LOCALadk Magazine

LOCALadk 21 Words matter. They both reflect and shape who we are, but sometimes the words we don't use, the stories we don't tell, are just as powerful. Take the story of the Adirondack State Park, for ex- ample. For many locals and visitors alike, the human saga of this place begins in the 1800s with the arrival of Anglo-European wilderness guides, hoteliers, and lumberjacks. But when we say "Welcome to the Adiron- dacks," we often forget that the story of people on this landscape is much richer, deeper, and more welcoming than that. The same is true of a small college on the shore of Lower Saint Regis Lake where I've taught natural sci- ences since 1987. It's named after Paul Smith, who built a world-famous luxury resort here with his wife, Lydia, in 1859. We at Paul Smith's College are proud to have Smith as our namesake, but there's a lot more to the story of this place than good old Paul. The words of James Wardner, another local hotelier of the 19th century, open a window on a deeper sto- ry. In his memoir, he claimed to have advised Paul to build his hotel on the lake "about where the Indians are camping." Many Adirondackers are surprised to learn that In- digenous people have lived in these rugged uplands since the end of the last ice age. That hidden heritage has often been left out of what passes for Adirondack history, but stone artifacts found on our campus show that people have lived here for thousands of years. The roots of humanity run deep in these mountains, and those connections enrich our community. The story of this landscape also includes a more re- cent chapter that has long been overlooked and mis- represented. My introduction to it began some years ago when a friend pointed to a small, alder-cloaked stream on the college's property in Onchiota. "Guess what that stream is called," he said. The name, he told me, was "N-word Brook." We both wondered what such an unpleasant name was doing here in the Adirondacks. Nobody else in the area seemed to have a valid explanation for it, either. It was frustrating for me, but it was also a problem for the rest of us at Paul Smith's College, too. Our faculty were embarrassed by the brook's name whenever stu- dents asked about it on field trips there. We knew the story of Paul Smith well enough, but nothing about this "N-word Brook" on our own property. Once again, Wardner's memoir opened a new chapter in our story. His version of it wasn't long, and it wasn't pleasant. He said that Black settlers had cleared some land along a local stream during the mid-1800s, and that "because of the negroes the brook was called by the white people N...r Brook." I wanted to know more, so I turned to the usual source. A century ago, an amateur historian named Al- fred Donaldson wrote a "History of the Adirondacks," which is still a commonly used historical resource in these parts. Unfortunately, it's full of errors and cruel stereotypes. Here are examples of how Donaldson told the story of the Black settlers: "The Adirondack wilderness, for obvious reasons, was the least attractive and least suited to the negro." "They did nothing for themselves or for their own land." "As a negro colony it was a failure and soon dwindled away." Fortunately, a new generation of local scholars is do- ing a better job of researching the story of those set- tlers. With their help and some digging in various ar- chives, I learned that our little brook is part of a larger story of the Adirondacks and of America itself. That story is much more amazing and inspiring than I could have imagined from the way it has typically been told in the past. During the mid-1800s, this region was a hotbed of social activism at a time when enslaving human beings was still legal in this country. The Adirondacks were the focus of a dream of a better America, an inspiring quest for human equality based on land ownership and multi-racial communities in the mountains. Frederick Douglass, abolitionist John Brown, and other promi- nent civil rights activists helped to promote Black em- powerment through settlement in the Adirondacks during the 1840s and 1850s. To support that dream, a philanthropist named Gerrit Smith donated 120,000 acres of his Adirondack hold- ings to 3000 Black New Yorkers, in part to help quali- fy many of them to vote. As part of a larger effort to hinder the growing anti-slavery movement, state law had prohibited African Americans from voting unless they owned at least $250 worth of property, which at the time was a substantial amount. Although few of the mostly urban recipients actually moved here, the Smith grants did help many of them to gain enfranchisement. I now wanted a more visual way to grasp the scale of African American influence here. I began with a map from 1858 that showed where property lots were indi- cated around my home town of North Elba. I then used Gerrit Smith's handwritten records to color in every lot that was granted to an African American. The result was astonishing. Roughly half of a 150 square-mile sector extending from the High Peaks to Lake Placid and beyond was once Black-owned. Adding another sector that includ- ed Onchiota and the brook approximately doubled that amount. This was nothing like what I got from those older sources, and it made me even more determined to find the real story behind our little stream. Wardner's memoir had offered another clue when it mentioned one of the local Black settlers by name. John Thomas was one of several Smith grantees who settled in Vermontville, a small hamlet ten miles north of Saranac Lake. We have no photo of him, but we do have a letter he sent to Gerrit Smith in 1872 that told his own dramatic story. John Thomas was born in Maryland around 1810, en-

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