Adirondack Life contributor and independent scholar Amy Godine is set to track the history of pilgrimages to abolitionist John Brown’s North Elba grave and home, with an emphasis on the yearly visits of the John Brown Memorial Association from Philadelphia and the exclusionary Lake Placid Club.
From 1922 into the 1970s, black activists gathered at Brown’s shrine to honor his May birthday with speeches, sermons, and song. People in Lake Placid participated too, spurning the segregationist culture of the Jim Crow era. Of special interest to Godine is the complicated relationship of the black city pilgrims with the notoriously exclusionary Lake Placid Club. [Read more…] about John Brown Pilgrimages and the Lake Placid Club