Adirondacks

Northern NY Discusses Interviewing and Oral History

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The Clinton-Essex Counties Roundtable will be held from 9:30 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. on Saturday, May 9, 2009 at the Northern New York American Canadian Genealogy Society, Keeseville Civic Center, 1802 Main St., Keeseville. The topic will be “Community Scholars Training: Interviewing & Oral History” and will be presented by Traditional Arts in Upstate New York (TAUNY) Executive Director Jill Breit.

Breit will share examples of successful oral history projects and demonstrate the many ways interviews can be used for different outcomes. She will focus on how to organize an oral history project, the basics of an oral history interview, the importance of field notes and follow-up interviews, recorders and other equipment for collecting oral history.

There will also be a tour of NNY American Canadian Genealogy Society Library and the Anderson Falls Heritage Society. Lunch will be provided at a cost of $5.00, payable at the roundtable.

The roundtable is provided free of charge to the public on behalf of the Northern New York Library Network, Potsdam, and Documentary Heritage Program. To register for this event contact the NNYLN at 315-265-1119, or sign up on-line at www.nnyln.org and click on “Classes.”

NYC: Douglas Brinkley on Roosevelt, Wilderness Warrior

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In his new book, The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America, Douglas Brinkley (Professor of History and Baker Institute Fellow, Rice University) looks at the pioneering environmental policies of President Theodore Roosevelt, an avid bird-watcher and naturalist with Adirondack ties at the American Museum of Natural History’s Linder Theater in New York City tomorrow, Tuesday, April 28, 6:30 pm. Admission will be $15 ($13.50 Members, students, senior citizens).

Roosevelt was a pioneer of the conservation movement and was involved with the American Museum of Natural History from childhood. As a matter of fact, the original charter creating the Museum was signed in his family home in 1869, and the Museum has a permanent hall in tribute to Theodore Roosevelt and the contributions he made to city, state, and nation throughout his life. A book signing will follow this program.

Douglas Brinkley, Professor of History and Baker Institute Fellow, Rice University, is the author of several books, including The Unfinished Presidency, The Boys of Pointe du Hoc, and The Great Deluge (which won him the 2007 Robert F. Kennedy Book Award)- he is also a contributing editor at Vanity Fair and an in-house historian for CBS News. He has earned several honorary doctorates for his contributions to American letters and was once called the “the best of the new generation of American historians” by the late historian Stephen E. Ambrose.

For questions regarding this event, please contact Antonia Santangelo at 212-769-5310 or [email protected].

Wild, Unsettled Country At The Adirondack Museum

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The Adirondack Museum has announced a new exhibit, A &#8216-Wild, Unsettled Country’: Early Reflections of the Adirondacks, that will look at the early efforts to convey the Adirondacks visually to the wider world. The exhibit will open on May 22, 2009 &#8211 meaning that year-round Adirondack Park residents should be able to catch the exhibit for free the last week of May.

The first Europeans to see the Adirondack landscape of northern New York State came to explore, to document important military operations and fortifications, or to create maps and scientifically accurate images of the terrain, flora, and fauna.
These early illustrations filled practical needs rather than aesthetic ones.

The exhibition will showcase approximately forty paintings from the museum’s exceptional art collection, including works by Thomas Cole, John Frederick Kensett, William Havell, John Henry Dolph and James David Smillie.

Also featured are fifty of the engravings and lithographs of Adirondack landscape paintings that brought these images to a wider audience and provided many Americans with their first glimpse of the &#8220howling wilds&#8221 that were the Adirondack Mountains.

While tourists were flocking to Saratoga Springs, N.Y. in the 1830s, few ventured north into the &#8220lofty chain of granite&#8221 visible from Lake George. One guidebook described the mysterious forms as &#8220a wild repulsive aspect.&#8221 Little was known of these yet-unnamed mountains.

In 1836, the New York State legislature authorized a survey of the state’s natural resources. Artist Charles Cromwell Ingham was asked to join geologists Ebenezer Emmons and William C. Redfield during one of the first exploratory surveys. During the trip, he painted The Great Adirondack Pass, &#8220on the spot.&#8221 The original painting will be shown in the exhibition.

The exhibit will also include photographs-stereo views and albumen prints-sold as tourist souvenirs and to armchair travelers. William James Stillman took the earliest photos in the exhibition in 1859. These rare images are the first photographic landscape studies taken in the Adirondacks. Photos by Seneca Ray Stoddard will also be displayed.

Significant historic maps will illustrate the growth of knowledge about the Adirondack region. In 1818, it was still a mysterious &#8220wild, barren tract&#8230-covered with almost impenetrable Bogs, Marshes & Ponds, and the uplands with Rocks and evergreens.&#8221 By 1870, the Adirondacks had become a tourist destination with clearly defined travel routes, hotels, beaches, and camps.

&#8220A &#8216-Wild, Unsettled Country’&#8221 will be on exhibit in the Lynn H. Boillot Art Galleries. The space includes the Adirondack Museum Gallery Study Center &#8211 a resource for learning more about American art. In addition to a library of reference books, a touch screen computer allows visitors to access images from the museum’s extensive fine art collection.

The Gallery Study Center will include a media space as part of the special exhibit. The documentary film &#8220Champlain: The Lake Between&#8221 will be shown continuously. The film, part of the Lake Champlain Voyages of Discovery project, has aired on Vermont Public Television in recent months.

&#8220A &#8216-Wild, Unsettled Country’&#8221 is not just for adults. Family-friendly elements include Looking at Art With Children &#8211 a guide for parents as they investigate the arts with youngsters- the Grand Tour Guide &#8211 a colorful and engaging map that encourages exploration of the Adirondack sites shown in the paintings- and ten different Wild About! guidebooks that urge kids to be &#8220wild&#8221 about maps, prints, history, and more.

Photo caption: View of Caldwell, Lake George, by William Tolman Carlton, 1844. Collection of the Adirondack Museum.

Adirondack Museum To Process Petty Collection

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The Adirondack Museum at Blue Mountain Lake has announced the appointment of Melissa Tacke as Project Archivist to describe and arrange the collections of personal papers belonging to two of the founding fathers of the Adirondack Park Agency: Clarence Petty and Richard Lawrence.

The Clarence Petty Papers consist of correspondence, subject files, memoranda, aviation and weather records, newspaper clippings, government documents, books and other publications, audio recordings, memorabilia, awards, photographs, and 62 maps. These records document Clarence Petty’s long career with the Conservation Department and the Department of Environmental Conservation, as well as his influential role in the creation of the Adirondack Park Agency and the Adirondack Park Land Use Master Plan.

The papers also reflect Petty’s relationship with contemporary environmentalists, environmental organizations and government agencies, and his position as an authority and spokesman on environmental issues throughout the country. The collection dates from circa 1939 through 2006. Clarence Petty donated the papers to the Adirondack Museum in November 2006.

The Richard Lawrence Papers consist of correspondence, subject files, memoranda, notes, publications, books, government documents, memorabilia, awards, and photographs. They document Richard Lawrence’s work as a member of the Temporary Study Commission on the Future of the Adirondacks and as the founding Chairman of the Adirondack Park Agency. The records date from the mid 1960s to the 1990s and were donated to the museum by the Lawrence family in 2006.

Tacke’s position has been funded by a grant in the amount of $9,669 from the New York State Archive’s Documentary Heritage Program. The Documentary Heritage Program (DHP) is a statewide program established by law in 1988 to ensure the identification, sound administration, and accessibility of New York’s historical records. The DHP provides grants to not-for-profit organizations in New York State that collect, hold, and make available historical records. Tacke will work in the Adirondack Museum’s research library from April 6 through June 30, 2009 under the terms of the grant.

Melissa Tacke holds three degrees from SUNY Albany. Her Bachelor’s degree was awarded for a double major in Women’s Studies and Africana. She holds one Master’s degree in Women’s Studies and a second in Information Studies. She is a native of Lawrence, Kansas. Tacke comes to the Adirondack Museum following nearly a year of work at Bennington College, Bennington, Vermont as a Project Archivist, funded by a Getty Campus Heritage Grant. She also served as a Digital Images Archivist.

Photo Caption: Project Archivist Melissa Tacke at left with Adirondack Museum Librarian Jerry Pepper. Adirondack Museum Photo.

150th Anniversary of John Browns Raid Conference / Symposium

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John Brown Remembered: 150th Anniversary of John Brown’s Raid is the title of a conference / symposium that will be held October 14 -17, 2009 at the Harpers Ferry National Historical Park in Harpers Ferry, West Virginia. Speakers will include David Blight, Spencer Crew, and Paul Finkelman.

Harpers Ferry National Historical Park, along with other partners, is hosting this multidisciplinary academic symposium on John Brown and his 1859 raid on Harpers Ferry. The symposium, which will be held at the Stephen T. Mather Training Center in Harpers Ferry, is hoped to stimulate new and diverse academic research, scholarship, and debate.

A schedule and registration details can be found here.

Champlain Valley Architecture Tours

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As part of the Lake Champlain Quadricentennial celebration, Adirondack Architectural Heritage is presenting a new tour series, Architecture of the Champlain Valley. The series features half-day walking tours of eight towns along the lake, led by experienced and professional guides. Tours will be at 9:30 am and 1:00 pm on Saturdays in May and June unless otherwise noted.

May 2- Willsboro: One of the oldest settlements in Essex County, Willsboro has a rich history connected to agriculture, paper industry, stone quarrying, shipbuilding, and tourism.

May 9- Keeseville: Keeseville is a town with a long history as an industrial community that manufactured products from wood and iron ore using the power of the Ausable River.

May 16- Essex: Essex prospered during much of the 19th century as a shipping and ship building port, and today, as a National Historic Register District, contains many wonderful examples of various styles of architecture.

May 23- Elizabethtown: As the county seat, Elizabethtown boasts a large historic government complex, and a number of buildings that reflect the town’s social, political and economic importance.

May 30- Port Henry: Port Henry and the surrounding town of Moriah have the longest industrial history of any community in the Champlain Valley, beginning with iron mining and manufacturing in the late 1700s.

June 6- Ticonderoga: Historically associated with military events, Ticonderoga developed as an industrial town connected to paper manufacturing, and today offers more than three dozen buildings listed on the National Register.

June 20- Wadhams (10:00)/Westport (1:00): The hamlet of Wadhams lies just north of Westport on the Boquet River, and was once known for its industrial pursuits which supported the outlying farms. Though industry and agriculture played a role in the development of Westport, it has gained most of its identity as a summer resort town.

June 27- Ironville: In the town of Crown Point, the settlement of Ironville is the site of the Penfield Homestead Museum and was once the center of a thriving iron industry.

Attendance is free of charge, but advance registration is required. Reservations may be made by calling AARCH at 834-9328.

Adirondack Architectural Heritage (AARCH) is the private, non-profit, historic preservation organization for the Adirondack Park region. This is one of over fifty events in our annual series highlighting the region’s vast architectural legacy. For more information on membership and our complete program schedule contact AARCH at (518) 834-9328 or visit our website at www.aarch.org.

Passing as Black: A Pioneer of American Alpine Climbing

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There was an interesting review of Passing Strange: A Gilded Age Tale of Love and Deception Across the Color Line by Martha A. Sandweiss in the New York Times Book Review yesterday. The book is about Clarance King, first director of the United States Geological Survey (USGS), American alpine climbing pioneer and author who passed as black, married a former slave, and lived two lives from his home base in New York City.

Passing Strange meticulously — sometimes too meticulously- the book can be plodding — recounts the unlikely convergence of two lives: King was born in 1842 in Newport, R.I., to parents of longstanding American stock, and Ada Copeland was born a slave in Georgia, months before Confederate guns fired on Fort Sumter. Copeland, like most slaves, is woefully underdocumented- we know that she somehow became literate, migrated to New York in the 1880s and found a job in domestic service. King, by contrast, is all but overdocumented- after schooling, he went west as a surveyor, summing up 10 years of work in two books, including the 815-page “Systematic Geology,” which told, one historian said, “a story only a trifle less dramatic than Genesis.”

The pair met sometime around 1888, somewhere in bustling New York. By telling Copeland he was “James Todd,” a Pullman porter from Baltimore, King implied his race- a white man could not hold such a job. They married that year (though without obtaining a civil license), settling in Brooklyn and then, as Copeland had five children, Flushing, Queens. All the while King maintained residential club addresses in Manhattan, where colleagues knew him as an elusive man about town. Living a double life is costly, and King’s Western explorations never quite delivered returns, so the Todds were always broke.

King was among the first to climb some of the highest peaks of the Sierra Nevada range in the late 1860s and early 1870s and wrote Mountaineering in the Sierra Nevada, which includes accounts of his adventures and hardships there.

According to The Literature of Mountain Climbing in America (1918):

The beginnings of mountaineering in America have to be looked for mainly in early histories and narratives of travel, though the first ascent in the Canadian Rockies is chronicled in the supplement to a botanical magazine. The first magazine article upon American mountains seems to be Jeremy Belknap&#8216-s account of the White Mountains, printed in the American Magazine in Philadelphia in February, 1788. The first book was Joel T. Headley’s The Adirondack, published in 1849. The Alpine Journal of England, the earliest of such magazines, had a short account of a climb in Central America in its first volume, 1864, and in the third volume, 1867, there was an account of an ascent of Mt. Hood. The first book devoted to alpine climbing in America was Clarence King’s Mountaineering in the Sierra Nevada.

As an aside, among the men who were associated with Clarence King was his good friend, artist John Henry Hill. Hill accompanied King on two expeditions west (1866 and 1870) as a staff artist but his New York claim to fame is his work on the Adirondacks which he first visited in the 1860s. He camped and sketched throughout the Adirondacks, and from 1870 to 1874, lived in a cabin he dubbed &#8220Artist’s Retreat&#8221 that he built on Phantom Island near Bolton’s Landing, Lake George. During one winter, Hill’s brother, a civil engineer, visited and the two men set out on the ice to survey the narrows and make one of the first accurate maps of the islands which Hill than made into an etching “surrounding it with an artistic border representing objects of interest in the locality.” On June 6, 1893 Phantom Island was leased by the Forest Commission to prominent Glens Falls Republican Jerome Lapham.

His journal and much of his work is held by the Adirondack Museum, and additional works can be found at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Brooklyn Museum of Art, New-York Historical Society, and the Columbus Museum of Art.

400 Years of The Champlain Valley Event

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Rich Strum, Director of Interpretation and Education at Fort Ticonderoga, will offer a program entitled &#8220Conquest, Commerce, and Culture: 400 Years of History in the Champlain Valley&#8221 at Saranac Village at Will Rogers in Saranac Lake on Sunday, March 8, 2009.

Samuel de Champlain first saw the great expanse of Lake Champlain, the Green Mountains to the east, the Adirondacks on the west in 1609. New York State, Vermont, and the Province of Quebec are commemorating the 400th anniversary of Champlain’s explorations this year through a variety of programs and events.

Strum will provide an illustrated overview of four centuries of the Champlain region’s history. He will discuss military contests for control of the vital Champlain corridor, the role the lake has played in economic growth and expansion, the lasting impact of 150 years of French dominance in the 17th and 18th centuries.

The presentation will begin at 2:00 p.m. and is offered at no charge to member sof the Adirondack Museum and children of elementary school age or younger. Free admission will be extended to all residents of Saranac Village at Will Rogers. The fee for non-members is $5.00. For additional information, please call the Education Department at (518) 352-7311, ext. 128 or visit the museum’s web site at www.adirondackmuseum.org.

Rich Strum has been the Director of Interpretation and Education at Fort Ticonderoga since 1999. He serves as North Country Regional Coordinator for New York State History Day. He is the author of Ticonderoga: Lake Champlain Steamboat, as well as two books for young readers: Causes of the American Revolution and Henry Know: Washington’s Artilleryman. He lives in Ticonderoga, N.Y. with his wife and daughters.

In Stoddards Footsteps at Adirondack Museum

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His career spanned the settling of the Adirondacks, the heyday of the guide, the steamship, and the grand hotel. Pioneer photographer Seneca Ray Stoddard produced over 8,000 images of a changing landscape &#8212- the largest documentary record of regional life in the late nineteenth century. Adirondack photographer Mark Bowie followed in Stoddard’s footsteps more than a century later, faithfully photographing once again the exact locations of many of his classic images.

Join Bowie on Sunday, February 15, 2009 at the Adirondack Museum at Blue Mountain Lake, New York as he compares the Adirondacks of today with Stoddard’s. The comparisons are fascinating, sometimes surprising, in every case, illuminating.

Mark Bowie is a third generation Adirondack photographer. He is a frequent contributor to Adirondack Life and Adirondack Explorer magazines. His photos have been published in Natural History, as well as by the Sierra Club, Conde Nast Publications, Portal Publications, and Tehabi Books.

Bowie’s first book, Adirondack Waters: Spirit of the Mountains (2006) is a landmark regional publication. In Stoddard’s Footsteps: The Adirondacks Then & Now was recently published. He has recently completed work on a third book, The Adirondacks: In Celebration of the Seasons, to be released in the Spring 2009.

Mark Bowie leads digital and landscape photography workshops, has produced several multi-format shows about the Adirondacks and has been featured on the Public Television programs &#8220Adirondack Outdoors&#8221 and &#8220Insight.&#8221 He lives with his wife, Rushelle, in Pittsfield, Massachusetts.

The program, &#8220In Stoddard’s Footsteps&#8221 will be the second in the museum’s popular Cabin Fever Sunday series. Held in the Auditorium, the presentation will begin promptly at 1:30 p.m. Cabin Fever Sunday programs are offered at no charge to museum members. The fee for non-members is $5.00. There is no charge for children of elementary school age or younger. Refreshments will be served. For additional information, please call the Education Department at (518) 352-7311, ext. 128 or visit the museum’s web site at www.adirondackmuseum.org.

Adirondack Architectural Heritage Offers Unique Tour

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Adirondack Architectural Heritage (AARCH) is offering for the first time an opportunity to explore the rustic building tradition long associated with the Adirondacks. For four days tour private and public camps of the Adirondacks led by experts in the field of architectural history and preservation, and local historians. Stops will include Camp Pine Knot, Camp Sagamore, lunch on the WW Durant, camps at Piseco Lake, and Camp Santanoni. The day trips will be supplemented by evening lectures by preservation professionals. Accommodations at Minnowbrook Conference Center in Blue Mountain Lake, meals and local transportation are included. Cost is $1400 for double occupancy and $1700 for single.

To make a reservation or for further information please call 518-834-9328, or send an email to [email protected].

Adirondack Architectural Heritage is the private, non-profit, historic preservation organization for the Adirondack Park region. This tour is one of over fifty events in our their series highlighting the region’s architectural legacy.