Figure 3. Black residents of the Adirondacks during the mid-1800s. Top row, left to right: Vermontville residents Walter Scott, Rose Scott, and Betty Burns. Bottom row, left to right: North Elba residents Lyman Epps, Sr., Josiah Hasbrook, Jr., and William Carasaw.
By Curt Stager
Feb. 24 –What does it mean to be an Adirondacker? The term often evokes images of White lumberjacks, wilderness guides, and hoteliers, but it’s important to remember that Adirondackers come in all colors. In that spirit, the long-overlooked role of Black settlers has recently been woven back into the human story of this region with the aid of local historians including Amy Godine, Hadley Kruczek-Aaron, Don Papson, Sally Svenson, Sandra Weber, and others. Here are here some additional insights into the story that arise from a hand-written document dating back to the 19th century.
The saga centers on a back-to-the-land movement that included a massive land giveaway funded by abolitionist Gerrit Smith shortly before the Civil War. From 1846 to the early 1850s, Smith gifted about 120,000 acres of his properties in and around the Adirondacks to roughly 3,000 Black New Yorkers. The main aim was to empower them through self-sufficiency in land ownership but it was also to help qualify many of them to vote, because state law disenfranchised Black men unless they owned $250 of property.
Those land transfers are recorded in a ledger that is currently archived at Syracuse University. The script can be illegible in places, but after being given a photocopy of the ledger by Martha Swan, director of the human rights organization “John Brown Lives,” I’ve spent much of the last year translating it into a searchable database that I am happy to share upon request. Here are some findings from that project.
The Smith ledger database
The database contains 3025 entries that include the names of the grantees, more than 300 communities in 60 counties statewide from which they enrolled, and the sizes and locations of gifted lots representing the transfer of 126,695 acres in total. More than one third of the grantees were residents of the New York City area with another thousand concentrated in Long Island and the lower half of the Hudson River Valley (Fig. 1). Most of the lots they received were located in Franklin and Essex Counties, with roughly 500-550 lots apiece in Townships 10-12 and 880 in Township 9. Additional grants were made in Hamilton County, Smith’s home town of Peterboro, and the farming community of Florence in Oneida County.
Voting rights were an important part of the story but not the only motivation behind Smith’s grant-initiative. Most Adirondack land was worth only $1 or so per acre back then, so a typical 40-acre property didn’t meet the $250 requirement by itself until it was “improved” with, say, a working farm. A few of the recipients would still have been unable to vote because they lived in other states, and some were already financially well off enough to meet the voting requirement. Furthermore, at least a dozen of the grantees were women, none of whom could have voted in any case because female New Yorkers would not gain suffrage until 1917. Among them were Flora Fry, a resident of Governeur, Rebecca Hornbeck of Dewitt, and Mary Cantine of New York City who were given properties in Essex County. For many, Smith’s grants opened a path to empowerment as productive members of multi-racial communities in the Adirondacks, but the gifts also served to acknowledge the work of individuals who championed human rights and to connect all of the grantees in a shared sense of mission. As Amy Godine puts it in her recent book, The Black Woods, “…there was pride of membership in a picked fraternity of deed holders that put bootblack and professor, cartman and minister, on one level.”
Black settlement patterns
Another point worth emphasizing is that the Black settlers did not form “colonies” in these mountains, per se. This is not what one reads, for example, in Russell Banks’ popular novel, Cloudsplitter, or Alfred Donaldson’s A History of the Adirondacks, which incorrectly depicted North Elba’s “Timbuctoo” community as a shabby, racially segregated ghetto. Sadly, such errors in our local literature can amplify misguided beliefs that Black people do not belong in the Adirondacks.
The following maps help to illustrate what African American settlement patterns in North Elba and Franklin really looked like from 1850 to 1860 and how their legacies still influence us today (Figure 2). The central panels B and E show that roughly half the area of those towns was once Black-owned (black squares).
Figure 2. Adirondack settlement maps 1850-1860. Top row: Franklin, Townships 9 & 10. Bottom row: North Elba, Townships 11 &12. [Panels A & D]: red squares indicate land now owned by the state of New York. [Panels B & E]: black squares indicate properties granted to Black New Yorkers by Gerrit Smith. [Panels C & F]: black circles indicate the approximate locations of residences of Smith grantees, grey circles indicate residences of African Americans who were not grantees. The residents shown here were listed in local census records of 1850, 1855, and 1860, and/or other documents from that time period, but do not necessarily represent the entire Black population.Many of the properties were eventually seized for non-payment of taxes. Deeds were often left unregistered in those days, tax-notifications were commonly lost or misdirected, and many urban, low-income grantees found that they couldn’t afford to be absentee land-holders. As a result, the distribution of today’s wild public land (A and D; red squares) resembles that of the Smith properties, with 78% of the granted lots in North Elba’s Townships 11 and 12 now being held by the state. In Franklin’s Townships 9 and 10 the percentage is lower but still significant (9% and 58%, respectively).
Panels C and E show approximate locations of the properties upon which roughly 1% of the grantees actually settled (black circles). Here we see most clearly that these were not compact, monochromatic colonies but integrated communities that were dispersed across the landscape as intended. The grey circles represent additional African American settlers who were not grantees.
Who actually settled here?
How many “Black settlements” were there in the Adirondacks? Perhaps none, strictly speaking. The grantees joined existing White communities that had recently been established on former Indigenous lands, typically representing a tenth or less of the local population. That said, these maps suggest that there were three main centers of attraction for African Americans in the region: North Elba, Vermontville, and Loon Lake where the closest thing to a colony, Willis Hodges’ short-lived enclave of “Blacksville,” was located. In addition, the Wilson and Gordon families lived in Duane, the Hazzards lived on the main road between Saranac Lake and Bloomingdale, and other families settled in Belmont, Elizabethtown, Governeur, Plattsburgh, and Westport.
How many settlers were there in total? Local census records document 9 grantees among the North Elba residents, 7 in Vermontville, and 5 at Loon Lake during the 1850-1860 period. If we include the earliest known arrivals in 1848-1849, a list of intended settlers published in The North Star in 1848, the Blacksville settlers named in Willis Hodges’ autobiography, and various other non-grantees along with their entire families, the total populations are close to 62 North Elbans, 30-50 Loon Lakers, and 46 Vermontvillians who were present at some point during that 12-year period. Adding Black residents of the aforementioned surrounding towns and hamlets brings the sum close to 200.
Those numbers fluctuated from place to place and year to year, but in North Elba they are lower than what was reported in 1850 by James McCune Smith, one of Gerrit Smith’s agents. “I found in North Elba,” he wrote, “about 60 colored persons in all.” The 1850 census listed only 21 Black residents in North Elba at the time, and informal accounts add just a few more. Does this mean that a large fraction of the local African American population was invisible to written history? It was common for people to be missed by census takers, and the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 put all Black New Yorkers at risk of kidnapping and enslavement even if they were legally free, as most of the Black Adirondackers were. Considering the wisdom of concealing one’s whereabouts under such conditions, we may never know for sure what the true numbers were.
Whatever the final tally of African American settlers was, it was far less than what Smith originally had in mind for his 3000 land grants. Many authors to date have focused on that imbalance, suggested possible reasons for it, and concluded that the Adirondack project was more or less a failure. Few such accounts point out that many White settlers didn’t last long here either, and that an earlier, larger state-sponsored giveaway of Adirondack land to White veterans, now known as the Old Military Tract, found few takers, as well.
I prefer to focus instead on those remarkable people who had the grit and resilience to accept the Adirondack challenge and give it a shot. A significant number of them spent the rest of their lives here, and some left descendants who are still living here among us.
Figure 3. Black residents of the Adirondacks during the mid-1800s. Top row, left to right: Vermontville residents Walter Scott, Rose Scott, and Betty Burns. Bottom row, left to right: North Elba residents Lyman Epps, Sr., Josiah Hasbrook, Jr., and William Carasaw.
Like their White neighbors, each one of these Black pioneers represents a fascinating story of resilient nineteenth century life in the mountains. Unlike their White neighbors, however, they also faced the bitter challenges of racism and constant vigilance against the threat of enslavement. Most newcomers moved here to build a better life for themselves and their kids, but the Black settlers did so with a higher purpose in mind, as well: to help build a better America in which people are treated with fairness and dignity regardless of race. That extra dash of heroism makes them Adirondackers we can all be especially proud of.
Curt Stager lives in North Elba and is a professor of Natural Sciences at Paul Smith’s College (cstager@paulsmiths.edu)
Top photo: Distributions of Smith grantees statewide. All photos provided by the author.
COMMENTARY: Black Settlers of the Adirondacks
By Curt Stager
Feb. 24 – What does it mean to be an Adirondacker? The term often evokes images of White lumberjacks, wilderness guides, and hoteliers, but it’s important to remember that Adirondackers come in all colors. In that spirit, the long-overlooked role of Black settlers has recently been woven back into the human story of this region with the aid of local historians including Amy Godine, Hadley Kruczek-Aaron, Don Papson, Sally Svenson, Sandra Weber, and others. Here are here some additional insights into the story that arise from a hand-written document dating back to the 19th century.
The saga centers on a back-to-the-land movement that included a massive land giveaway funded by abolitionist Gerrit Smith shortly before the Civil War. From 1846 to the early 1850s, Smith gifted about 120,000 acres of his properties in and around the Adirondacks to roughly 3,000 Black New Yorkers. The main aim was to empower them through self-sufficiency in land ownership but it was also to help qualify many of them to vote, because state law disenfranchised Black men unless they owned $250 of property.
Those land transfers are recorded in a ledger that is currently archived at Syracuse University. The script can be illegible in places, but after being given a photocopy of the ledger by Martha Swan, director of the human rights organization “John Brown Lives,” I’ve spent much of the last year translating it into a searchable database that I am happy to share upon request. Here are some findings from that project.
The Smith ledger database
The database contains 3025 entries that include the names of the grantees, more than 300 communities in 60 counties statewide from which they enrolled, and the sizes and locations of gifted lots representing the transfer of 126,695 acres in total. More than one third of the grantees were residents of the New York City area with another thousand concentrated in Long Island and the lower half of the Hudson River Valley (Fig. 1). Most of the lots they received were located in Franklin and Essex Counties, with roughly 500-550 lots apiece in Townships 10-12 and 880 in Township 9. Additional grants were made in Hamilton County, Smith’s home town of Peterboro, and the farming community of Florence in Oneida County.
Voting rights were an important part of the story but not the only motivation behind Smith’s grant-initiative. Most Adirondack land was worth only $1 or so per acre back then, so a typical 40-acre property didn’t meet the $250 requirement by itself until it was “improved” with, say, a working farm. A few of the recipients would still have been unable to vote because they lived in other states, and some were already financially well off enough to meet the voting requirement. Furthermore, at least a dozen of the grantees were women, none of whom could have voted in any case because female New Yorkers would not gain suffrage until 1917. Among them were Flora Fry, a resident of Governeur, Rebecca Hornbeck of Dewitt, and Mary Cantine of New York City who were given properties in Essex County. For many, Smith’s grants opened a path to empowerment as productive members of multi-racial communities in the Adirondacks, but the gifts also served to acknowledge the work of individuals who championed human rights and to connect all of the grantees in a shared sense of mission. As Amy Godine puts it in her recent book, The Black Woods, “…there was pride of membership in a picked fraternity of deed holders that put bootblack and professor, cartman and minister, on one level.”
Black settlement patterns
Another point worth emphasizing is that the Black settlers did not form “colonies” in these mountains, per se. This is not what one reads, for example, in Russell Banks’ popular novel, Cloudsplitter, or Alfred Donaldson’s A History of the Adirondacks, which incorrectly depicted North Elba’s “Timbuctoo” community as a shabby, racially segregated ghetto. Sadly, such errors in our local literature can amplify misguided beliefs that Black people do not belong in the Adirondacks.
The following maps help to illustrate what African American settlement patterns in North Elba and Franklin really looked like from 1850 to 1860 and how their legacies still influence us today (Figure 2). The central panels B and E show that roughly half the area of those towns was once Black-owned (black squares).
Panels C and E show approximate locations of the properties upon which roughly 1% of the grantees actually settled (black circles). Here we see most clearly that these were not compact, monochromatic colonies but integrated communities that were dispersed across the landscape as intended. The grey circles represent additional African American settlers who were not grantees.
Who actually settled here?
How many “Black settlements” were there in the Adirondacks? Perhaps none, strictly speaking. The grantees joined existing White communities that had recently been established on former Indigenous lands, typically representing a tenth or less of the local population. That said, these maps suggest that there were three main centers of attraction for African Americans in the region: North Elba, Vermontville, and Loon Lake where the closest thing to a colony, Willis Hodges’ short-lived enclave of “Blacksville,” was located. In addition, the Wilson and Gordon families lived in Duane, the Hazzards lived on the main road between Saranac Lake and Bloomingdale, and other families settled in Belmont, Elizabethtown, Governeur, Plattsburgh, and Westport.
How many settlers were there in total? Local census records document 9 grantees among the North Elba residents, 7 in Vermontville, and 5 at Loon Lake during the 1850-1860 period. If we include the earliest known arrivals in 1848-1849, a list of intended settlers published in The North Star in 1848, the Blacksville settlers named in Willis Hodges’ autobiography, and various other non-grantees along with their entire families, the total populations are close to 62 North Elbans, 30-50 Loon Lakers, and 46 Vermontvillians who were present at some point during that 12-year period. Adding Black residents of the aforementioned surrounding towns and hamlets brings the sum close to 200.
Those numbers fluctuated from place to place and year to year, but in North Elba they are lower than what was reported in 1850 by James McCune Smith, one of Gerrit Smith’s agents. “I found in North Elba,” he wrote, “about 60 colored persons in all.” The 1850 census listed only 21 Black residents in North Elba at the time, and informal accounts add just a few more. Does this mean that a large fraction of the local African American population was invisible to written history? It was common for people to be missed by census takers, and the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 put all Black New Yorkers at risk of kidnapping and enslavement even if they were legally free, as most of the Black Adirondackers were. Considering the wisdom of concealing one’s whereabouts under such conditions, we may never know for sure what the true numbers were.
Whatever the final tally of African American settlers was, it was far less than what Smith originally had in mind for his 3000 land grants. Many authors to date have focused on that imbalance, suggested possible reasons for it, and concluded that the Adirondack project was more or less a failure. Few such accounts point out that many White settlers didn’t last long here either, and that an earlier, larger state-sponsored giveaway of Adirondack land to White veterans, now known as the Old Military Tract, found few takers, as well.
I prefer to focus instead on those remarkable people who had the grit and resilience to accept the Adirondack challenge and give it a shot. A significant number of them spent the rest of their lives here, and some left descendants who are still living here among us.
Like their White neighbors, each one of these Black pioneers represents a fascinating story of resilient nineteenth century life in the mountains. Unlike their White neighbors, however, they also faced the bitter challenges of racism and constant vigilance against the threat of enslavement. Most newcomers moved here to build a better life for themselves and their kids, but the Black settlers did so with a higher purpose in mind, as well: to help build a better America in which people are treated with fairness and dignity regardless of race. That extra dash of heroism makes them Adirondackers we can all be especially proud of.
Curt Stager lives in North Elba and is a professor of Natural Sciences at Paul Smith’s College (cstager@paulsmiths.edu)
Top photo: Distributions of Smith grantees statewide. All photos provided by the author.