History, Natural History & the Arts
September 1st was the opening of oyster season on the 19th century dining calendar.
“What the last Thursday of November is to the American turkey gobbler, such is the first day of September to the American oyster. … The autumn brings back the magical ‘r.’” The Post and Gazette of Elizabethtown, in Essex County, reported on September 11th, 1879. [Read more…] about Oyster Season In 19th Century New York
One of the familiar attacks on John Brown (and by extension his anti-slavery legacy) involves his failed business ventures and accusations that he was a swindler and a drifter, roaming from place to place – only briefly and uneventfully staying in North Elba, Essex County, NY.
“Over the years before his Kansas escapade Brown had been a drifter, horse thief and swindler,” Columbia University historian John Garraty once wrote. Garraty served as the president of the Society of American Historians and was co-author of the high school history textbook The American Nation (he died in 2007).
A closer look at Brown and the his family, however, reveals an experience typical of many Americans, then and today, and the importance of North Elba in Brown’s plans for a raid into Virginia. [Read more…] about The Last Days of John Brown: North Elba
Commemorations for the 250th anniversary of the American War for Independence are underway at Fort Ticonderoga. The museum has started developing plans and exploring partnerships at the state and national levels to mark this historic anniversary.
Through exhibits, events, publications, and programs, Fort Ticonderoga seeks to increase access and awareness and expand educational impact related to the monumental history of the complex struggle to achieve independence. [Read more…] about America 250 Patriots Marker Dedicated at Fort Ti
John Brown has often come down to us as a lone nut, bent on an suicidal mission, but this is far from the truth.
Brown was part of a larger movement to free slaves that grew with passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 (which required the return of escaped slaves to their masters with all its potential for torture and death at their hands) and the large Underground Railroad movement.
It’s little understood that Brown was intimate with northern politicians, industrialists, ministers, and folks from all walks of life, including the leading intellectuals of the era – the Transcendentalists. [Read more…] about The Last Days of John Brown: The Secret Six
This is the story of the October 16, 1859 anti-slavery raid, during which John Brown led 19 men in an attack on the Harpers Ferry Armory.
He was afterward charged with murder, conspiring with enslaved people to rebel, and treason against Virginia (West Virginia was not yet a state) and after a week-long trial was sentenced to death in early November.
Brown was hanged on December 2nd (John Wilkes Booth snuck in to watch) and his body was afterward carried to North Elba in Essex County, NY to “moulder in his grave.” [Read more…] about The Last Days of John Brown: August 1859
A new pilot Route 73 shuttle service will be begin Saturday, August 21st, along the busy Route 73 corridor in the Adirondack High Peaks region, according to announcement issued Thursday by the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC), Essex County, and town of Keene. [Read more…] about New Adirondack High Peaks Shuttle Starting Aug 21st
The new book From Northville to Placid: Place Name History of New York’s Oldest Long Trail (Beechwood Books, 2021) by Erik Schlimmer, with foreword by James Appleton, features historical accounts of seventy of the named features along this 138-mile path through the Adirondacks. [Read more…] about New Adirondack History Book About The Northville-Placid Trail
The shortage of children that closed the Raquette Lake School a decade ago was not due to a housing deficit. On the contrary, Raquette was chockablock with housing when the school failed, much of it sitting empty for most of the year.
While Raquette boasts some unusual features – some of its structures are accessible only by lake – it shares this same predicament with most other gentrifying Adirondack places, lake-locked or otherwise: plenty of lodging and nowhere to live.
How can any community with so many vacant dwellings suffer from a housing crisis? [Read more…] about Adirondack Gentrification: Dispossession & Chronic Displacement (Part 2)
The 1932 and 1980 Olympic bobsled track, located on Mt. Van Hoevenberg in Lake Placid, N.Y., is on The National Register of Historic Places.
Clearing for the original one and a half, 26-curve course began in August 1930 and the track, specifically built for the 1932 winter games, was open to the public just 148 days later on Christmas Day 1930. [Read more…] about New York’s Olympic Bobsled Track: Some History
This year we are celebrating New York State’s acquisition of John Brown Farm 125 years ago. And it’s good that we are.
But let us also recall a 200th anniversary linked to the John Brown Farm – a connection that has particular importance this year as we witness a voter suppression spree around our country. Two hundred years ago, that was us – our New York ancestors – enacting explicit rules to keep blacks from voting.
John Brown and his family moved to the Adirondacks as part of an effort to counteract New York State-sponsored suppression of voting rights for black men.
We are now seeing a wave of voter suppression efforts in states controlled by Republican legislators fearful of losing their majority power. Well, guess what? That’s exactly what was going on here in good old New York back in the early 1800s. We New Yorkers apparently were leaders in voter suppression. We even put it into the state constitution! That’s more than the states are doing today. [Read more…] about NY’s Voter Suppression History & John Brown’s Farm