The Franklin Pioneers

Whom to trust, whom to avoid? The grantee-settler Willis Hodges would ask this question too. In May 1848, Hodges and his band of New York City pioneers reached the wild land they would spend the summer clearing and then conjuring the enclave he called Blacksville. The landing was not soft. Early charges for teamstering and supplies were much stiffer than Hodges expected. He had a bleak hunch he’d been rooked. Short of funds, he had to mortgage two hundred acres, and his fellow pioneer William H. Smith, also from the city, had to sell a small lot too. But these hits, while daunting, were survivable, and Hodges and his party found relief in their dogged progress in the woods.

From the spring of 1848 until the onset of winter, the Black pioneers grubbed the underbrush, fired up the slash, chopped trees to logs and logs to cordwood until their muscles froze. They chinked cabin logs (unseasoned! would they crack at the first freeze?) with hunks of green moss, and hauled big stones to a chimney site and mortared them with lime and ash. A spring, I’m guessing, was sourced on a light rise (cedar pump logs would have to wait), and a privy likely dug and capped. In Virginia, Hodges used to help his father, an herbalist, hunt for healing plants and roots. In these woods, too, he likely gathered what he could.⁴

Were there things they left behind and missed? Maybe a spare candle mold, some bar lead, linseed oil, a bee box, rope? The air was warm, but how the locals doomed-and-gloomed the coming cold, you might take it for a war. While a coat peg remained to be whittled, a pine torch readied, a span of bark hacked into shingles or squared off for a shelf, the cabin fixing was not done. Coffee, tinderbox, matches, all called for stations. Beds cried out for feather ticks and quilts. Kettle, gridiron, soap pot, long-handled pan, and waste bucket needed cleaning and rinsing, then back to their posts.

Once, just after the Fourth of July, Willis Hodges slipped down to New York City. With him was his friend and fellow activist-turned-homesteader, William H. Smith. In this a summer Manhattan was besieged with wild dogs so numerous the city was paying “dog-killers” fifty cents a head for any “dog unmuzzled,” and ragged boys with bats patrolled the streets. Undeterred by either dogs or their pursuers, the self-dubbed “Franklin Pioneers” thronged to Union Hall on Wooster Street to hear Smith and Hodges share news of their progress. Even McCune Smith broke from his long rounds at the Colored Orphan Asylum to hear the settlers and, afterward, to write Gerrit Smith. Also here to speak was the city cartman Anthony Provost, the activist who had made the giveaway his cause, and his friend Edward Marshall, who ran a night school for Black youths in McCune Smith’s home.⁵

Provost told the crowd that he was “steadily concocting a plan of operations” to lead “a good-sized well-organized number” of grantees to “Franklin 9th.” Further, he and Marshall had set up a mutual aid fund for Franklin-bound grantees that would help pay for surveys, land clearance, and road building. Investor buy-in was $1.25, and monthly dues $0.50.⁶

Provost’s carting clients in the city, ranging from rag dealers to tannery tycoons, had brought him a fair living. Hauling everything from commodities to essential goods like firewood or hay, Black cartmen enjoyed good standing in their community; among the carters, the Colored American declared, were “our very best citizens, men who for moral worth and industrious enterprise, are the pride of our city, some of them leaders in the holy cause of equal rights.” Why, then, was Provost so eager to leave the city?⁷

In 1839, Provost had applied for a cartman’s license. He’d carted profitably for years and had wealthy clients in the Swamp (the heart of the city’s leather and tanning district) who were glad to give him references. He owned “as good a horse and cart as was to be seen on the dock” (no small feat given the expense of keeping a horse fed, clean shod, and healthy). His “high moral character” was widely recognized. His case, he felt, was rock solid. And the mayor turned him down. It was simply “not customary for colored men to drive carts in the city,” Cornelius Lawrence offered, as if evidence of racism were its own justification. The sophistry was bad enough, but Hizzoner’s show of sympathy was worse: not letting Provost drive his cart, explained the mayor, was actually for Provost’s good; cart licenses would be withheld from Black men to save them from hotheads “who might dump their horses and carts into the river.” Better, in other words, to deprive Black New Yorkers of a legal living than to trouble the city with the obligation to enforce the law. Provost soldiered on, but after 1839, he was a marked man, a Black New Yorker with ambition. Seeing him in this light (maybe seeing him for the first time at all), white cartmen struck back. Provost was fined, and had to sell his horse and cart and “betake himself to more menial employment.”⁸

There was a joke the Irish liked to tell, a three-part answer to the story that the streets of New York City were paved with gold. First, no gold here. Second, no pavement either. Third, if the streets were to be paved, it would be the Irish who would do it. Provost might have added that at least the Irish got the job.⁹

Then, in 1846, Provost, a fervent advocate for equal suffrage, had to contend with the debacle of the Constitutional Convention, and the white electorate’s decisive routing of any hope of enfranchisement. All the old arguments from 1821 against Black voters had been revived, this time bolstered with new fake science about racial inferiority. Convention delegate John A. Kennedy from New York City railed against granting rights to the race with which Caucasians shared “the fewest points of resemblance … Nature revolt[s] at the proposal.” John Hunt, also from Manhattan, urged the others to please keep in mind that “the negroes are aliens… . We might close our eyes in a fit of amiable enthusiasm, and try to dream the wool out of their curl … but they knew and felt all the while (that is, the sane negroes) that they were negroes and aliens by the act of God, and there was no remedy.” Give Black New Yorkers full rights of citizenship, and New York would be aswarm with ballot-seeking Southern Blacks, an influx sure to drive white workers from the state when a job war heated up and wage cuts followed. Give these men the vote, opined St. Lawrence County delegate Bishop Perkins, “they would never be permitted to come up to the ballot box, or if they did come, it would only to be bought and sold like cattle in the market.”¹⁰

Equal voting rights for Black New Yorkers never had a prayer. Out of fifty-six counties, only ten supported suffrage. Clinton County, close to Canada—farm patched, Yankee settled, and culturally kin to abolitionist New England—would go five to one for equal voting rights. Essex and Franklin were all for suffrage too. But New York County, home to most of Gerrit Smith’s three thousand deedholders, recoiled. Constitutional Convention city delegates in 1821 and 1846 were the most strident advocates of total disenfranchisement for Black New Yorkers (and the keenest advocates for African colonization), and city voters in November 1846 rejected equal manhood suffrage by six to one, almost three times the state average.¹¹

What did this mean for Anthony Provost? In 1839, he had learned how threadbare was the mantle of “free man of color” when a flagrantly discriminatory ruling assailed his right to make a living. Seven years later, he discovered that six out of seven city voters deemed him unworthy of a ballot. If he wasn’t valued and he wasn’t wanted, why call New York City home? The wonder isn’t that he signed up for forty Adirondack acres and offered to take grantees north. The wonder would have been if he had not.¹²

After Provost, it was the newsman Willis Hodges’s turn to speak, a familiar name to many in the hall for his late lamented Ram's Horn. There was a bold rag! In Baltimore, white people were so scared of it that when a Black subscriber went to claim his issue at the post office, he was arrested and fined $500. Willis Hodges had sold his stake in the Ram's Horn before he headed north, and now it seemed his ex-partner, Thomas Van Rensselaer, planned to shutter New York City’s one Black paper for lack of funds.¹³

Like his columns in the Ram’s Horn, Hodges’s remarks about his gift lots pulled no punches. He shared his rocky landing at Loon Lake, the high cost of transport, and the unhappy fact that he’d had to mortgage his land—news that came as a profound surprise to Smith’s land agent in the audience. McCune Smith and Gerrit Smith had laid such stress on the need to stay debt free, and now, so early in the journey, the threat of debt already loomed. But so enthusiastic were Hodges and William Smith about their prospects, and so hopeful were they for more settlers, that the doctor put aside his worry. “It did my soul good to shake their hard hands,” he later wrote his Peterboro friend about the “two foot sore and travel weary Pioneers… . [S]uch a good spirit” prevailed among the Franklin Pioneers, it made the doctor himself “very desirous to go on the good land.” The audience in Union Hall was smitten, too, soaking up the reports of “log houses and cleared acres, Pine stumps—and want of a team!” The new homesteader, William H. Smith, once a city porter, declared, “It is better to suffer two years in Franklin, than forever in New York.” A few weeks earlier, the New York Tribune published a rapt description of Smith’s cabin (the writer was the Blacksville settler George B. Wilson): “A spacious dwelling on Lime Lake on the main turnpike from Lake Champlain to Ogdensburg… . The site is a beautiful one, and several of the granted locations lie near it on various directions.”¹⁴

What raised the loudest cheer, however, were not reports of cabin work and country views but a joke about the city these frontiersmen had left behind. When William Smith told his wife he was making a short trip to Manhattan and urged her to write letters he could deliver to their friends, she “sat down, and in a few minutes exclaimed that she did not know the day of the month. ‘How so?’ ‘Oh, because I am not forced to remember the landlord’s call.’ ” The audience roared. The feeling that one’s time was not one’s own, that every hour in the waking day belonged to someone else—landlord, creditor, or boss—was something everybody recognized. On the new land, time would be theirs to manage—time and space alike. City space was charged with menace and anxiety. The map, unwritten, that Black New Yorkers took with them every time they went into the streets directed every step. Not this way, that way; danger, go back, eyes down, get away. The map marked every hospital, church, school, and library reserved for whites only; every worksite, oyster house, dock, and boatyard they were not to venture near; every firehouse, union hall, and public bath that made it clear: not here, not yours, step back.

Even as Hodges and Smith bore the glow of the good meeting into the cobbled streets (still rank with the detritus of the glorious Fourth—spent firecrackers, corncobs, charred potato skins, and whatever else had escaped the avid foraging of pigs), and even after two months in Franklin County, the old habits of Black vigilance and worry ruled the view, fixing route, pace, and direction. Blacksville and Lime Lake were waiting for them. It was time to get back to their new home.

Spring Fever, Winter Dreams

In the city, May had always been a hopeful month, the moment for bold resolve and new beginnings, for removals, risk, and planning. We do it every year, McCune Smith marveled in an essay—each spring, Black city folk packing up and moving “with a vigor and earnestness that outdistances all other nomadic tribes on the face of the earth.” And not just to new rooms in the city. The warming season was the time to dream of country living too. A few weeks after the city meeting of the Franklin Pioneers in July 1848, Gerrit Smith sent his city agents a batch of deeds for eighty-six grantees, and in his thank-you note, McCune Smith could report with pride that the Gerrit Smith Farming Association was now fifty members strong.¹⁵

Willis Hodges’s party had reached Loon Lake in May 1848, and that same month, Samuel and Thomas Jefferson, two brothers from Troy, moved to a good-sized lot in Essex County’s North Elba (having judged their gift lots in Hamilton County too difficult to reach). The lot they picked in Township 12 was Lot 93; a white farmer, Thomas Nash, who was buying it on time from Gerrit Smith, let the Jeffersons rent it on good terms. Already working a five-acre piece of it was their old congregant from Troy’s Liberty Street Church, the shoemaker James H. Henderson. His gift lot, also, was too remote and rough to farm, so he moved here in 1848, and may have been the one to alert the Jefferson brothers to this good land.¹⁶

That fall on his visit to the Black Woods, John Brown met these three “good colored families” and impressions all around were warm and hopeful. The grantees were already familiar with the abolitionist’s keen interest in this project from his cheerleading in the Ram’s Horn (“The colony on the Smith Lands must be got up, and can be, and will be!”). Brown also knew Gerrit Smith, and if he hadn’t yet met these grantees’ Troy pastor, he was certainly familiar with Garnet’s celebrated “Call to Rebellion.” James Henderson was pleased enough about his new white neighbor to describe the visit in the North Star. “I have seen J.B. of Springfield, Mass.,” he reported, “and he says that he will move here in the Spring, and will give us a start if we will try to help ourselves.” And Brown, for his part, was champing to get started. “I can think of no place where I would sooner go, all things considered than to live with these poor despised Africans to try, & encourage them, & show them a little so far as I am capable how to manage,” he wrote his father. Only outstanding debts and business woes kept him from joining them sooner than May 1849. He knew they needed help. Without a team of oxen or horses of their own, they couldn’t yank their stumps and smooth the ground for seed; they were heading into their first Adirondack winter unprovisioned. Brown likely understood more than the grantees just how long an Adirondack winter could be.¹⁷

Also worrisome were rumors about local merchants overcharging the grantees for food. In October 1848, Brown shipped the homesteaders ten barrels of pork and flour. Three barrels of each went to Hodges for the settlers around Blacksville, and four more barrels (two pork, two flour) Hodges was to get to Timbuctoo. Make it last, Brown wrote Hodges, his confidante and proxy among the settlers. This is all I can afford. Through Hodges, too, Brown urged the grantees to avoid a post office he didn’t trust and always, when he sent packages, to match receipts to contents to make sure nothing had gone missing along the way. He recommended a storekeeper in Port Kent. This was a long pull from the Black Woods, but he knew the man was honest. He implored the homesteaders to pace themselves and, above all, to plan for cold. Don’t build, he warned, before you’ve laid in fuel. Keep on the good side of the locals, and never forget “the vast importance of sustaining the very best character for honesty, truth, industry and faithfulness.” Earlier in May, Reverend Garnet had urged the grantees to stay politically engaged, but Brown’s counsel was more pragmatic: “I would advise, by all means, that you do not go to any expense about voting next spring, until we can get ready to take hold of that matter right.” Hodges, it would seem, was so keen to vote in his new neighborhood that he was prepared to go into debt to meet the property requirement. Don’t you do it, Brown all but ordered. Debt was just another kind of bondage, as he well knew.¹⁸

Brown’s sober counsel was surely welcome. But what Hodges and the homesteaders could have used (what Lewis Tappan had called for half a year before) was a savvy helper on the scene who knew this country and how to read it, how to work it, how to keep pace with its demands. How many logs, for instance, needed to be chopped and split to warm a ten-by-ten-foot cabin for a six-month Adirondack winter? Blackflies, which in early summer were thick enough to choke on, could be held off with a smudge—but to make a smudge pot you had to know the evergreens and mosses. Tracking a bee tree, rendering mutton fat for candle tallow, matching plow tip to soil type, knowing not to build a cabin with just-cut lumber—maybe this came easy to the farmer’s son Willis Hodges, but likely not the others. And while Hodges knew his woodpeckers and his screech owls, nothing back in Princess Anne County approached the witchy chortle of a loon. A nine-foot bull moose looming up out of the mist? The heart could stop midbeat. And who would ready the Black settlers for the vagaries of Adirondack summer, how it came on so brightly, promising the world, then lost interest, just skipped away?¹⁹

In November 1848, the North Star ran a letter from John Brown to the grantees that would be read aloud at Troy’s Wesleyan Methodist Episcopal Church. By way of reassurance, this longtime surveyor wanted the grantees to know that he knew how to tell good land from bad, and that their land, which he had seen, was possessed of “many very superior natural advantages… . Hold on to [it] as [your] most valuable earthly treasure, and sooner suffer nakedness and hunger than part with [it].” Attending this church meeting was the Timbuctoo pioneer Samuel Jefferson, who seconded Brown’s good opinion. Not “under any circumstances” should you “part with your land,” he told his Troy friends and fellow deedholders. His and Brown’s appeal made a hit. Several Troy grantees moved to the Black Woods that spring.²⁰

And it had to be in spring, this move, because in winter, nobody was going anywhere. Prospective pioneers put all their moving plans on hold, and settlers, too, deferred to the still spirit of the season. When winter dropped like a hammer in the woods, they might not leave their cabins more than once or twice a day, and then just to thread a path to the barn or woodshed, stream or privy, blinking back the white light, much too focused on the cold to marvel at the snow spilling off the high-branched pines. For some settlers, the Adirondack winter was simply hateful, nothing for it but to wrap yourself in quilts, darn socks, and pray that when the dog growled after dark, she was just having a bad dream and not telling them to get the sheep into the cabin double-quick because the wolves were moving off the ridge.

But Willis Hodges was a writer, and winter was his ally; it curled around the cabin like a cat, let him pull chair to table, put pen to page, and do what he adored. He had no plans for publication. His memoir, if that’s what this turned out to be, was written for the family he had yet to start, something to let them know his backstory, how he got from Virginia to Blacksville, near Loon Lake, and, more than this, to let them understand what Blacksville had to do with slavery. Hodges himself had never been enslaved, but, as McCune Smith once wrote, “The one idea of slavery” had so entirely managed to “spread its shoots & roots & its suckers into every institution in this land” that Hodges clearly felt it wholly sensible to claim the slave narrative for his model. Slavery and the battle to dismantle it shaped his past, his purpose, his very presence in this cabin. And although he wrote the book a future editor would title A Free Man of Color: The Autobiography of Willis Augustus Hodges when he was only thirty-three, with more than half his life to come, the half at Hodges’s back could load a stone boat. Still-fearful memories of his mother being beaten by vigilantes, his family’s home in shambles, his brother’s jail time and his own, a hellish season digging a canal with several hundred enslaved men and their white drivers, and then his weary dealings with the Negrophobes of Brooklyn and Manhattan—all this mapped the common ground of degradation that free Blacks shared with enslaved millions. This memoir would document the links.²¹

Hodges finished his seventy-page manuscript on his thirty-fourth birthday in February 1849. In the company of his “little band” of Franklin Pioneers, he gave thanks to “the mercy of God and the goodness of the honorable Garret [sic] Smith” and praised the good work of his fellow farmers “under our own ‘vine and fig trees,’ with none to molest or make us afraid.” The “aid and good cheer” of John Brown, Hodges’s friend since the old days of the Ram’s Horn, were warmly noted. But interestingly, he made very little of the Black Woods itself. Though Hodges had been ten months on this land, building up his home and the fragile settlement around it, he gave it no more than a page. Years later he would tell his son about the fugitives he sometimes sheltered in his cabin who were moving up to Canada, but in the memoir, nothing is revealed. His cabin mates are undescribed, his dealings with white neighbors unreported. The view from his front door, what Loon Lake looked like in morning fog, a persistent cold of his that had John Brown a little worried—these were of no interest. What mattered, all that mattered, was that he’d made it to the finish line, his Adirondack home.²²

Someday, Hodges wrote in his last lines, his enslaved brethren would occupy “the wilderness of slavery and injustice… . [O]ur children or children’s children will possess the land, if God is God, and a just God.” The analogy was plain. They would possess and vanquish the “wilderness” of bondage as confidently as Hodges laid claim to the wilderness and cultivated his “vine and fig trees” in the North. His occupation of the Black Woods anticipated freedom’s triumphant occupation of the South. It dramatized it, made it imaginable: if it could happen in Blacksville, Franklin County, it might happen in Pharaoh Land as well. Thus the fuzzy imprecision of his Adirondack pages. At the dawn of 1849, Hodges’s Black Woods had to be all metaphor, as big as Canada, as idealized as Charles Ray’s conduit to “respectability and influence.” And so, instead of bog marsh, blackflies, and white neighbors, we get figs.²³

There were no fig trees at Wolf Pond. And the Loon Lake home that Hodges described in his memoir wasn’t thanks to “the goodness of the honorable Gerrit Smith.” Hodges’s gift lot was so starkly uninviting that he’d had to buy another one for two dollars an acre. This was a good move. It flanked an old military road in fair repair, with sawmills, iron forges, and rough-cut hotels all within a day’s tramp. East of Loon Lake was Goldsmith, a bustling mill town with a schoolhouse, sawmill, and post office. Merrillsville, where he got his mail, was a hike through the woods.²⁴

Help Unwanted

In Timbuctoo, this same winter, the grantees were also busy writing, but unlike Hodges, they did aim to publish, and the sooner the better. The North Star had recently reported that a Keene man (Keene is to North Elba’s east) would be the giveaway’s official surveyor. Reporting on this new helper was Douglass’s coeditor, William C. Nell. The surveyor, Wait J. Lewis, had been vetted by Frederick Douglass and Gerrit Smith, Nell explained, and Douglass himself had introduced the white man to the Rochester grantees. Lewis had told them that his knowledge of the gift lands was exhaustive; he’d seen many lots and could say with confidence that “none of the lots were worthless, but the greater portion excellent.” His survey fee was $1.50. People who wanted his assistance could send this fee to the North Star, care of Douglass. Many grantees signed up for a survey then and there.²⁵

The settlers of Timbuctoo were stunned. They knew Wait J. Lewis. They’d seen what passed for his surveying. He was, they felt, incompetent. They wrote a worried letter to the North Star, but Douglass would not publish it, offering instead only his own summary of their concerns with this rejoinder: since the letter writers had “admit[ted]” that Mr. Lewis was “a Justice of the Peace, and Chairman of the Keene School Committee, and that he has a certificate as Surveyor,” these credentials would “sufficient[ly] guarantee [his] character … until something definite and tangible is preferred against him.”²⁶

Douglass’s brusqueness is no mystery. An inquiry into a surveyor whom he and Smith had recommended was embarrassing. And what good could it do Smith’s project? The giveaway was already beleaguered by the slow pace of migration, and by the emergence of this new challenge from the colony in Oneida County’s Florence. What were the jumpy gripes of a few pioneers next to the prospect of an Adirondack surveyor who was game and primed to help? A year after directing “the sharp axe of the sable-armed pioneer [to] at once be uplifted over the soil of Franklin and Essex Counties,” Douglass did not conceal his frustration. “These lands must be soon made a blessing to the colored people or they will become a curse,” he told the North Star that January. “There is no living there [on the Smith Lands] without houses and farming utensils. Houses cannot be built and farming utensils obtained without money—and this the grantees have not got.” This was as bleak and blunt a diagnosis of what ailed the Black Woods as anyone had dared to offer. But it would not suggest the cure. And Douglass was not inclined to name the one person in the world in a position to relieve the undercapitalized pioneers. Douglass was building up a newspaper. What would become of it without Gerrit Smith’s occasional gifts of money? A fuss about a surveyor was not his cause. Let this settle, let it cool.²⁷

Instead these embers caught and flared. Outraged by the grantees’ complaints, Wait J. Lewis elicited a long deposition from a Keene acquaintance, Elijah Jones, for the North Star and the Northern Star and Colored Farmer. Lewis, Jones declared, was the best friend the grantees ever had! He had himself given them land, “40 square rods of beautiful land in the village plat” he called Freeman’s Home. For this kindness, he was rewarded with the outrage of his white neighbors, who had said they’d sooner “starve … out” the grantees than “live in a village surrounded by colored people,” and claimed that Lewis was “trying to ruin the town” and should “go armed, or he would get shot.” Gerrit Smith and his Negroes (they said) “ought to be banished to Africa,” and Wait Lewis with them. But let it be known, Jones offered, that for all this risk to his own person, Lewis stood by his convictions. He hoped to “live to see one member of the Essex County Board of Supervisors a little darker complexion than the rest,” dreamed of reading “the speeches of Dr. James McCune Smith in Congress,” and aimed to “live long enough to know that Gerrit Smith occupied the White House at Washington.” When his neighbors turned Black people from their doors, Lewis made “his house a home for the colored man.” When racists menaced the grantees, he would “fulfill all his contracts” with the deedholders and get them surveys even when the job incurred “a great expense.” Lewis had been postmaster, coroner, justice of the peace, and superintendent of his town and its schools, and if anyone was fool enough to slander him, Lewis would see him “in our County or Supreme Courts.”²⁸

But Timbuctoo held firm. James Henderson shared the concern of his community in a letter to his old minister. And because this was his first note to the reverend since he left Troy, he made sure, first thing, to assure Garnet that the news from the North Country was mostly very good. North Elba, he wrote from “West Keene Timbucto, Essex Co.,” turned out to be a pretty fine place to farm. “I have been here eight months, and I like the land and the country well. There is no better land for grain. We get 25 to 50 bushels of oats to the acre. New land is the best for oats, and for potatoes and turnips; of the last two articles we get from 200 to 400 to the acre. The farmers here get 46 cents per bushel, cash in hand, for their oats.” Further, “I have seen Mr. J. B. of Springfield, Mass,—and he says he will move here in the Spring, and will give us a start if we will try and help ourselves.” Henderson put the bright side front and center. Garnet would love to read this, and several thousand grantees too. And his letter, which was introduced by Garnet’s, was published in the North Star, in full.²⁹

But regarding Douglass’s recommended man from Keene, Henderson showed no mercy. Wait Lewis called himself a surveyor? “Some of the best men in the town of Keene … all tell one story about him—that is, that he is not a man to be trusted; all that he wants is the money. We who are here can see and know.” Lewis made no new lines when he surveyed; he just went “hunting” for the old ones. He used a wire instead of a surveyor’s chain, and marked lot boundaries and names “with a lead pencil, in a hand as fine as this letter.” Nor did he bother to mark internal boundaries of adjacent 40-acre quarter lots. It was true that backcountry surveyors liked working with the 160-acre square, but were the grantees supposed to guess the inside lot lines? Further, Wait Lewis claimed that Reverend Garnet had hired him to help the settlers. Henderson had a hunch this wasn’t so.³⁰

Late that spring of 1849, when John Brown appeared with his good chain, regulation transit, and miles of experience, the grantees’ poor opinion of Wait Lewis was confirmed. Correcting the sloppy work of a surveyor by whom “many of [the settlers] had been cheated badly” consumed Brown’s first weeks in Township 12, recalled Brown’s daughter Ruth Thompson. The unscrupulous Keene surveyor “took advantage of their ignorance, and got them to settle on lands that did not correspond with the deeds Gerrit Smith had given them… . Father felt deeply over the way so many of them had been treated, and tried to encourage and help them in every way he could. He spent much of his time in surveying their land, running out their lines, and helping them to locate on land actually belonging to them.” Though Brown’s daughter left the local surveyor unnamed, circumstantial evidence points to Wait J. Lewis from Keene.³¹

The Reverend Backs the Cobbler

Two centuries of public history on the giveaway and its travails have canonized this episode, which, like Loguen’s grim report and Hodges’s bitter dealings with his teamsters, seems to underscore yet again why the giveaway was so beleaguered: locals had it in for Black people. This synopsis is misleading. There were Adirondack racists. There were also Adirondackers who were helpful and supportive, and who might well have directed agents or grantees to credible surveyors early on. But no such counsel was elicited, so Wait Lewis filled the vacuum. And while not the “official” surveyor Henderson would have preferred (an arguable distinction since New York surveyors were not licensed until 1920), Lewis was indeed, town records show, just about everything else he said he was: postmaster, superintendent, school committee chair, and justice of the peace. Further, his surveying methods may have been more usual than Henderson realized. In 1885, the Warren County historian H. P. Smith complained about Adirondack surveyors’ overuse of compasses (“magnetic needles”) instead of chains. And backcountry surveyors who could not afford a regulation hundred-link chain often made do with brass wire on a spool or even long ropes cinched with knots. In the deep woods, rope and wire were easier to manage. Even Lewis’s neglect of the grid inside the 160-acre lots was not unheard of. The late Norman Van Valkenburgh, renowned historian of New York surveying, told me that country surveyors often left inner lot lines uncharted, figuring that clients could save expense and sort these out themselves. (He did, however, concede that Lewis’s reliance on a pencil was “a bit much.”)³²

One of Lewis’s assertions was entirely unfounded. Reverend Garnet had not authorized him “to receive money or otherwise.” Garnet didn’t know him. He did however know the Troy grantee James H. Henderson, “a Christian, a cautious man, and of the soundest integrity,” and someone to be taken seriously, Garnet told the North Star. It grieved him to think the grantees had “again been most miserably humbugged, and most shamefully gulled” (a reference, here, to the copycat land settlement schemes of 1847). “The matter must be seen to,” he declared. But neither he nor other good friends of the giveaway would do it. When this erupted, Garnet was at or on his way to Gerrit Smith’s, and after Peterboro, Geneva. And Peterboro was not a place from which to launch an inquiry into a surveyor Smith presumably endorsed. All that ever “saw to” this crisis was the fortuitous arrival of John Brown in May 1849. Brown reviewed Lewis’s surveys and redid them, and Keene’s litigious surveyor was not heard from again.³³

And May brought more energetic hopeful bodies to the Black Woods than Brown. From 1849 into the next decade, homesteader-grantees from Rensselaer, Ulster, Dutchess, Jefferson, Washington, and New York Counties moved not just to Blacksville, Freeman’s Home, and Timbuctoo, but to St. Armand, Duane, Negro Brook, Franklin, and Vermontville. Small parties of fellow travelers from Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Delaware joined these settlements, and after the Civil War, freed people from the South came north and made new homes. Numbers remained modest. This scattered, changeable community would never be what Gerrit Smith imagined.

It would be what it could.