LOCALadk Magazine

LOCALadk 42 If history's your thing: On October 11-12, 1776, the vaunted British Royal Navy thrashed a cobbled-together Amer- ican flotilla on Lake Champlain, the tattered remnants of which escaped literally under their nos- es. The weakened and bewildered British retreated to Canada for the winter, and when they tried the same strategy in 1777, they were repulsed at Saratoga. It's no stretch to say losing the battle on Lake Champlain helped the Colonists win the war for independence. All this is thoroughly recounted in Jack Kelly's Valcour: The 1776 Campaign That Saved the Cause of Liberty (St. Martin's Press, 2021). Kelly clearly explains the maneuvers both mil- itary and political, the back-stab- bing and jealousies, the cruelties and heroisms that characterize all wars. It's June 1946. A Boy Scout troop from suburban Philadelphia un- dertakes a fifteen-day paddling and hiking outing through the Cold River country, some of the most remote terrain in the Adirondacks. One highlight is their visit with the legendary hermit Noah Rondeau. A daily, snapshot-rich log of their trip recently surfaced and is the cen- terpiece of William "Jay" O'Hern's A Classic Adirondack Paddle (In the Adirondacks, 2023). The mostly un- edited, often subtly humorous log entries and never-before-published pictures of the backcountry of 77 years ago, and especially of Ron- deau, make for a unique book. In August 1958, Diane Struble swam the entire 35+ miles— against the current — of Lake George, becoming the first per- son to do so. Struble's compelling story is told in Called by the Water, authored by her daughter Gwenne Rippon (Lake George Historical Association, second printing, 2021). Rippon tells of her mother's heroic, bumpy life and details her mar- athon swim, accompanying both with plenty of photos. Two books explain the forces that, like it or not, shaped today's Adirondacks politically, economical- ly, and more. A Wild Idea, by Brad Edmondson (Cornell University Press, 2021) explores the gestation, birth and fraught childhood of the Adirondack Park Agency (APA) in the 1960s and '70s, with deep dives into the backstage maneuvering and frontstage fireworks that high- lighted the concept's implementa- tion, which satisfied hardly anyone. Bernard Melewski, in Inside the Green Lobby (State University of New York Press, 2021), carries the story forward. Melewski, a profes- sional lobbyist for the environmen- talist-leaning Adirondack Council from the early 1990s to 2005, tells of the battles to kill, maintain, or reform the APA, and of the numer- ous proposals, and their fates, to update Adirondack land use plan- ning. Another pair probe the experi- ences of African Americans in the region, and it's not always a pretty picture. Thoroughly researched, The Black Woods: Pursuing Racial Justice on the Adirondack Frontier, by Amy Godine (Cornell University Press, 2023) uncovers much that has not been known about its titu- lar topic, while Bryan Thompson's African Americans of St. Lawrence County (The History Press, 2023) reveals that denigration, segrega- tion, and brutal Klan influence were not limited to the South.

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