Epilogue

In mid-August 2018, the Adirondack Experience (ADKX), the renowned history museum in the heart of the Adirondack Park, brought a new artifact into its core exhibition hall. The boxy little structure came from a Schroon Lake music camp in eastern Essex County. The head of the Seagle Music Colony had it built on-site in 1957 for an aspiring voice student from Clinton, North Carolina. Fulton Fryar, newly graduated from his all-Black high school, had been invited to join Seagle to study voice and opera, and his hopes for this demanding and esteemed summer program were high. There would be top-flight instruction and a chance to sing in big productions. He’d make friends too, guys like him who loved putting voice to song.

Most expectations were well satisfied. At Seagle, Fryar studied hard, sang in operas, got good parts, and helped build sets. But there would be no downtime hanging with new buddies in the bunkhouse. When he got to the colony, bone tired from the bus ride, Fryar was directed up a brushy slope to a shedlike structure near the laundry. Finished just that day: his own bespoke back of the bus, a one-man shoebox with a window, bunk bed, and shelving. Fryar, the first and only Black student at the Seagle Music Colony, was astonished. This was the North. In the North this was not supposed to happen. Fryar found some paint and a brush. On the door in a bright, flowing hand, he wrote, “Always Welcome to ‘The Closet,’ the home of Fulton Fryar.” For the two summers he spent at Seagle, this was where he slept.¹

After Fryar left, “Fulton’s Closet” was a storage unit and a utility shed. Then in 2018, when the Closet was slated for demolition, a visitor to Seagle read Fulton’s welcome on the door and inquired about the backstory. It struck him strongly that there was something here worth keeping. Preservationists were contacted, and curators pricked up their ears. The ADKX moved this relic of Adirondack-style Jim Crow to its campus, and ever since, it has been stopping people in their tracks. Amid the wicker pack baskets, stuffed bear cubs, and bent-twig headboards from the Great Camps of tycoons, it’s not what visitors expect. But it’s where the Closet belongs, making its bleak point. This happened here, and more than here. It happened in the sportsmen’s club, the jury box, the cure cottage, and the county board of supervisors. All were spaces, inside or out, where Black people in the Adirondacks were not, and where their absence spoke of white privilege and power.

There is a poem by Mark Strand called “Keeping Things Whole” I sometimes thought of while I was working on this book. The speaker describes himself in terms of where he isn’t. Where there’s a void, he fills the void, and his movement keeps things whole, plugs the gap that other people make and leave. This is what he does and all he does, and it often struck me that Blackness—for early Adirondackers in this story—seemed to register in just these terms—the absence of field, the negative space, the thing that gave what’s visible its contour and distinction. But here’s the difference. The speaker in Strand’s poem enjoys the privilege of agency. He names his job; his movement is his choice. What went on in Adirondack country—the othering of Blackness that helped keep things whole, so to speak—was not Black chosen. It was white made and white enforced.²

And the aspiring opera singer Fulton Fryar never asked to be sequestered in a shed. It was his choice, however, to speak about the Closet at the ADKX in August 2018 to an auditorium packed to capacity, and to find, after sixty years, his experience firmly acknowledged as a part of Adirondack history. His story was now everybody’s story, and the insult dealt out daily for two summers was no longer his to bear alone.

The inclusion of the Closet in the region’s leading museum rides a surging trend. Since the beginning of this century, Adirondack activists and institutions have been laboring to build awareness of the Black Adirondack experience, contend with legacies of racism, and ensure Black engagement in the process.

The ADKX has led the charge with programs that engage with social justice and inclusivity, and it looks like an exhibit on the Black Adirondack experience will find a home there too. Still going strong are several other projects that I mentioned in the preface. In 2016, Parks made John Brown Lives! its “Friends Group” for the John Brown Historic Site, which means more say in programming, site interpretation, and community outreach. The JBL! exhibit, Dreaming of Timbuctoo, continues to enlighten visitors with a story of nineteenth-century suffrage justice and the Black farming initiative that inspired Brown to move his family to his last and favorite home. The SUNY Potsdam archaeologist Hadley Kruczek-Aaron has expanded the reach of her Timbuctoo dig, which calls the Eppes family’s world to life through the revelations of material culture. In 2022, her students tackled a shady midden behind the clapboard home of Anna Newman, the Philadelphia rusticator who fell hard for the Adirondacks, stayed for keeps, and hired Lyme Epps Jr. to tend her livestock. In 2023, Hadley’s diggers will take their whisks and trowels to the presumed site of the Eppeses’ second home.

In 2016, composer Glenn McClure followed his 2013 Timbuctoo: An Abolition Oratorio, with Promised Land: An Adirondack Folk Opera, once again collaborating with musical director Helen Demong of the Northern Lights Choir in Saranac Lake. In the works, I’m told, is a full-bore opera honoring the Eppeses’ frontier lives and friendship with John Brown.

Recent responses to the story include the elegiac 2021 documentary Searching for Timbuctoo, from the Albany filmmaker Paul Miller, who gives his narrative a rich, panoramic frame and deepens the history with interviews with historians academic and independent. Martha Swan of John Brown Lives!, and educators from the state archives and the Adirondack region, are cooking up lesson plans and field trips for grade schoolers that can steep them in a corner of New York history through a saga of Black pioneers and voting rights on the antebellum Adirondack frontier. Historic signs have been erected that mark the vanished neighborhoods of Timbuctoo and Blacksville. On maps and local signage, John Thomas Brook will replace the name of the stream that bore a racist name for 150 years.³

People want to make something of this story. They want the hope that fired it, and the faith that fanned it even after its originator left it for dead. After a visit to the exhibition, the New York City jazz pianist Eli Yamin wrote and recorded the lushly rolling “Timbuctoo Blues” with his band. Two installations from the artist-activist Ren Davidson Seward of Saranac Lake occupy the grassy traffic circle at the entrance to the John Brown Farm. Under Pollia’s bronze hero and his Black friend, Davidson’s Memorial Field for Black Lives documents the tie that binds the antislavery struggle to antiracism work today. Her subject, Black Americans who were killed without cause by law enforcement officers or vigilante mobs, makes its hard point in seventy knee-high posterboards that rise in rows around the statue, each bearing a death notice as parsed and taut as a haiku. And winding behind the first, a second installation offers a chronology of Black voting rights granted or denied.

On John Brown Day in 2022, the Memorial Field was the site of an open-air dance performance from the Harlem-based dance company EMERGE125 (formerly Elisa Monte Dance of Manhattan). The company has a long-standing summer residency in Lake Placid, but it was sixteen years before the director-choreographer Tiffany Rea-Fisher learned about Timbuctoo and its roots in a suffrage justice initiative. In summer residencies since, she has choreographed a range of pieces reflecting aspects of this story. On May 8, 2022, her company honored John Brown’s birthday. At dusk, in the long shadows of the memorial statue, and to an ethereal and haunting version of “John Brown’s Body,” dancers swooped from lamentation to resolution, all soaring leaps and light.⁴

Adirondack independent scholars and history buffs find fresh portals in and out of this rich story, some of them astonishing. The research of the Plattsburgh reporter Robin Caudell inspired a monologue about the suffrage activist Helen Appo Cook, a daughter of the Black settler William Appo. In New Russia, Margaret Bartley’s interest in the Smith grantee Lafayette Mason has her scheming with a town historian in South Dakota to get a proper veteran’s headstone in the graveyard where she believes he rests. Greg Furness, before retirement a historian with NYS Parks, has, in addition to his deep-spaded genealogical work on Adirondack abolitionists and grantees, quietly replaced or fixed broken, missing, or illegible headstones of Black Adirondackers who served in the Civil War (and recently furnished William Appo Jr.’s stone with a Civil War veteran’s GAR marker). And bringing his forensic skills to bear on the map of the Black Woods, the Adirondack paleoecologist and science teacher Curt Stager has identified what might be cellar holes for the Morehouse homestead on Loon Lake, and the location of Hazzard family farmsteads. His digitization of Smith’s gift lands will point the way to an interactive map that we hope will let people see at a keystroke just where the land lots were for grantees such as Frederick Douglass, Solomon Northup, and Willis Hodges. Another intriguing prospect: a self-guided hiking map that will get this story off the page and give it boots and blisters. Brother Yusuf Burgess, who introduced city kids from Albany and Troy to Adirondack camping and a dose of abolition history (see the preface), would be all in.⁵

Engaging with this story, too, are conservationists and stewards of Adirondack culture. In 2022, the nonprofit Adirondack Land Trust has pledged to bring more “cultural due diligence” to its research on land awaiting conservation action. So, more human history (like evidence of squatters, Native Americans, or here-and-gone Smith grantees) may figure in title searches of properties on what used to be Smith’s gift land. Another august not-for-profit, Adirondack Architectural Heritage (AARCH), known mainly for its preservation advocacy and fine-grained tours of Adirondack landmarks (Great Camps, hunters’ clubs, rustic boathouses, historic barns, etc.), now lists a driving tour of Timbuctoo in its long inventory, no small effort given the dearth of cabin sites and other proofs of occupancy.⁶

In 2022, two venerable environmental organizations, the Adirondack Council and Protect the Adirondacks! (PROTECT), hosted presentations on the story of Smith’s giveaway—a tacit recognition of all that twenty-first-century environmental activists have in common with New York’s Black agrarians before the Civil War. In addition to their mutual respect for the salving, transformational power of the wilderness, both activist generations share a recognition of the forest as a potential commons, and of wild nature as the image of democracy in action, blind to skin color, unimpressed with caste. True, the Black pioneer stalked his soul-forging regenerative moment with a rifle and an axe, and the twenty-first-century hiker-tourist with a day pass and a laminated map, but the expectation in each case of better health and spiritual refreshment in these still, fragrant woods is still very much the same.⁷

The early framing of the Adirondacks as a fount of Black replenishment and self-belief also inflects new projects and initiatives that aim to get Black New Yorkers to the Adirondack Park. Since 1991, Benita Law-Diao from the South Bronx and Albany, an organizer with the national organization Outdoor Afro, has been taking Black New Yorkers—teenagers, families, naturalists, women—into the Adirondacks for canoe trips and hikes. This is work she does for free and with a missionary fervor. “I want people to know what’s here!” she says. “Oh my God, to see what it does for people. The joy.” One vanload at a time, Law-Diao is making converts, among them, Governor Kathy Hochul, who in 2022 appointed Law-Diao to the Adirondack Park Agency. She is the first Black board member in its fifty-one years.⁸

The twelve-year-old Adirondack Diversity Initiative (ADI) is another group that has aimed to introduce Black urbanites to the Adirondack region. It can be a tough sell. BIPOC students from New York City at SUNY Potsdam, for instance, may be only fifteen miles from the Blue Line, but to many, the nearby wilderness can seem as distant as Duluth. One shrewd program offers not only outdoor expeditions but affordable provisions that can make the difference between a great first experience and a bust (think tents, sleeping bags, a good raincoat, and Smartwool socks). The ADI has also partnered with Black excursion outfits from Rochester, Albany, and the Bronx to facilitate day hikes, river trips, and tours of the Wild Center and the John Brown Farm.

Particularly hopeful is the Timbuctoo Climate and Careers Summer Institute from the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry (ESF) in Syracuse. Paul Hai, director of the ESF’s Adirondack Interpretive Center and an advocate for diversifying the Adirondack workforce, has long argued the benefits of giving Black city students access to a summer stint of experiential learning in the woods. Forest ranger, camp director, mycologist—these prospects need a spark. At Adirondack environmentalist Aaron Mair’s suggestion, the “Timbuctoo Pipeline” will partner with Brooklyn’s Medger Evers College, a CUNY Brooklyn school with a largely Black enrollment, to set up young Black scholars with boots-on-the-ground summer study at ESF and other upstate campuses. And if this downstate/Adirondack alliance invokes another visionary city-to-wilderness program that helped city Black New Yorkers find the woods in 1846, it should. Both Mair and Hai celebrate this legacy (Mair has introduced members of the Black, Puerto Rican, Hispanic, and Asian state legislative caucus to the Timbuctoo exhibit at the John Brown farm). In 2022, at the urging of the caucus, the state legislature awarded the “Timbuctoo Pipeline” $2.1 million, and gave the same amount again in 2023.⁹

All of these present-day initiatives (I’ve named only a few) can leave no doubt that the early promise of the Black Woods as a landscape of transformation retains its power to inspire. Not so enduringly charismatic has been the appeal of Black Adirondack farming. No “pipelines” are being organized to revive this part of Smith’s old scheme, and no field trips to Black-owned farms either. Of the eighty-five Black- managed farms in New York State on a recent map from Black Farmers United NYS, not one is in the six-million-acre Adirondack region. In the Finger Lakes, Hudson River valley, and Long Island are clusters of Black farmers. Inside the Blue Line there are none. Racial diversity does not distinguish this region’s sixty farmers’ markets, or the scores of locally supported small farms that constellate Essex County’s eastern half. The nearest Black-owned farm I know of near the Adirondack Park is sixteen miles south of it. In Canajoharie’s long-shuttered Beech-Nut baby food plant, E29 Labs will provide five hundred union jobs and a “cultivation facility” for “adult use” cannabis.¹⁰

We are a long way from Timbuctoo.

We are also a long way from exhausting the uses of this story for scholars. Much remains to be explored. Early in this book, for instance, I identified several Black settlement plans in New York that were inspired by Smith’s announcement of 1846. But the reach of Smith’s idea extended well beyond the border of his state. After the war, speculators and justice activists hoped to set up freedpeople on farm colonies in the South, and their bids to win Smith’s backing ranged from the crudely opportunistic to the fervently altruistic, the grandiose to the shyly hopeful, and the one-page summary to the pamphlet-long petition. Smith heard from bankrupt enslavers wanting him to compensate them for their efforts to change up the plantation (See how far we’ve come! No slaves! No overseers! All that bad business done with!), even while their schemes subverted any prospect of Black-owned farms or homes, mobility, self-employment, or freedom from debt. Northern speculators in the South waxed eloquent about maximizing profits by systematizing labor, but this hardly benefited freedpeople or helped Black laborers gain holdings of their own.¹¹

But some appeals were more generous and earnestly progressive, and a few were from abolitionists as long in the racial justice trenches as Gerrit Smith. The Yankee activist Charles Stearns purchased a 1,500-acre farm near Augusta, Georgia, and broke it into plots for Black ex-slaves and white Northerners alike (and Stearns dreamed big, aiming to plant “in every Southern County a New England colony” whose “influence [would] entirely renovate the South”). The devout abolitionist John Gregg Fee organized a Black residential community in Camp Nelson, Kentucky, selling modest house lots at one-fifth the market price to freedmen who were veterans of the US Colored Troops. And Smith said no to all of them, the speculators and idealists and his old Radical Republican allies in Congress who hoped for his support for government land confiscation. No project that might stiffen the animosity the vanquished white South bore toward the North would win his backing. He did not want to see this war revived.¹²

Can we discern the influence of Timbuctoo today? In the South in 2023, young radical agrarians preach the gospel of Black husbandry with the fervor of Charles Ray and Willis Hodges. And no less than the Black agents, they celebrate the links between Black farming, self-sufficiency, civic empowerment, and spiritual health.¹³

Smith’s plan also speaks to—and might even be a forerunner—of affirmative action. This justice-driven strategy we call affirmative action wouldn’t get its name until 1961, when President Kennedy introduced it in an executive order aiming to fight job discrimination against minorities (later this order would take on discrimination against women). The injustice Gerrit Smith targeted was Black enfranchisement, but his plan, too, strove to equalize a badly uneven playing field. Another commonality these two plans share: the criticism they invited, and do still, for seeming to reward the undeserving and for failing to provide sufficient capitalization, structure, and administrative support. Nor would either scheme be credited for everything it got (or is getting) right. An effort to contextualize Smith’s project would both contemporize it and historicize affirmative action as a trend much older than we think.¹⁴

I glancingly observed the creep of Adirondack gentrification and its impact on the Black grantees, their children, and their communities, but after reading the Adirondack sociologist Eliza Darling’s seven-part online essay on the attenuated history of Adirondack displacement and gentrification, I’m sorry I didn’t push my inquiry harder. Darling’s research has me wondering, for instance, whether, after the Civil War, Black and white families in the Black Woods were dropping from the census in equal measure. What about the comparative rates of bankruptcy and eviction? Would a close review of court responses to debt or petty crime reveal patterns of divergence? What uncomfortable and useful information might a more data-driven inquiry reveal?¹⁵

Another topic that begs for a deep dive: Smith’s land philanthropy in the context of Native American land loss. We speak generally about settler colonialism on wild land from coast to coast, but Adirondack scholars have given this “exempted” region too quick a pass. In Peter Smith of Peterboro: Furs, Land and Anguish, Gerrit Smith’s hometown biographer, Norman Dann, traces the early nineteenth-century upstate fur trader and land baron Peter Smith’s massive land purchases and clears the way for further interrogation. Anecdotal yarns about his unforgiving landlordism are an old story; not so the pattern of opportunism and duplicity Dann notes in Smith Sr.’s long dealings with indigenous people. Put plainly, this speculator’s land wealth was gained at the expense of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, and the inherited wealth that enabled Gerrit Smith’s ability to give away his land had roots in toxic soil. How we understand Gerrit Smith’s land gifts to impoverished Black New Yorkers will gain from a consciousness of its indebtedness to other people’s losses and displacement.¹⁶

The irony is that several of the leading settler colonizers who benefited from the land fortunes of the Smiths were themselves of indigenous descent. According to the town historian, Lyman E. Eppes’s father was a “full blooded Indian.” To Amherst census takers in 1900 and 1910, the Hasbrook family aligned itself with the Montauk branch of the Narragansetts (as would, in 1910, the family patriarch, Josiah Hasbrook Sr., from his last home in Sag Harbor). In Saranac Lake in 1910, Morehouses and Gordineers (also spelled Gardineer) claimed Montauk ancestry (and, rather weirdly, a link to the “Arikara,” a tribe in South Dakota). The affiliation is not repeated, but even if it showed up only in a few censuses, we might ponder what this meant to Adirondack families long identified as Black, and wonder, too, whether an allegiance to a native heritage informed their forebears’ move to this frontier.¹⁷

In recent years, some scholars have discerned in the Black Woods a kind of lost utopia. Certainly Gerrit Smith’s own Bible-fired perfectionism argues for this view. His first notion of the colony reflected the radical theology that joined his idea of what could be, and what ought to be, to a practical solution; it partook of the ideal from the first. His Black land agents also reveled in the millenarianism of Bible politics and sketched the prospective colony in utopian terms. But since the hopeful rhetoric never translated into a working model, or a plan for one, or the hope of one once settlers actually settled, the utopian reading is not mine.¹⁸

But exceptionalist readings of Adirondack history are a regional tradition, and they are going strong. An ADKX-sponsored webinar on Timbuctoo in 2022, for instance, counted fully twelve “Black Suffrage Communities” that Gerrit Smith “set up.” And maybe there’s no help for this. Maybe the happy habit of exceptionalism is baked into the region’s DNA, and if I can learn to love the regional tradition, embrace hyperbole as heritage, I won’t feel so confused. A town supervisor assures her audience on Franklin Pioneer Day, “We did not see race.” Really? But she was speaking for her memory, a proud one, and good for her.¹⁹

She did not speak, however, for the Black chauffeurs in Saranac Lake’s segregated boardinghouses, or the white proprietors of Adirondack cottage colonies, motor courts, and inns whose lodgings went unlisted in the Negro Motorist Green Book from 1936 to 1964. They saw race, I’m pretty sure. And the Boy Scouts, school principals, and firemen who blacked up for hometown minstrel fundraisers in every corner of the park did too. The Adirondack editor who wrote the headline, “Colored Man in E-Town Jail for Auto Theft” in 1926 when Marshall Morehouse’s cousin stole a car saw race—skin pigment being, in this report, the first proof of criminality. And I’m guessing two Black schoolchildren, Oscar and Ann Morehouse, saw race when a white classmate was cast as a “Nigger Doll” in the Petrova Elementary School Christmas pageant in 1948—and this announced in the same issue of the Adirondack Daily Enterprise that reported with grave concern a Georgia governor’s new “ ‘white supremacy’ program designed to keep 80 per cent of Georgia’s negroes from the ballot.”²⁰

My question is, why idealize? Why gild the lily? It doesn’t need the paint. What makes the integrated neighborhoods and hamlets of the Black Woods exemplary is that they weren’t exceptional. Race was seen, felt, and noted. Why shun the history that was? The Black-founded settlements we know were on the ground were miracle enough without tripling their numbers. Even in the glory days of a rough parity on the frontier, Black and white frontiersmen commingled not from a heedful dream of racial justice but because cooperating made life easier and beat the inefficient alternative. James Brady was admitted to an all-white army company because he was pale enough to pass, and beefing up the company spared his town the burden of a draft. The innkeeper Iddo Osgood urged two Black men to move to North Elba because it didn’t have a minister or doctor, and they could meet the need. When a tax collector needed proof that John Thomas owned and worked his property, Thomas’s white neighbors gave it. Standing for the Thomases meant the Thomases would stand for them.

Charles B. Ray, who more than any agent trusted the genius of expediency, had it right all along. It would be the face-to-face encounter that sparked the intermittent bonfires of an equalitarian frontier. That’s where I find the best of the Black Woods: in all the messy, needful dealings that make room for the human factor—dealings that often leave me a little hungry, because the closer-in the zoom, the more I want to know. Too bad! says history with a shrug. I’m done here. You’re on your own. Simeon Hasbrook climbed Whiteface. This much we can be sure of. There’s a letter that reports it. But did he slow for blueberries? Could he see Vermont? The Hampton Singers stayed with the Eppeses when they visited Lake Placid. Were there fireflies that evening? Did they walk to John Brown’s grave? And the Alabama sharecropper Robert McCray who got $300 for his late father’s Adirondack gift lot … what did his wife say? What happened next? John Brown wrote Willis Hodges thirty-five letters, almost all of these destroyed when Brown was put under arrest. What was in them? Names of fugitives? Details of routes? I want answers! Maybe, you as well. And the history won’t get us there, won’t say what wasn’t saved.

But it gets us this far. It gets us to the point of asking—to wondering, and then imagining. Can there be a better view?