John Apperson

Robert Moses’ Lake George Park Commission Opposition Began his Downfall

February 11, 2025 by Anthony F. Hall 1 Comment

Inside the Blue Line of the Adirondack Park, only John Brown’s Farm and the Crown Point ruins are managed by the Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation (State Parks). All other public lands and amenities – camp grounds, picnic areas, hiking trails and lean-tos, camping islands – fall under the supervision of the Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC).

Wint Aldrich, a Deputy Commissioner for Historic Preservation at Parks through four administrations, once explained that anomaly to me. “The Conservation Department [precursor to DEC] didn’t want Robert Moses anywhere near the Forest Preserve,” Aldrich said. [Read more…] about Robert Moses’ Lake George Park Commission Opposition Began his Downfall

John Apperson’s Battle To Protect Lake George’s Islands

August 3, 2024 by David Gibson 2 Comments

Before Adirondack conservation leader Paul Schaefer began to organize his coalitions and, after a titanic ten year struggle, finally defeat through public referendum proposed big dams on the South Branch of the Moose River and elsewhere (1945-1955), Paul’s mentor John S. Apperson (often known as Appy) was waging another, longer, but less well known struggle concerning an actual, late 19th wooden and early 20th century concrete dam at the outlet of Lake George, built to power pulp, paper, and other mills in Ticonderoga, and to float logs down to those mills. [Read more…] about John Apperson’s Battle To Protect Lake George’s Islands

Saving Lake George’s Dome Island Hemlocks

January 11, 2024 by Anthony F. Hall 1 Comment

Dome Island is that rarest of things, an undisturbed piece of wilderness in the middle of Lake George, protected for the past seventy years by the Nature Conservancy and a committee of local volunteers and, in recent decades, by the Lake George Land Conservancy.

More than 60% of its forest canopy is composed of hemlocks, and every year since 2020, when hemlock woolly adelgid (HWA) was first discovered among the evergreens’ needles and branches, the Nature Conservancy has treated the invasive pest with insecticides. [Read more…] about Saving Lake George’s Dome Island Hemlocks

Schenectady and the Adirondacks: A Legacy of Conservation

July 29, 2022 by Guest Contributor 1 Comment

Schenectady has a long history of its residents being active in conservation and outdoor recreation – in Schenectady County and in the wilderness of the North Country, alike.

Schenectadians’ interest in protecting and exploring wilderness has its roots in the mid 1800s with industrialization and westward expansion. The wilderness was at risk of disappearing, and influential nature lovers used their writings to convince Americans that preserving land and wildlife was vital. Many Americans, including people in Schenectady, could easily see the case for this. [Read more…] about Schenectady and the Adirondacks: A Legacy of Conservation

Ed Zahniser On Wilderness & New York State

January 9, 2022 by Edward Zahniser 4 Comments

New York State’s Forest Preserve lands of the Adirondacks and Catskills are living fossils of the broad 19th-century movement to protect wild forests of the federal public lands in the West as forest reserves and not as national forest sources of fiber, forage, and minerals.

New York State’s Forest Preserve lands therefore are living proof that the wilderness preservation movement is not an upstart 20th-century offshoot of the mainstream American conservation movement. [Read more…] about Ed Zahniser On Wilderness & New York State

Al Smith, John Apperson, FDR & The Fight That Expanded NYS Forests

November 5, 2020 by David Gibson 1 Comment

A young wildlands advocate Paul Schaefer was enamored of activist John Apperson from the day he first met him.

It was about 1931. Apperson was an General Electric engineer fighting to protect Lake George and other wild places. As Schaefer said, it was the pure sense of joy that Apperson exuded about conservation in the Adirondacks which galvanized young people looking for a cause.

These were very important years for the Adirondacks, as for the nation. The 1932 national election loomed, as the Great Depression sucked hope and savings from so many. One can imagine the anxiety that gripped the country and the opportunity for hucksters, demagogues, as well as statesmen. [Read more…] about Al Smith, John Apperson, FDR & The Fight That Expanded NYS Forests

Adirondack Environmental History Going Online

April 8, 2014 by Anthony F. Hall 3 Comments

Governor Al Smith helped block the construction of a highway along the shore of Tongue Mountain, but it was Franklin D. Roosevelt who was instrumental in protecting the east shore of Lake George, documents in the Apperson-Schaefer collection at the Kelly Adirondack Center at Union College in Schenectady suggest.

With funding from the bond acts of 1916 and 1926, much of Tongue Mountain and many of the islands in the Narrows were now protected, permanently, as parts of the Adirondack Forest Preserve.

But by 1926, John Apperson, the General Electric engineer who dedicated much of his life to the protection of Lake George, had become concerned about the future of the east side. [Read more…] about Adirondack Environmental History Going Online

John Apperson

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