The final Cabin Fever Sunday Series program of the season at Adirondack Experience, The Museum on Blue Mountain Lake (ADKX) will be Fools Rushed In: W.H.H. Murray’s Adventures in the Wilderness, 150 Years Later with Ivy Gocker, is set for April 7th, at 1:30 pm.
In 1869, Boston-based clergyman and author William Henry Harrison Murray published a collection of advice and anecdotes on his camping trips to a then little-visited region – the Adirondacks. Adventures in the Wilderness; or, Camp-Life in the Adirondacks would launch a thousand camping trips, inspiring hordes of untested city folk to try their hand at “roughing it” in the Adirondack wilds.
Known as Murray’s Fools, these adventure-seekers flooded the region, spurring the growth of a tourism industry that would change the Adirondacks forever. Adirondack Experience Library Director Ivy Gocker will explore the impact of Murray’s influential guidebook as well as the life of Murray himself, based in large part on the ADKX’s own collection of correspondence, publications, and scrapbooks from Murray and his family.
Ivy Gocker has been Library Director at the Adirondack Experience since the fall of 2016. Prior to that, she worked for nine years at the Brooklyn Public Library in New York City, spending her last six in the library’s local history department, the Brooklyn Collection. She has a Master’s degree in Library Science from Pratt Institute.
Murray’s Fools Distilling Co will be offering a tasting in Visitor Center. For more information, click here.
For more information, contact the Adirondack Experience at (518) 352-7311 or visit their website.
A version of this article first appeared on the Adirondack Almanack.
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