his agents to share with the new landowners came too late to be of use. John Brown – the prominent white abolitionist farmer who promised Smith he’d move to the region to help the pioneers – arrived a year later than expected and left the region after only a few years. In “Bleeding Kansas” and later Harpers Ferry, Virginia, Brown rose to notoriety, and Black Adirondackers who knew him celebrated these furious campaigns. But the lack of the steady, onsite advisor they had been promised was undoubtedly a blow.
Another challenge to Smith’s grand plan was the impact of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, which put Black people at risk for capture and re-enslavement. The grantees knew that safety was no given in the overwhelmingly white Adirondack woods. Some stuck it out, while others likely returned to more familiar neighborhoods in cities, and some who had expected to go north changed their plans and never made the move into the woods.
Lingering Impact
For all these many setbacks, however, we find in legal documents, town records, place names, and other archival sources evidence of the gains Black settlers made on this frontier, and we see what about this agrarian experiment went right. On this sparsely populated frontier, 200 pioneers made their presence felt. Black children integrated rural schools. Black families prayed at rural churches. Black farmers testified for white neighbors who faced farm seizures for unpaid taxes, and white farmers did the same for their Black friends.
In North Elba, the Connecticut-born grantee-settler Lyman Eppes helped found his town’s first library, two churches, a community choir, and a school. In St. Armand, to the north, the farmer Charles Henry Hazzard and his brother Alex, a guide, joined a committee to launch their town’s first cemetery. Black Adirondackers worked alongside white farmers as guides, woodchoppers, hired hands, and road builders. Black and white pioneers brought their potatoes to the same starch factory, buried their dead in the same integrated graveyards, shared Christmas feasts, and hiked together to the summit of Mt. Whiteface. Town posts and civic obligations were integrated, too. Grantees volunteered as constables, tax collectors, inspectors of elections, and overseers of roads.
And come election day, in North Elba, Franklin, and St. Armand, Black men voted. So, while Smith wrote off his great experiment as a failure, at least some of the men to whom he gave land settled there and realized the end goal of earning the right to vote. When the Civil War erupted, some Black Adirondackers joined the Colored Regiments in Massachusetts and New York City, and a few joined white companies as well. At the war’s end, white Adirondackers supported the pension appeals of Black veterans and veterans’ widows who were their neighbors. Several white households made room for Black boarders, and vice versa. In the great commons of the unregulated wilderness, Black people and white hunted, fished, and foraged together. And while the shared work of place-making was no perfect antidote for prejudice, racism was challenged and subverted in countless unexpected ways.
Sadly, this part of the region’s history – how the Black settlers fared and sometimes flourished on an obdurate frontier – has been very poorly documented. Although archival sources, including census reports and private letters from the Black land agents to Gerrit Smith, note evidence of Black agency and progress, secondary sources are often dominated by confident, offhand assertions of Black incompetence and unfitness for the rigors of Adirondack life.
In 1878, Gerrit Smith’s biographer, Octavius Brooks Frothingham, wrote, “On the best land they would have done nothing. They had none of the qualities that make the farmer…[Had] the land been the richest in the State they would not have responded, for they could not; it was not in them.” Twentieth-century historians who relied on the old accounts parroted these offhand indictments, blaming the “failure” of Smith’s giveaway on “the character of the colonists who naturally had neither the training nor the stuff in them for pioneering” (E. P. Tanner). Even the Black civil rights leader and sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois credited all gains the Black pioneers made to the influence of John Brown.
What these reports failed to note were the short-lived, never mapped Black enclaves and neighborhoods, including Freeman’s Home, Blacksville, Negro Hill, Negro Brook, and parts of St. Armand. Ony the little enclave in North Elba called Timbuctoo was ever noted, and if John Brown hadn’t made his home near this one, Timbuctoo might also have escaped notice.
Despite the omission from historical record, some Black families abided in their neighborhoods for generations, and even now a few descendants of the Smith grantees live in the northern Adirondacks. In the past quarter century, year-round Adirondackers keen to claim this legacy for local history have hosted and often thronged commemorative events. Blacksville, Timbuctoo, Murry Hill and John Thomas Brook (once Negro Hill and Negro Brook) have gained map amendments or historical markers that identify Black pioneers. The settlement called Timbuctoo has sparked the imagination of novelists, composers, choreographers, historians, curators, filmmakers, environmentalists, archaeologists, educators, and activists.
An annual May pilgrimage to John Brown’s Adirondack home that honors the antislavery fighter’s birthday did not acknowledge his Black neighbors when it was launched in 1921, but it does now. Since 2015, visitors to this historical site have learned about Black land pioneers Lyman Eppes, John Thomas, and Private William Carasaw at Dreaming of Timbuctoo, a permanent exhibition on the Black agrarians, their advocates and allies. SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry now partners with CUNY Medgar Evers College to offer Timbuctoo Climate Science and Careers Institute to high school students from New York City. The two-week sessions focus on environmental science and social justice and include a week in the Adirondacks.
Those of us who love the Adirondack region know about its natural riches and the good work of the conservationists who lobbied for the park. We cherish its historical sites as well, from the Great Camps of the Gilded Age to John Brown’s grave. And now, another chapter of Adirondack history compels our interest and enriches how we understand the value of this land. Exhibitions, public programming, and historical signage invite us to explore the saga of Black farmers on gifted land, in search of community and voting rights. It is a page of Adirondack history like no other, and as timely as it is fresh.