Acknowledgments

If it weren’t for Betsy Folwell, my longtime, now retired editor at Adirondack Life magazine, I would not have gotten started and then stuck on writing articles about Adirondack ethnic, social, and migratory history. And if I hadn’t written what I did, Martha Swan, director of the social action group John Brown Lives!, wouldn’t have urged me to curate the exhibit Dreaming of Timbuctoo, which gave rise to this book.

So thanks, first thing, to these two friends for their long faith.

As for other long companions: these books are in my bibliography, but even so, I name them here to salute their uncommon usefulness to me in this endeavor. The Plains of Abraham, by the late Lake Placid town historian, Mary MacKenzie, was never far from my desk. Notwithstanding our sometimes vastly different interpretations of the Black experience in the region, her long chapter on North Elba’s Black community was the first to recognize the Smith grantees as Adirondackers and stakeholders in her town’s story, and my debt to this pioneering dive is great. Philip Terrie’s Contested Terrain and Forever Wild, touchstones of Adirondack cultural history, stretched my understanding of what the Black pioneers experienced, and the social historian Sally Svenson’s wide-ranging Blacks in the Adirondacks offered a panoramic overview of regional Black history that helped me keep the Black Woods of Gerrit Smith in perspective.

On the great age of antislavery reform and resistance, I never stopped referencing Benjamin Quarles’s many books, or the authoritative Black Abolitionist Papers, or checking in with John Stauffer’s The Black Hearts of Men, for his inquiry into an interracial friendship among prominent radical reformers bound by their interest in Gerrit Smith’s idea. No biography of John Brown was more helpful to me than David Reynolds’s authoritative effort, or more respectful of the Black community in North Elba. And a few books that had nothing whatsoever to do with Adirondack history, like Patricia Limerick’s The Legacy of Conquest and Jonathan Spiro’s Defending the Master Race, gave me sturdy guideposts too.

That 2001 exhibition, Dreaming of Timbuctoo, the inspiration for this book project, was much enhanced by archival research from several volunteers, and many of their bold findings are represented here. So to Cliff Oliver, Charles Touhey, Jeff Jones, Suzy Doolittle, Claudia Blackler, Bill Herbert, Shirley Morgan, Mary Hotaling, Cherrie Burgess and her late husband, the beloved Brother Yusuf Burgess, and, always and again, Martha Swan of John Brown Lives!—my stubborn gratitude at the thought of how much we got done.

Assistance and encouragement met one request of mine after another in libraries and archives at the Adirondack Experience (formerly the Adirondack Museum); the Adirondack History Museum; New-York Historical Society; Morgan Library; New York State Archives and State Library; Hart-Cluett Museum, Research Room, in Troy; Special Collections Research Center, Bird Library, Syracuse University; Special Collections, Feinberg Library, SUNY Plattsburgh; the National Archives and Records Administration in Washington, DC; Saratoga Springs Public Library; Saranac Lake Free Library, Adirondack Room; Lake Placid Public Library; and of course, the county archives of Essex, Franklin, Herkimer, and Hamilton. The Essex County Archives in the courthouse is one especially sweet place to work.

All of the content-rich websites that now make primary material so accessible have been a blessing beyond measure. I leaned particularly hard on Ancestry.com, Accessible Archives, NYS Historic Newspapers, Fulton County History, the West Virginia Memory Project, and Newspapers.com—sleep-thieving, eye-blearing rabbit holes every one.

Shrewd leads came my way from John Brown biographer and scholar Lou DeCaro, Donna Burdick, town historian of Smithfield, NY, Cynthia Halberson of the Jones Library, Amherst, MA, and Patty Wiley of the Middlesex Historical Society in Vermont. Brendan Mills, supervisor of the John Brown State Historic Site, Debra Kimok of SUNY Plattsburgh’s Special Collections, Margaret Gibbs, Jenifer Kuba, Lindsay Pontius, all of the Adirondack History Museum, and Jerry Pepper of the Adirondack Experience directed me to sources unexpected. To the long line of researchers and scholars who have benefited from the expertise of James Folts of the New York State Archives, I add my name and awe. The independent scholars Margaret Bartley, Karl Beckwith Smith, Tom Calarco, Norm Dann, David Fiske, Morris Glenn, Mary Hotaling, Carol Kammen, Hadley Kruczek-Aaron, Lee Manchester, Don Papson, Ken Perry, Curt Stager, Paul and Mary Liz Stewart, and John Warren all gifted me with great ideas and suggestions, and Greg Furness, especially, never met a query he couldn’t run to ground.

Greg and Gladys Furness, Jane Haugh, Chris Jerome, John Stauffer, Phil Terrie, and Chase Twitchell read versions of this book. Each brought to it a discrete perspective and special expertise and alerted me to key points, thematic possibilities, and blunders I had missed. And for the last section on memory and memorials, I could have had no better reader than the late Michael Kammen.

I think it’s fair to say the academy isn’t famous for its warm regard for independent scholars, and of course, our own sullen expectation of indifference doesn’t help. But I got very lucky with the anonymous readers who vetted this manuscript for Cornell University Press. They all know this territory well, and reviewed it with care and gratifying interest. They held it to a high standard, and gifted me with tough advice, most of which I took.

A Hackman Fellowship from the New York State Archives plunged me into the substantial bounty of the Essex County tax redemption records. Two grants from the Furthermore Foundation, an initiative of the J. M. Kaplan Fund, let me extend my research and grace the book with maps and artwork too. Two residencies at the Blue Mountain Center in Blue Mountain Lake were much valued. And thanks are owed to the editors Annie Stoltie, Lisa Bramen, and Niki Kourofsky, of Adirondack Life. Whether they gave me room to write articles that informed this book (on poorhouses, impoverished contract farmers, squatters, peddlers, blackface minstrel shows, conservation and eugenics, or the Klan) or the chance to rework research for this book into articles (on Black Civil War veterans, Smith’s land agents, or the scuttling of a state plan for an interpretative center at John Brown’s home), I have been one lucky freelancer, and am very much obliged.

My agent Malaga Baldi of Baldi Books has been all in from the day she finished reading the manuscript, and how this project might have fared without her good faith and straight talk is hard to imagine. Michael McGandy, my acquisitions editor at Cornell University Press, was for this book before it was a book, and for that confidence alone I am in his debt. Both book and writer were strengthened by his unsentimental rigor, his regard for organization, and his wide-angle perspective on this history. Associate editor Clare Jones, tasked with shepherding this slow learner through my management of image logs, permissions, TIFFs, and JPGs, had a thankless job she dispatched with steely calm.

Marketing is new to me but the mavens at CUP were not discouraged, and made this new world legible and fun. The book itself was much improved by the sharp eye of its copyeditor, Eric Levy. And I got really very lucky with my production editor Karen Laun, who fielded a blizzard of eleventh-hour tweaks and edits. Thanks also to my proofreader, Alan Berolzheimer, and to the challenge-loving reference librarians in my hometown public library, and most of all, to my friend and neighbor Mitch Cohen, who saw me through the long home stretch of readying this book for production with patience and unfailing cheer. May every digitally clueless author be so blessed.

Writers who work slowly ask a lot of people close to us. After a while, our friends get bored, and maybe frustrated or uneasy. She’s never going to finish, so don’t ask. It’s from kindness, so no blame! But for my friends who did keep asking—Martha Swan, Dennis Johnson, Valerie Merians, Chris Shaw, Steve Stern, Debra Spark, Karen Brooks, Jane Haugh, Marc Woodworth, Susan Bokan, Bruce Kennett, Sylvia Davatz, Sally Brady, and Louise, Sara, and Carol (sister, sister-in-law, and cousin)—God bless. I did it. I hit send.

I could also thank my husband Jack Nicholson, and our son Jesse who grew up with this project, but it would be like thanking my own breath. That’s how livening has been their interest and support.