A Wonderfully Enjoyable Affair

Not every JBMA pilgrimage raised a throng. During the Depression, and in the war years, too, attendance waned and local interest flagged. The big-ticket orators of the first decades of the twentieth century—the trial lawyer Clarence Darrow, who packed Town Hall to standing room only; Oswald Garrison Villard, author of Brown’s first literary biography; A. Philip Randolph, founder of the nation’s first Black labor union—gave way to speakers much less luminous. Barber’s successors (he died in 1949) did not share his gift for programming or promotion. But in those first decades before the Second World War, when the JBMA raised chapters in Brooklyn, Manhattan, Springfield, Worcester, and Baltimore, John Brown Day was something fine. Early May brought a mayoral welcome, organ concerts, church services, and speeches by townspeople of influence, and, usually, some passionate and edgy oratory by a racial justice advocate of renown. Adirondackers were especially taken with the folksy, suspender-popping style of the wide-shouldered Darrow, the celebrated provocateur. “The white man gives the negro inferior wages and mean jobs,” he declared, “then says the negro is lazy and won’t work; but when the white man does work good and hard one day, he says he has ‘workt like a nigger.’ … If any of you white people, leaving this meeting tonight, had to choose between losing a leg or being Black, which would you prefer?”⁷

By the late 1920s, Lake Placid was claiming John Brown Day as a tradition, and so confident was Barber of its acceptance that he pitched it as a vacation in its own right, a “wonderfully enjoyable affair… . The automobiles carry copiously filled lunch baskets and the cars are decorated with John Brown Memorial Pennants. They all stop to lunch together far up in New York State… . Pictures are snapped, jokes are swapped and the whole atmosphere is permeated with jolly camaraderie.” All of this may seem to bear no relation to a day of solemn homage. But to Black travelers in this era, the link between this spring pilgrimage to a hero’s grave and the freedom to go “excursioning” was as bright as May itself. For three American centuries, the open road was ruled by whites. Where Black travelers could go, what they did, where they slept, and how they got around was determined by white bosses. They might know the road as construction workers, cooks, porters, drivers, or maids, but not as citizens charting their own course. Train travel to the North in the first half of the twentieth century meant a siege in a Jim Crow car with hard benches, sooty air, and flooding toilets. Traveling by foot could put a Black man afoul of a vagrancy law and hitch him to a chain gang. The JBMA pilgrimage more than spurned this legacy; it stood it on its head. The promise of a safe, welcoming vacation for Black Americans in an all-white rural region (all white, that is, as far as the pilgrims knew) subverted all the old conventions. Barber reveled in the upset.⁸

From a JBMA brochure in 1928: “The people of Lake Placid delight to welcome us and give us the freedom of the Village.” Self- determination and freedom of assembly, movement, speech—this was the promise of John Brown Day. A few years later in the Pittsburgh Courier, Barber’s claim was bolder still. “The pilgrimage is an event in the Northwoods,” he said. “We have established contacts up there which, to say the least, few Negroes have anywhere else. There is a respect for us which I have not seen given to any colored group in any of their conventions.”⁹

Much more, then, was in the offing than a “good time coming” and a balsam-tingled breeze. For Black pilgrims, the long trip to Brown’s grave was as salving as the laying of the wreath. Where white pilgrims made a cult of the hardships of the journey, the twentieth-century Black pilgrims loved this getaway for its lack of risk, its normality and ease—and, too, for the pleasure of a historic site where they were plainly welcome. At George Washington’s Mount Vernon, Black tourists could not use the picnic grounds or reach the place except by a segregated streetcar or a steamer that docked far from the entrance. In Washington’s lovely home, they were subjected to a “lost cause” version of enslavement with throwback “darkeys” and “Uncle Neds” happily engaged in household service. What a relief to find in remote North Elba a state historic site where slavery was actually called out as a crime.¹⁰

Barber had a second goal for his organization too, though he waited until 1924 to announce it. He wanted to see Brown’s Adirondack grave honored with a monument from Black America, a monument whose design, funding, siting, and installation would be overseen entirely by his new John Brown Memorial Association. The pilgrimage was fine for the few days it lasted, but a monument might bring Black pilgrims to North Elba every day, and claim a stake here for Black visitors the long year round.¹¹

Fancy Our Surprise

Who was Jesse Max Barber, the Philadelphia activist who launched this plan? What made him want to do this? After college (where he edited the campus newspaper and another publication), this aspiring journalist, a son of former slaves in Blackstock, North Carolina, moved to Atlanta and got work editing and writing for a periodical, the Voice of the Negro. By 1904, the Voice claimed a readership of fifteen thousand. Observing this meteoric rise was another Black Atlantan, the writer, sociologist, and reformer, W. E. B. Du Bois, who asked the youthful journalist to join his coalition of some thirty Black professionals engaged in civil rights reform. The Niagara Movement, as this group was called, was gaining fame and notoriety for contesting Booker T. Washington’s ideology of racial accommodation. It wasn’t true and it wasn’t right, Du Bois insisted, that only Blacks who toed a line of “non-resistance, giving up agitation, and acquiescence in semi-serfdom” could gain a public voice. “Bookerism” had a stranglehold on Black civic progress. Du Bois aimed to snap its grip.¹²

Young Max Barber made his Atlanta journal a mouthpiece for these subversive notions and a venue, too, for his and his mentor’s shared devotion to John Brown. For four days in August 1906, Barber and the Niagara Movement activists honored Brown at Harpers Ferry. One attendee from Chicago, the socialist churchman Reverdy Ransom, urged his fellow radicals to model their resolve on John Brown’s “sublime courage.” So moved was Barber by Bishop Ransom’s appeal that he published it in his Voice: “Like the ghost of Hamlet’s father, the spirit of John Brown beckons us to arise and seek the recovery of our rights… . No weak and ordinary voice can call the nation back to a sense of justice.”¹³

Hard on the heels of that summer’s triumph, however, was the three-day September race riot that swung across Atlanta like a scythe. Was Barber thinking of Bishop Ransom’s challenge when he furnished the New York World with a report? In this anonymous indictment, Barber charged Atlanta’s white newspapers and political elite with inciting a race riot with unsubstantiated reports of sexual violence and lurid stories about Black “fiends” infected by a “rape germ”—fake news that Barber countered with evidence of white racist conjecture. This was bold, and more than risky. When white Atlantans learned who wrote the piece, they gave the editor his options. He could leave the city, and at once, or expect to find himself on a chain gang. The alacrity with which Barber moved his family to Chicago suggests the gravity of the threat. Just as traumatizing, Barber’s adversary, Booker Washington, made this forced migration an occasion to paint Barber as a coward, a mocking stigma that effectively derailed the editor’s career. Only when the family moved to Philadelphia and Barber took up dentistry and joined the NAACP would he find his second act.¹⁴

In 1922, when Barber and Spotuas Burwell first visited North Elba, Barber was forty-four and his sponsor, the NAACP, was the nation’s boldest voice for civil rights reform. So the wreath-laying at John Brown’s grave seven years after Booker Washington’s death did more than break a long spell of Black disengagement with John Brown. It defied the cautious strategies of Bookerism (“counsels of submission,” Du Bois called them) that stood for all that the arch-antiaccommodationist John Brown despised. Indeed, the Lake Placid ceremony was as much a paean to post-Bookerite public activism as it was to Brown himself.¹⁵

And a highly scripted celebration it was, too. On John Brown Day, May 9, 1922, the Philadelphia pilgrims would claim to be shocked! shocked! when they were thronged by white locals at John Brown’s farm. “Fancy our surprise,” Barber told the NAACP magazine, The Crisis, “to find that … the public schools had taken a holiday for the occasion, the Chamber of Commerce sent a delegation to welcome us, and the distinguished people of the town came out to be at the memorial services… . There were perhaps one hundred and fifty automobiles parked around the grave and a thousand people there to do honor to her. The school children walked the three and one-half miles to be with us.” Among his audience “was a judge from the town … lawyers, doctors, school board members, and members of the aristocratic clubs. Old soldiers embraced us. Men who knew John Brown wept for joy that this long-deferred occasion had come. Our photographs were taken by a dozen cameras. School girls took pictures for their civic class. Our pictures are now on sale as souvenir postcards in Placid, and at the caretaker’s place at the farm.” Anchoring the ecstatic dispatch in The Crisis was a photograph of Blacks and whites clustered around and standing atop Brown’s boulder under a postracial Yankee sky. In truth, Barber had labored hard behind the scenes to win town backing. But describing white people just showing up would help convince Black readers of The Crisis that Lake Placid was safe to visit—as would Barber’s suggestion that white locals asked the pilgrims to return. A yearly pilgrimage was always part of Barber’s long-range plan, but crediting the locals made John Brown country look especially hospitable. And with these hopeful exaggerations, Barber joined an old fraternity. Willis Hodges, Frederick Douglass, Henry Highland Garnet, and Charles Bennett Ray had each burnished an idealized Adirondacks in hopes of stepping up Black interest.¹⁶

But Barber would not have known this. With the exception of Lyman Epps Jr. (always honored on John Brown Day for his friendship with the Browns), the grantees and the Black Woods of Gerrit Smith were of no interest to the Black pilgrims. On no John Brown Day would Barber mention Timbuctoo, Freeman’s Home, Blacksville, or any of the Smith grantees’ descendants still in Vermontville, Saranac Lake, and St. Armand. The family likeness between an 1846 bid for equal voting rights for Black New Yorkers and Barber’s generation’s push for Black enfranchisement was not noted. JBMA speakers made no mention of the Black antislavery reformers who plugged the giveaway ( John Brown’s good friends among them). Nobody knew that near Brown’s home were gift lots, never claimed, of Frederick Douglass and William Wells Brown. When Lyman Epps’s clan was hailed, it was never for its early stake in a Black voting rights initiative. The kinships between the nineteenth-century Black grantees and the JBMA activists (their shared delight, for instance, in their freedom of speech, movement, and expression in the Adirondack region, with schools, churches, roads, and back trails and fishing holes accessible to all), were unobserved.¹⁷

Uneasy with Agrarianism

Partly this may have reflected Barber’s own impatience with Black agrarianism, which for so long had been the pet cause of his nemesis. Buy land, build your farm, own your home, and gain your self-sufficiency, Booker Washington had promised, and white respect will follow. But it hadn’t. In the Voice of the Negro, Barber once published a piece about one “Simon Elijah Constant,” an imagined devotee of Washington’s school of quiet industry and uplift, whose “every effort tend[ed] toward the ownership of land, the accumulation of wealth, and the right-shaping of his personal career for the weighty responsibilities of honorable citizenship,” yet who, for all his effort, never could get further than “Alas, Simon the Serf.” As late as 1920, sixty years after emancipation, only a quarter of the nation’s 218,612 Black farmers owned their farms. The rest were stuck in peonage. There was no rising up for them.¹⁸

“No race can prosper till it learns there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem,” Booker Washington had said. Gerrit Smith would have agreed. But Smith envisioned husbandry as a path to political empowerment. Each deed he dispatched to a hopeful pioneer struck a blow at a racist law that kept Black men voteless; all along, his goal was to empower a landowning antislavery electorate. Did Barber’s generation of Black pilgrims know this? Or did one back-to-the-farm promotion sound just like another? And what, anyway, could they know of Smith’s “scheme” in 1922?¹⁹

The JBMA was entirely dependent on white memory for its view of the Black Woods, for what it knew (and didn’t) about Gerrit Smith, and even for what it loved about Lyman Epps Jr. And where did this leave Barber? All he knew and maybe could know about the giveaway was that Brown got land from a rich reformer and hoped to lend the Black farmers a hand. After that, he relied on historical accounts much skewed by ignorance and racial bias. Archival sources that might have set the record straight were not yet publicly available, and Black scholars who may have hoped to challenge the clichés lacked access to relevant collections. Frothingham’s Smith biography would have assured Barber that the grantee-settlers had “none of the qualities that make the farmer,” and Du Bois’s biography of Brown went no deeper since he, too, relied on all-white, biased sources. Villard’s Brown book made much better use of primary material but offered little insight into the pioneers, whose experience, as ever, was winnowed through the Browns’. As for what Barber gleaned from local memory, this, too, reflected the pinhole focus on John Brown, his neighborhood, and his family. Nor would Barber have picked up much from county histories. By the late nineteenth century, the writers, artists, and environmental lawmakers who shaped the image of the region privileged the imagery of wilderness—mountains, woods, and water—over homelier, less charismatic farmscapes.²⁰

So I don’t blame Barber, Burwell, or any of the pilgrimage’s promoters for saying nothing about the giveaway, a subject that was undervalued, little studied, and poorly understood. Even if they had read Brown’s biographies or heard North Elbans’ stories about a vanished Adirondack farm colony for Blacks, they still may have not have seen what that fragile, failed, long-ago experiment had to do with them. That … embarrassment. That best-forgotten bust.

Nor would the one living source of information ever challenge this assessment. It was, after all, Lyman Epps Jr.’s link to John Brown, not his tie to Timbuctoo, that garbed him with his cloak of visibility. The Epps that Barber reverenced was a portal, a living witness to the martyred saint. And I only am escaped alone to tell thee. And fine with the grantee’s son! The more esteemed was Epps’s link to Brown, the more removed he was from a narrative of failure. He was not one of those “lazy good-for-nothins” who “just took one look at the place and turned around and went right back.” He was of this place now, a lifelong North Elban and proud to be “the only Negro who [had] ‘stuck out the snow and the cold up here.’ ” I’ve gone native, he told a white interviewer. Woolly mackinaws and hard-as-iron winters were his joy. Every day he marched a mile to the post office with a cane made out of a hickory golf club he salvaged from the links of the Lake Placid Club. At his birthday party in 1941 (he claimed he was one hundred), he pulled a cross-cut saw. He was feted by the Grand Army of the Republic at a campfire at the John Brown Farm. “People don’t treat me as though I was colored,” he mused. “They act as though I was just like them, and that’s how I want to be.”²¹

He wasn’t just like them, and not so much like his father either. Between the antebellum grantee-settler’s upward trajectory and the son’s failure to prosper was a world of difference. Eppes Sr. was a resolute pioneer who farmed into his eighties, an Adirondack guide, a charter member of North Elba’s Union Church, and contributor to Douglass’s broadsheet. His judgment won John Brown’s respect and the confidence of city deedholders who trusted him to sell their land. The five of his and Annie’s eight children who survived to grow up in North Elba sang at school, church, and civic events. When he retired, or he and Annie celebrated their golden anniversary, or lodged the Hampton minstrels at their Newman home, the newspapers took note. Four ministers spoke at his funeral. Eppes Sr. was a man of parts.²²

His son Lyme Jr., the only one of Eppes’s children to stay in North Elba, never owned a home outright. He was a farmhand with bosses. He worked for his father, and in 1872 tended oxen for Anna Newman, a rich Philadelphian with a sprawling farm near Brown’s home. He groomed the links at the Lake Placid Club, a place that hired no Black caddies, waitstaff, cooks, or housekeepers. He worked at the town dump. He hoped he might be hired by the state to be the caretaker at the historic John Brown Farm. He knew he could do the story justice, and others knew it too. “There is now a movement under foot to provide a place at the farm for Lyman Epps,” a reporter wrote in 1921. “Lyman Epps is now 71. He is perhaps the only man living who was intimately in touch with John Brown… . He relates many interesting incidents in connection with JB and would be of great value at the memorial in receiving visitors at the grave and recounting intimate stories of JB’s life.” But that tap never came.²³

Local news items about Epps Jr. were doting. At the 1935 ceremony at Brown’s grave, Lake Placid mayor George P. Owens called him a “faithful Negro saint.” Readers learned about the birthday cake baked by his neighbors, and how he never missed a vote. (His long hike to the polls in 1940 was said to cause the stroke that compelled his removal to the Essex County Home.) But public fondness would not ensure security. Epps started poor and got poorer. He never could afford to visit his brother, a resident for fifty years in an insane asylum downstate. When Albert died in Wingdale, Epps could not pay to bring him home. This the town did, and interred him with his family. Lyme Epps had twenty dollars to his name when he moved to the Essex County Home.²⁴

Epps’s death in November 1942 was noted from New York to Fresno. Lake Placid’s mayor lamented the loss of a “venerable figure … esteemed and respected by all while he lived among us.” But the hometown hero could not pay for his own headstone; that bill was picked up by the Lake Placid chapter of the JBMA. Max Barber organized a service for him in Manhattan, but the town’s observance of his death was slight. Epps’s burial brought a dozen mourners, among them the funeral director, the village clerk, a few Black women from the village, and two pallbearers from the Lake Placid Club: Godfrey Dewey, the son of the club founder, and the club’s secretary and vice president, Harry Wade Hicks.²⁵

This was the double-sided quality of Adirondack race relations: on one hand, a public show of easy tolerance and inclusion, and on the other, a casual indifference. The fifty thousand readers of The Crisis who marveled at a photograph of a peaceably integrated gathering in the Adirondack Mountains honoring a militant advocate for Black rights saw one side, and that is how Max Barber wanted it. Almost every year until his death, even in the thick of the Depression when Black pilgrims from hard-hit Philadelphia could not afford to travel, he went to North Elba. His commitment never dimmed. But he would learn that the John Brown so dear to him was not the man revered by his Adirondack allies. John Brown country was a much more complicated place—here welcoming, there aloof, here accommodating, there the image of Langston Hughes’s “cold-faced North”—than he believed in 1922. He had called for a pilgrimage as committed to “the new abolition of evils of this new day” as it was devoted to “the memory of one who nobly gave his life against the evils of his day.” But one commitment did not ensure the other. And if, as Barber first exulted, “the people up there regard John Brown as a saint,” this did not mean they saw Brown as a redeemer for their century, embraced a civil rights revival, or wanted any part of a year-round interracial “new abolition” spirit in their backyard.²⁶

Barber did not argue. He was a guest here. Good guests did not reproach their hosts. In no speech in North Elba would he assail or even acknowledge Adirondack racism. But he heard about it. He knew the middle-class Black families in Lake Placid and Saranac Lake who put up pilgrims in their homes. He saw how Jim Crow mapped their lives.

The porch-fronted cottages of Saranac Lake, so renowned for the healing rest they offered guests and patients racked with tuberculosis, were as segregated here as they were elsewhere in the nation; most Adirondack sanitoriums spurned Black patrons out of hand. The Klan was active in this region too. In the first third of the twentieth century, flaming crosses lit up hills and fields only a hayride away from John Brown’s farm. Three hundred people signed up for the Klan in Ticonderoga. In Wilmington, Klansmen were so sure of their acceptability that they built a clubhouse on Route 86. In 1924, Lake Placid saw three crosses illuminated in a week. In this era, Adirondack Kluxers were mostly targeting French Americans, Irish Catholics, and backers of the downstate Democratic politician Al Smith (four-time New York governor and the first Catholic candidate for president in 1928), but Black Adirondackers would not have been consoled. They knew the crosshairs of Klan terror could find them anytime.²⁷

Social culture in the region was deeply racialized. Locally produced minstrel shows, for instance, were a staple of small-town Adirondack entertainment long before Barber was born. In 1914 and 1915, the Lake Placid News republished John Brown’s family letters, heartfelt notes that left no doubt as to his outrage with racism—right next to ads for blackface revues of “Sambo” and “Jungletown.” Adirondack opera houses and parades regularly featured blackface routines that reinforced impressions of Black incompetence and guile. From 1916 into the 1920s, Adirondack movie houses in Malone, Lake Placid, Ticonderoga, Saranac Lake, and Plattsburgh steeped Adirondack viewers in The Birth of a Nation, D. W. Griffith’s Dixie-doting, exuberantly racist take on the Great Conflict and the heartache of a Union-ravaged “stricken South.”²⁸

And none of this moved Barber to comment. His outrage at the Southern lien system (“a camouflaged form of slavery”) and his descriptions of “the misery and fear which rises like smoke from every Negro hovel” down there were full-on. Not so his public recognition of John Brown’s “cold-faced north.” But he felt it. Putting up with it was the price of getting what he wanted. Eyes on the prize, not on the heart.²⁹

The Lake Placid Club

In 1895, New York’s celebrated state librarian and regent, Melvil Dewey, founded a small residential colony in Lake Placid with a mission close to evangelical. No Gilded Age frivolity and ostentation for his new club. Here would be revived and invigorated the sturdy Yankee values of plain living and high thinking. Food would be healthy, fresh, and locally produced. Activities would honor physical fitness, literacy, and a reverent engagement with the Adirondack wilderness. The club’s hotels and cabins welcomed guests the whole year round.³⁰

And it took! By the time Max Barber first visited North Elba, the Lake Placid Club was 9,200 acres strong and the employer of 1,100. Its wooded acres were garlanded with bridle paths and ski trails. It had golf courses, a post office, and a toboggan run pitched so high it shot the long sleds clear across the lake. Most enticing to its advocates, and the key to its bright brand, was the “nation’s model rest and recreation” community’s scrupulously vetted membership. A thousand clubs and colonies were restricted in this era, but Melvil Dewey’s “Anglo-Saxonist” criteria for club membership were more than social. They were rooted in racialized eugenics, the pseudoscience of the late nineteenth-century Progressive Era that aimed to improve human “gene stock” through selective breeding. Other clubs left their exclusionary policies implicit, but the Lake Placid Club spelled out its tenets in a handbook, unmodified for decades.³¹

Welcome: white, financially secure, Protestant Republicans who had been vetted by club members. Excluded: Black people, “new-rich groups,” Cubans, and especially, emphatically, Jews, “even when of unusual personal qualifications.” A member of the national Eugenics Committee, Dewey seeded his club with members who shared his vision of a master race, such as Cornell professor Jeremiah Jenks, coauthor of The Immigration Problem, the Yale economist Irving Fisher of the American Eugenics Society (“Breed Out the Unfit and Breed in the Fit”), and the Brooklyn minister Newell Dwight Hillis, eager drummer for the Race Betterment Foundation.³²

Apologists for Dewey’s racism (many Adirondackophiles among them) are quick to invoke the rampant bigotry of the age. The wider backdrop of the era (President Woodrow Wilson’s stringent immigration policies, the resurgence of the Klan, the reflexive social antisemitism of resort hotels and clubs) suggested his defense: he was a man of his time. But as Wayne Wiegand, Dewey’s biographer, observes, Dewey’s racialized worldview did more than glimpse a trend. It advocated and promoted it. It meant that the wife of a club member would be refused membership because she was one-quarter Jewish, notwithstanding her sixteen years as a practicing Christian Scientist. It meant that Dewey derided public inquiries into his discriminatory policies as “Jew attaks [sic].” It meant he urged club members to buy up land along the Cascade Pass as a preemptive prophylactic against Jewish buyers and other “undesirables.”³³

What, exactly, had any of this to do with Barber’s pilgrimage? There were no Jews among his pilgrims, and his dealings with Melvil Dewey were insignificant. Not so, however, his exchanges with Harry Wade Hicks, the club’s secretary and vice president, and Dewey’s close friend and supporter. Barber met Hicks at one of the first pilgrimages (Hicks may have been the member of one of the Adirondack “aristocratic clubs” Barber proudly noted in The Crisis). Hicks not only shared Barber’s devotion to John Brown; he had made “Browniana” part of his club’s culture. He filled shelves and drawers in the club’s wood-paneled library with Brown ephemera and hung Brown’s portrait above its mantle. He corresponded with a score of lay enthusiasts whose devotion to “the Martyr” ensured the survival of Brown’s papers in the first half of the twentieth century when academic historians yawned. A passionate outdoorsman, he also inspired numberless club guests to visit Brown’s historic home—sometimes by starlight on long wooden skis. And when the Black Philadelphians launched a pilgrimage in 1922, Hicks, a year-round resident of the club with strong ties in North Elba, made himself the JBMA’s on-site Adirondack intermediary, and not just for a pilgrimage or three, but for close to forty years.³⁴

Hicks helped Barber get the permits from the state Department of Conservation for the JBMA’s yearly visits. He tapped local clergy and town notables to speak at John Brown Day. He pressed his club to pay for a protective cover for John Brown’s headstone. For the JBMA organizers, he sometimes led a special tour of the club itself, an offer for which Barber was particularly grateful. An exclusive club tour from a white man of refinement was a delectable reversal of the old script of Black servants ministering to whites. In stretching the show of interracial solidarity from public space (a town hall, a state historic site) to private, the tour amplified the JBMA’s influence and territory. Its marketing value was superb.³⁵

This worked for the club too. By the early 1920s, its discriminatory policies were widely known. And while a once-a-year guided tour for “worthy” Blacks posed no threat to the club’s exclusionary culture, a gestural enactment of interracial fellowship made the club look good. But a gesture, Barber learned early, it would stay.³⁶

No, Harry Hicks would not act on Barber’s suggestion that the club host an interracial conference. Nor would the club welcome a concert by a Black women’s gospel choir. When the club bought and shut down an old railroad hotel in Lake Placid in 1926 (a convenient rest stop favored by the pilgrims), Barber implored Hicks to reopen it for the John Brown Day weekend, only a few months away. He knew of nowhere else to put the pilgrims, not on such short notice. And he had been making such a point of this town’s vaunted hospitality: “What a bustle the town is in! The pilgrims have arrived. Homes and hotels are thrown open to us.” But here it was late March, and his pilgrims were unhoused. He sent worried letters to town officials, postage stamps provided. No answer. With mounting frustration, Barber wrote Hicks, “Since your Club cannot accommodate us maybe you can perhaps help by waking these men up and asking them to answer my letters.” And Hicks did. Several Saranac Lake boardinghouses made sure the pilgrims all had beds. But this late-breaking club-made housing crisis made the precarity of Barber’s status painfully apparent. He needed Hicks and valued him, and maybe the influential clubman, for reasons more obscure, needed him. But was Hicks on his side? Were they allies, or was Hicks, in fact, his keeper?³⁷

This uneasy possibility may explain why, after many years, Barber stopped asking, in each case, for Hicks’s help. There were times he did not need it, and in one case, he avoided it. The JBMA John Brown monument was a project whose progress and detailing Barber planned to manage himself. By 1934, he had been raising money for this memorial for over a decade. He had a vision, he’d pursued it, the state had given him permission to put the monument where he wanted it, and everything looked good. Then someone got ahold of Franklin B. Kirkbride. A fervent champion of eugenics and other “race betterment” initiatives, Kirkbride was the secretary of the venerable and steadfastly exclusive Ausable Club in Keene. What he’d heard about something “unsightly or inappropriate” in store for John Brown’s shrine was concerning. Kirkbride knew of Hicks’s special tie with the JBMA. He would let Hicks tackle this one. One reliably right-thinking clubman to another.³⁸

Any visitor to the John Brown Farm Historic Site has walked by Joseph Pollia’s statue of Brown in the traffic turnaround at the entrance. Zeus-sized at eight feet tall, with bulging forearms and tangled beard, midstride and on the move, Pollia’s Brown is accompanied by a Black youth, unnamed, who gazes gravely up at “the Liberator” as if to memorize his every word. The boy is shoeless and his clothes are ragged, his need as plain as Brown’s authority. Is he a self-emancipated slave, and Brown his guide and liberator? Brown told Gerrit Smith he hoped to be a “kind of father” to the Black grantees. He wasn’t, as fate had it, but here in weathered bronze, his palm on this boy’s back, he is guide and patriarch essentialized. And this memorial was no solely white-made vision. It took Barber thirteen years to raise the money for it, and he was much too invested in this project not to engage with the design. Together, Barber and Pollia, a classically trained sculptor with an imposing track record of historical commissions, conceived of a monument that would sit on top of John Brown’s boulder inside the gated shrine and near the grave. On “nature’s pedestal,” as Barber put it, the statue would loom triumphant, a symbol of Black gratitude through the ages. At a press conference in August 1934, Barber explained that “the natural stone would serve as a picturesque and practical base for the figures which would be silhouetted against the sky at a much greater height than if placed nearer the ground.” In the company of Brown, his raiders, and the women, the monument not only was in the shrine but was itself enshrined, and with it the idea that Brown’s devotion to Black America was not just the chief thing but (literally) the highest thing, the jewel in this reliquary’s crown.³⁹

This siting plan had been approved by William G. Howard, superintendent of lands and forests for the New York State Conservation Department. Everything was good to go. But five weeks before John Brown Day, Barber got a letter from Harry Wade Hicks, who wanted to know whether the statue, shrine, and pilgrims might not all be better served if “points of historic interest” were “decentralize[d].” Would not this statue on the rock crowd the shrine? The landscaping might suffer too. Barber resisted. He had his permit. This was his to oversee. Hicks did not relent. He wrote to Howard’s superior, the state conservation commissioner, Lithgow Osborne. And when Hicks got Osborne on his side, Barber saw how things stood. “I yield,” he wrote Hicks. “The pressure is such that of course we shall have to yield.” The statue would be erected in the turnaround—decentralized, as Hicks preferred.⁴⁰

Just a problem of aesthetics, Hicks had said.

It was a little more than this. For three-quarters of a century, the graveyard at the farm had been curated by white people whose every plaque and presentation valorized Brown’s martyrdom. In contrast, John Brown with a Black boy next to him on the great boulder, a peaceloving Brown, alive, engaged, would divert visitors from the sacred rock itself—that oft-described embodiment of Brown’s granitic spirit, his courage out of history—and redirect their gaze to a man whose work with other people, Black people, meant as much as his momentous death. Barber’s plan, its shift in emphasis, challenged the ownership of John Brown’s memory. And if he had not looped Hicks into his planning because he guessed Hicks might object to this, he guessed exactly right. When Hicks told Barber to find the statue a home outside the sacrarium, he rejected a more inclusive vision of Brown’s meaning. The fighter for racial justice and integration had no standing (literally) in the white-made fraternity of graves and markers inside the wrought-iron fence.⁴¹

In the parking circle, the Black-sponsored monument got its place. It’s what we see when we head to the grave. It sets the stage but isn’t on it. It’s an usher; it sees us in. And what could Barber do? For thirteen years he had looked to Hicks for backstage help. Hicks was calling in his chit. The question was not what Hicks might do if Barber failed him but what he might not do. Would he still urge the mayor to get schoolchildren to the farm on John Brown Day? Still burnish the respectability of the pilgrimage with the approval of his powerful patrician club? Hicks said he was making a suggestion and that Barber did not have to take it. But if Barber’s choice diminished Hicks’s engagement, the JBMA might be orphaned. Barber could not run the risk.⁴²

The standoff was a long time coming. Each reformer had taken pains to protect the other from a version of himself that would have powerfully offended. In North Elba, Barber tamped down the civil rights agitator who excoriated Northern Jim Crow in the Pittsburgh Courier and Abbott’s Monthly. And Hicks, when near Barber, kept the bigot under wraps. For a few days a year, their love of Brown carved out a piece of common ground where they “performed” a drama of race-blind tolerance and mutual respect. And it worked! They knew their lines! But nothing in this script addressed an interracial statue on Brown’s rock. And when the clubman found an ally in the accommodating Osborne, the Black activist’s true standing in John Brown country was laid bare. Guest and host were far from equals. Barber was, had always been, a supplicant—dependent yet again.

Mindful of Barber’s disappointment and the JBMA’s Depression-ravaged coffers, Hicks took charge of the unanticipated costs that this unexpected change incurred. He got the new plot graded and landscaped, ordered a sub-base and a plaque. But what Barber wanted was Hicks’s assurance that the displaced monument would still meet his expectation of some stature. A pedestal of six feet couldn’t match the eight-foot boulder, but if the pedestal was any shorter than six feet, or five at the lowest, the monument would lose its impact.⁴³

The thirty-six-inch pedestal Hicks secured is no higher than a card table.

Barber had fourteen years to get used to this stump before he died in 1949. It may not have been enough.

Better Than No Dream at All

When the JBMA’s statue was dedicated in May 1935, the crowd was full, the speeches of a piece. Everyone loved freedom in the abstract. But the call for equal rights for Blacks was less robust. With other speakers, Harry Hicks cast John Brown as a generic model of elemental courage, a martyr for every cause and season. His catalytic role in the Civil War was noted—Harpers Ferry the portal to the calamity that let the nation die and resurrect. The state historian, Alexander Flick, proclaimed that Brown’s death “tore away the last resistance to a pent-up volcano which deluged the land for years and filled it with woe” (but a noble woe! restorative!). Only Byron Remembrance Brewster’s son, Judge Byron O. Brewster, the latest Brownophile from his clan, observed Brown’s value for the present: “Slavery is a relative term. It may be said that there are many kinds of it still imposed on the human race.” And as long as this was so, there yet remained “a crying need for that same fearless and sublime devotion to justice that still emanates from the spirit of Old John Brown—a spirit dedicated singly to the brotherhood of man with justice for all.” Yet this same bold speech also indulged the notion that the Civil War was, perhaps, unnecessary. Had “natural economic causes been allowed to work out the problem, slavery would have disappeared from the South long since,” the good judge mused. Perhaps more than any remark that day, Brewster’s confident aside made clear how little John Brown Day had unsettled racist historiography. At this event and especially before this audience—before Max Barber!—to invoke “lost cause” ideology, and its counterfactual notions of the natural death that was slavery’s presumed and rightful destiny? Was this what the Black pilgrims, some, like Barber, just a generation out of slavery, came from Hartford, Brooklyn, and Philadelphia to hear?⁴⁴

But this was no Niagara Movement, and no NAACP either. And Brewster only reprised what white memorialists had said for decades about a Brown who waged war on one front, and whose cause was spent when the conflagration he ignited led to slavery’s abolition. Their Brown cared little about equal rights after slavery was outlawed because he cared little for equal rights before—only the divine right to legal freedom. On postbellum disenfranchisement, the injuries of Jim Crow, class grievance, or social racism (embodied, say, in the eugenicist agenda of an Adirondack residential colony), this Brown’s legacy was mute. The slaves were free, his work was done, his antislavery career deracinated—painted white. What the New York Times had to say about the shrine in 1890 still held: “No enemy of [Brown] who believed he was justly and properly hanged could criticize the manner in which his name is commemorated.”⁴⁵

The real surprise in 1935 was not anything white speakers had to say (or not say) but Barber’s own remarks. Like the others, he saluted a catalytic Brown whose actions let a president fulfill his destiny: “He it was who kindled the beacon fires of freedom on a thousand hills. He was the grim grey herald of that awful conflict which robed the nation in fire and blood … a conflict which had to come.” But about Brown’s value for the present, Max Barber could only offer heavily, “His work is done.”⁴⁶

Barber’s work was done, in any case, or that part of it that ever hoped to weaponize John Brown Day in the wider war on racism. And it might be argued that Barber’s reticence was the thing that ensured the pilgrimages’ survival. In another, painful lifetime, he saw his cherished Atlanta periodical snuffed out in its prime. His pilgrimage and monument were its successors, and these he would not lose. Barber had lived in three Southern states and two Northern cities. Like the grantee-farmer John Thomas, his experience of white racism was wide. His grasp of the meaning of this monument was well beyond Hicks’s own. In May 1925, the same spring that the JBMA held its interracial John Brown Day in Lake Placid, the white people of Greensboro, Alabama, hosted a great event of their own: five hundred Klansmen in full regalia, bearing torches and marching single file down Main Street, six riders at the lead, horses draped in white trappings. This would have been unimaginable in John Brown country, but not to the slaves’ son Max Barber, who had every reason to suppose that if a larger-than-life monument of an abolitionist who made war on his own government went up anywhere but North Elba, it would not last a night. Barber settled for a hobbled dream because it beat no dream at all.⁴⁷

The JBMA’s annual John Brown Day limped along for decades after Barber’s death, its attendance sometimes waxing, mostly waning, its speeches reliably devotional and bland. Calls for a nationwide antiracist agenda were perfunctory and unspecific. In 1946 the Lake Placid JBMA chapter introduced a handsome plaque to Brown’s shrine that honored women in Brown’s abolition circle who had never been identified. Not included and likely not considered were the Black North Elba women who had joined a radical agrarian initiative to help Black men get the vote. Also missing from the speakers’ list in the World War II years and beyond were leading lights in civil rights reform. Barber’s mentor, W. E. B. Du Bois, never spoke at John Brown’s grave. Nor did the diplomat Ralph Bunche, the NAACP legal wizards Roy Wilkins and Thurgood Marshall, or the Urban League’s courageous lawyer, Sadie Alexander, from President Truman’s Committee on Civil Rights.⁴⁸

In the summer of 1947, two years before Barber’s death, the celebrated artist-author Rockwell Kent and several of his friends made a bid to repurpose the pilgrimage at John Brown’s farm. To reporters gathered at Brown’s grave, Kent called for a pilgrimage explicitly devoted to racial justice in midcentury America. Nineteen years earlier, Kent had left Manhattan for a new life on a four-hundred-acre dairy farm in Ausable Forks. Here he made his art, wrote, and preached the glories of Adirondack life, and when city friends visited, he often brought them to Brown’s shrine. Waist-deep in Black rights initiatives, the left-leaning Kent held John Brown as a hero. With wreath in hand at Brown’s grave, Kent, the war correspondent William L. Shirer, then cottaging at the Lake Placid Club, and the Chicago Communist educator William Patterson, whose parents had been enslaved, described a plan to make Brown’s home “the objective of a yearly pilgrimage of rededication to John Brown’s ideals,” and to “stress the importance [of those] ideals in our national life today.” The idea was to attract “thousands of Americans annually to North Elba”—as the JBMA had not done for years.⁴⁹

The demise of this high-aiming plan was as abrupt as its inception; Kent, the project’s originator, simply had no time for it. Federal investigators were poking into his political affiliations, his art sales were off, and his Ausable neighbors were boycotting his dairy because his milk bottles advertised a socialist presidential candidate, Henry Wallace. Kent’s own run for Congress on Wallace’s American Labor Party ticket was risible. Out of 14,000 ballots, he culled 350 votes. As for his pilgrimage, to Adirondack families three or four generations in the region, Kent’s nineteen years at Asgaard Farm conferred no claim on John Brown’s meaning. Didn’t John Brown country already have a pilgrimage, with the colored people and their wreath, the statue, everybody so respectful, no hotheads, nobody looking for a fuss?⁵⁰

Just give the thing a rest. One pilgrimage was enough.

Right Here in Franklin

There was another Adirondack pilgrimage that did, finally, credit the racial justice initiative that integrated this frontier and brought John Brown to the region. But it didn’t call itself a pilgrimage, and it didn’t head for John Brown’s grave. It was a local affair, a combination family reunion and town Pioneer Day in Vermontville, town of Franklin, in July 2007. To guests I spoke with during and after the festivities, however, it had the long-time-coming feel of a pilgrimage. It was the first reunion of the long-separated Morehouse family since 1957, and the first time this fifth-generation Adirondack family was honored in this community for its connection to three pioneering Gerrit Smith grantees: Stephen Morehouse, John Thomas, and Avery Hazzard. These Adirondack settlers—in Loon Lake, Vermontville, and St. Armand—received gift land in the Black Woods, and some descendants were right here, two of them living in Vermontville.

Not that they knew they were descendants, at least not until that year. Until the history buffs came knocking, Oscar and Victor Morehouse didn’t have a clue. No one told the brothers about a reformer’s prescient effort to bring voting rights to Black New Yorkers before the Civil War. About the family in a country graveyard down the road they were wholly unaware. It seems the old people weren’t so big on backstories. Looking back was what you did when the view could lift the heart and you had time to take it in.⁵¹

John Morehouse, Oscar and Victor’s grandfather, was the son of the Civil War veteran Warren Morehouse and the fugitive-farmer’s daughter Charlotte Ann Thomas. It was John’s widowed mother who mostly raised him; his father died when he was young. John left high school early, worked as a teamster, and later poured shots at the Dew Drop Inn. His wife, Mary Hazzard, took in laundry and worked from home. Their oldest, Kathleen, quit school in the sixth grade and a little later met Wilbur Prince, a Black Vermonter working in a village bowling alley. She was fifteen when they were married by a justice of the peace; they moved in with her folks. At sixteen, her younger brother Marshall was identified in a county newspaper as the “first Saranac Lake boy to be arrested for nonattendance of part time school.” Marshall made the news again in 1927 when he and a friend broke into a store, cracked the cash register, and stole a car. They got as far as Albany. A stint in the Elmira Reformatory followed.⁵²

Life steadied for Marshall Morehouse on his return to Saranac Lake. He got a job at David Cohen’s famously stuffed-to-bursting hardware store—shelving, loading, stocking up—and he did this for years. In 1931, he married Betty Garrow, a Mohawk girl from the St. Regis reservation on the US-Canada border. Their family would be big. Also in this town were several cousins from the Hazzard side. Long out of farming now, they, like Marshall, had solid jobs that paid the bills but promised no advancement: line cook, day laborer, porter, laundress, stockboy, maid. This is not to say that Black Saranackers gained no economic traction in this era. But among the Black entrepreneurs who opened village boardinghouses for cure seekers in the first third of the twentieth century were no descendants of Smith grantees.⁵³

In the decade after World War II, the Morehouse children did what all youngsters did in this small town. They joined the Scouts, got bit parts in school pageants, played ball. This was the Adirondack story: fireflies in summer and, in winter, slogging off to school in snow so deep it hemmed your coat. But some Morehouse memories were not like everybody else’s. Most everybody else was white. The Morehouse children ran the gamut. Some were Black, some pale, some, as white Saranackers put it, “salt and pepper” or “sort of in-betweenish.”⁵⁴

In 1955, Marshall’s wife, Betty, age fifty-one and the mother of ten, was diagnosed with stomach cancer. She died the next year on a raw, sleety day. Morehouse, a man of tense reserve and tight means at the best of times, might have tried to keep his brood together if household help had been forthcoming. But in 1957 it was determined that the younger Morehouses would have a better time of it with Marshall’s older sister in Baltimore. The older boys remained in Saranac Lake. The split halves of this family would not be reunited for forty-seven years, and if it weren’t for Rob Lagroome, a young Baltimorean, there might have been no reunion at all.⁵⁵

Every Christmas of his life, Rob Lagroome’s aunts and mother pulled out their memories of Saranac Lake like playing cards and started dealing out the stories. Rob heard about his grandmother, the Mohawk with the lustrous braids who sang lullabies everybody loved and no one understood. He heard about the old house on the Saranac River and his grandfather’s daily tramp along the tracks to Mr. Cohen’s store. Marshall, the patriarch, was gone, but two uncles were still up there. Would Rob ever meet them? He made a brisk start—found a people-finding database, hit the keys, and up it popped, Uncle Oscar’s number, easy-peasy. So do it, he told himself. Just call the man. But when the lady on the other end wouldn’t put his uncle on (Yes, he’s here, this is our home, but he’ll need to call you back), Rob hung up. He knew how this would go. He had tossed his hopes into the air, and for what? For this?

Then the phone rang, and he lunged.

The Morehouse family get-together was scheduled for late July under a pavilion in the town park. Advance press was exuberant, and the big crowd eager and robust. Besides the family, old schoolmates, and longtime friends of the Morehouses, like the event’s organizer, town supervisor Mary Ellen Keith, there were independent scholars like Don and Vivian Papson, who had papered a long bulletin board with maps and letters documenting Morehouse family history as wide and far as they could track it. The Plattsburgh Republican reporter Robin Caudell shared her research on the Morehouses’ clan. The historical reenactor Cliff Mealy Oliver did a musing turn in a slouch hat and overalls as the self-emancipated slave and pioneer John Thomas. Don Papson explained what Gerrit Smith was up to when he gave away his land in 1846, and all he’d learned about Private Warren Morehouse, the sharpshooter of Boykin’s Mill. He also spoke with moving candor to the crowd about his considerable anxiety when he introduced himself to Oscar and Victor Morehouse. While he was thrilled to find descendants of Gerrit Smith grantees “right here in Franklin,” Don wasn’t sure how much to say. Oscar and Victor were light complected and perhaps had never been identified as Black. How would they take it? “There are white people in the Adirondacks who don’t want to know,” Papson said.⁵⁶

But what had never been called out was always understood. All his life, Oscar and Victor’s father, Marshall, was N or B in the census (except in 1910, when the census taker registered all the Morehouse family as Montauk Indians). So Papson’s revelation did not rattle Marshall’s sons. Nor would the Morehouse brothers shrink from learning that their ancestor, John Thomas, had been enslaved. “This, for me, was the best moment,” Papson recalled. “That moment of acceptance.”⁵⁷

The best moment for the Baltimoreans at the reunion was different. John Thomas was from Maryland, their home. Surely something here had come full circle. In the 1830s, a Black marriage was destroyed, and Thomas made a life-risking escape from Maryland to Troy and, after several years, the Adirondack frontier. And back again, five generations later, were Thomas’s descendants, who, too, had seen their family blasted by calamity, the death of a beloved mother that dispatched half their number from the Adirondacks south to—Maryland! Here was a pilgrimage! Speaking for the Baltimoreans, an exultant Rob Lagroome thanked the white people of Vermontville and his newfound aunt and uncles for their welcome. Mary Ellen Keith spoke stoutly of her town’s frontier culture, saying of the antebellum Black pioneers, “They were of the community. They worked with the people. They were respected. Everybody loved everybody. This was a neighborhood. We did not see race.” The Baltimorean Joan Morehouse Queen turned tearfully to her Adirondack brother, Oscar, and they embraced. Then everybody cheered, and Oscar found a chair.⁵⁸

I’m no fan of staged reunions, and genealogy, the stark fact of some nominal connection, leaves me cold. John Brown country’s reverence for Brown’s vaunted Anglo-Puritan blood, Melvil Dewey’s obsession with racial hygiene, Madison Grant’s catastrophically influential call for ethnic and racial cleansing (a shaping influence on Adolf Hitler), indeed, our long American romance with the myth of racial purity—nothing here beguiles me. But that summer afternoon in 2007, Papson’s and Lagroome’s faith in the uses of genealogy bore fruit. I never thought I’d see an interracial family reunion feted at an Adirondack Pioneer Day. Gathered here was more than a ruptured clan. The reunion brought the present face-to-face with a never-dreamed-of past. History, as the Alabama activist Bryan Stevenson might say, “got proximate,” and proud.⁵⁹

But I did not share Rob Lagroome’s hopeful feeling that a newfound Baltimore connection meant that diaspora and return balanced out. Between the exuberance of the pilgrims who had driven up from Baltimore and the cautious faces of the Morehouses of Vermontville was a remove. Did the Adirondack side of this family welcome a public celebration of its ancestry, or were they putting up with it because, after all the hoopla in the papers, what choice did they have? Just stay home? I couldn’t tell. Their reserve was hard to read.

A few summers after the reunion, I talked about that day with Bob McKillip, a fifth-generation Adirondacker whose people came from Ireland’s County Antrim, during the Great Famine. McKillip reveled in the history of the occasion: the family link to Gerrit Smith, John Thomas’s self-emancipation, his new life, his farm. But McKillip, too, had found some aspects of the day disquieting. He recalled the Morehouses from school. He was a little bit in awe of them, he admitted. “Tough kids. You definitely wanted them on your side in a fight.” And the part of Pioneer Day that made so much of race, this bit he didn’t get. “People didn’t used to think about that,” he told me carefully, parsing his unease. “Racism. This was not a word in Saranac Lake. When all that stuff came up on the news about civil rights for colored people—well, we were already doing that. Here we were living it all the time. And we didn’t even know it.” In his view, Pioneer Day took an openhearted decency and made it knowing and self-conscious. And seeing his old schoolmates being called out as Black, “singled out as something different,” made him wince. It rattled the Morehouse brothers too, he sensed. “That was new for them. That was just not part of their—dialogue.” It seemed overcooked.

I suspect more reunion-goers than McKillip shared his sense of a misunderstanding. The idea of a John Brown country beyond racism, beyond hate, has a proud grip on the region’s image of itself—and has since long before the Town of Franklin supervisor made her hopeful claim on a postracial past. Douglass’s rhapsodic sketch of the Smith Lands was inspired by the idea of a regenerative wilderness, God fashioned, God favored, that, too, “did not see race.” In the republican frontier, Charles Ray predicted, hard work and good behavior would win the grantee-settlers the color-blind esteem of their white neighbors. The assumption of a morally exceptionalist Adirondacks was a keystone of John Brown country—from Charles Ray’s high hopes to Max Barber’s giddy dispatches from North Elba (“Everybody here regards John Brown as a saint!”) to a 1961 editorial in an Adirondack Record-Elizabethtown Post that asked readers, “Aren’t you glad you live in good old Essex County? Here we don’t have racial violence and hatred. There is no need of ‘freedom riders’ in our region.” No need of anything, apparently. Up here in the good place, we’ve got the whole thing licked.⁶⁰

The Blinders of Exceptionalism

Exceptionalism is a problematic legacy in the Adirondack story. On one hand, it’s been a lifesaver, or anyway a park saver, making an emphatic and compelling case for the lasting preservation of this green Adirondack world. But if exceptionalism got us the park, it also planted a stubborn culture of social exclusivity. If it moved Smith’s agents to wax lyrical about the alchemical potential of the wilderness encounter, it also obscured their recognition of the settlers’ real needs. And in one account after another, an exceptionalist perspective would explain the settlers’ “disappearance” from the Black Woods in terms of a racialized, inherent incapacity.

In the late 1970s, the rhetoric of exceptionalism would once again be deployed at the John Brown Farm State Historic Site to devastating (and now largely forgotten) effect. The messaging at this sleepy site had not been refreshed for decades. Young curators and site historians at Parks and Recreation’s Bureau of Historic Sites were keen to shake it up. No other site of the thirty-four under Parks’ wide wing (there are six more today) was, in their view, better fixed to offer visitors a perspective on the outbreak of the Civil War through the antislavery campaign and the struggle for Black rights. Inspired by Black studies and the “bottom-up” history movements of the seventies, they aimed to crack the notoriously tough shell of enshrinement around the place and contemporize the script. New scholarship had tracked a tangle of alliances between John Brown and the radical Black abolitionists of New York. Was this not central to the story? What about Brown as an Adirondacker, and Gerrit Smith, whose “scheme of justice and benevolence” got Black pioneers, and then the Brown family, into this wild country in the first place? And who were the grantees? Weren’t their stories part of this as well?⁶¹

With Parks and Recreation Commissioner Orin Lehman was all for a site makeover, and when Parks won a hefty grant to bring this thing to pass, the Parks’ interpreters got busy. They focused on the Browns as Adirondack pioneers. They profiled the Browns’ Black neighbors, and the settlement called Timbuctoo. They considered Timbuctoo and Brown’s arrival in light of the larger campaign for Black justice and equal voting rights, and then, how that connected to the antislavery discourse, and how, for Brown, the two movements were joined at the hip. And hoping for support, they got in touch with the John Brown Farm site manager, Ed Cotter, and the town historian, Mary MacKenzie.⁶²

They would be disappointed. Mackenzie was appalled. To her garden club, she observed that North Elba’s John Brown was not an easy hero. His Kansas chapter in particular she deemed “unpalatable and indigestible,” and all that bloody business would be hauled out in an interpretative center because that’s what these places did. They covered everything. And was this necessary? “Much better that John Brown and the John Brown Farm remain symbolic,” she offered. “Better for people to just stand in that sublime spot, look at the sublime mountains, and think sublime thoughts about an incredible man who had an incredible dream.” Her friend the John Brown Farm Historic Site’s supervisor, Ed Cotter, heartily concurred. This new upgrade left him cold—the part of it that made anything of Timbuctoo and Gerrit Smith especially. Visitors to this site, said Cotter, knew nothing of this “obscure nineteenth century reformer… . Of the thousands of people who visit the site every year … only a mere handful have ever heard of Gerrit Smith and his Negro colony,” and they did not need to be enlightened. “Talk with our foreign visitors, members of the John Brown Memorial Association and visitors we get from all over our country reveals that they are interested in what John Brown tried to do for human rights and not in Gerrit Smith’s failures.”⁶³

By 1978, the JBMA to which Cotter alluded was a specter of its old self. The North Elba chapter now oversaw John Brown Day—a formulaic, sparkless business with prayers, spirituals, a wreath. This threat to local memory, however, yanked the sleepy outfit to its feet. An interpretive center at the site, a JBMA member wrote the New York Times, would attract visitors to Brown’s home who would not get it, mere unenlightened idlers who would think nothing of “trampling over the grave, dispensing beer cans, soda cans, and litter.” (Again that Adirondack bogey: an invasion of the unsuitable, the undeserving.) The JBMA’s anxiety freed the Times to admit its own distaste for “historic-site circuses,” and then the Department of Environmental Conservation confessed concern about the impact of the “trampling” hordes on alpine vegetation.⁶⁴

“We got clobbered,” one of Parks’ team recalled. “Blindsided like you wouldn’t believe.” Schoolchildren were writing postcards. Leave John Brown alone! Parking lots, tour buses, facilities! Who needed it? And Parks backed out. Two years of planning, research, and architectural proposals were abandoned. A new center would have to wait. It’s waiting even now. Retired staffers who worked on that junked project told me it was the toughest setback of their professional careers.⁶⁵

Yet was it so surprising? For 120 years, in county histories, newspapers, and memoirs, the Adirondacks stood for John Brown, and Brown’s story had returned the favor. It helped locals know who belonged to this tough country. It helped them say they knew who didn’t. It was the tough nut of regional identity, this confident exceptionalism, and nothing, not one part of it, recalled the story of Smith’s plan, Black voting rights, or the Black pioneers. Long before Parks killed its project, John Brown’s passion for racial justice and his equalitarian convictions had faded from his hometown resume, his sublime courage neutralized to the point where even racists could embrace him. By the time Parks got on the job, local ways of thinking about John Brown and the Black Woods were as hard-sunk as an Adirondack frost. Parks’ new spin in 1977 was more than fresh. No one got it. How did it belong?

This Place Is My Land, It Isn’t Your Land

It seems all roads in this story eventually swing back to this question: Who belongs? Who gets to say this place is mine? The Black agents put deeds into the hands of Marshall Morehouse’s ancestors with the promise of a healthful, color-blind, wide-open frontier. This new country, which, as William C. Nell put it in the North Star, had “just as much respect for a Black man as it has for a white,” would equalize Black opportunity as a Negrophobic Northern city never could. But it wasn’t new or so wide open. Long before Smith gave up his acres, native people had inhabited this region, and had claimed it for millennia. European colonizers who observed the absence of year-round settlements were quick to proclaim a clear, uncluttered tabula rasa inviting white dominion. The racializing discourse that defended this perspective emphasized the unfitness of the native people for the Adirondack wilderness—from their intransigent indifference to the rules of settlement and ownership right down to the region’s self-incriminating name. Adirondack means “bark eater.” That’s how helpless were the natives, how wholly unevolved. They ate tree bark “like the brutes, and bore, from thenceforth, degradation’s low mark” (so offered an Elizabethtown village history of 1905). The rift between the worthy and the undeserving was articulated long before the Adirondack historian Alfred Donaldson treated his readers to his eager fantasy of an ill-built shantytown with “little stovepipes” sticking out of “flat roofs … at varying angles,” crowned with (“the last touch of pure negroism”) “a large but dilapidated red flag” that read, “Timbuctoo.”⁶⁶

In 1853, and long before a penciled Blue Line corralled the region, county historian Winslow C. Watson boasted, “Thanks to … the settlers of Essex County … of New England origin … no county of the state embraced a population of higher intelligence, of purer morality, of more industrious and frugal habits.” The vaunted purity of Adirondack Yankeedom defined the regional brand even before the Civil War. White antislavery settlers like John Brown idealized an Adirondacks of Puritan incorruptibility, a soul-testing stronghold fashioned in God’s image. Social reformers (Gerrit Smith among them) predicted brilliant changes in the “rough and untamed natures” of the “monsters” in Clinton Prison after they worked in the Adirondack wilderness. The harsher the inmates’ wilderness encounter, the more profound their redemption.⁶⁷

Nativists who discerned a threat to the vaunted Yankee Adirondack rootstock posed by the rolling swells of immigrants (twenty-five million of them between 1880 and 1924) found a rationale for their alarm in the burgeoning new field of eugenics. A pseudoscience would be weaponized to justify the defense of Adirondack purity in all its incarnations: the balsam-scented air, healthful water, mountain views, and, with them, of a piece with them, the racial or genetic purity of Adirondackers themselves (“next to the bottom in number of defects found” in drafted men, declared the American eugenicist Charles Davenport to the War Department in 1920). Racial ideologues like Melvil Dewey observed with gratitude the Adirondacks’ saving distance from mongrel city hordes, a remove that felt like destiny. To leave a world behind, it had to stay behind, and because of how hard it was to get there, New York’s northern “Central Park for the World” would remain largely free and clear of poor Black people, immigrants, and impoverished whites. All to the good, claimed race-betterment ideologues (and, as recent scholarship suggests, some geographers as well, who would deploy these arguments to spatialize hierarchical ideas that also, indirectly, advanced a racialized agenda). Only the conservation of good Anglo rootstock ensured the survival of the race. Cross a pure-bred Nordic specimen with an African, Native American, Hispanic, Jew, or any “lower type,” and the nation would be worse than changed; it would be irreversibly degraded, and “Old Stock” Americans (“Homo Europaeus, the white man par excellence,” as the prominent conservationist and eugenicist Madison Grant proudly offered) would grow scarcer than the Adirondack moose.⁶⁸

Environmental history has noted the lead role of public health in early arguments for the Adirondack Forest Preserve (concerns fueled by the threat of befouled watersheds and rivers), but more than drinking water was at risk. Predatory forces from without imperiled woodlands, wildlife, oxygenated air, and Edenic views. Suspect spoilers (loggers, market hunters, railroad hands, migratory work crews, and immigrants) were judged as harshly as their suspected carelessness. Class, race, and ethnicity divided the pure of heart from the unprincipled, the pure of mind from the uneducable, the pure of pedigree from the polyglot and “unevolved.” Between the immigrant or impoverished Adirondacker (Black or white) who shot deer out of season and the clubman who fished and hunted for sport and proudly stewarded the wildlife he tracked was a divide as deep as it was necessary. “We, the mothers of this generation, ancestresses of future generations, have a right to insist upon the conserving of not only our soil, our forest, birds, minerals, fishes, waterways, in the interest of future home-makers, but also upon the conservation of the Caucasian race in our land,” the president of the Daughters of the American Revolution declared in 1910.⁶⁹

The stewards of Adirondack hunting clubs, private preserves, family compounds, and residential colonies guarded this racial patrimony with care. Their “Do Not Trespass” signs not only kept out local undesirables but kept the “good stock” in, kept their human fauna as undefiled as the club streams that were scrupulously stocked with noble “brookies.” Indeed, the one thing, and maybe the only thing, these clubs had in common was their insistence on social exclusivity. A white upper-class elite bound by education, business and family ties, club connections, and city residences, a tribe that in the immigrant metropolis felt itself besieged, was, in the great park, confident and strong.⁷⁰

In 1893, one-fourth of the new Adirondack Park, a total of 940,000 acres, was leased or owned by fifty private sportsmen’s clubs. Within thirty years these exclusionary strongholds were joined by other kinds of enclaves that further buffed the park’s high patrician tone: Great Camps, grand preserves, children’s summer camps, lakeside multifamily compounds, country clubs, and residential colonies like the Lake Placid Club, founded in 1895 and eventually the biggest four-season recreational community in the nation. But while most of these have broken up and few function as they did, the reputation of the region as no place for Black people abides. In 2016, the Adirondack environmentalist Aaron Mair, then head of the Sierra Club, visited the Schroon River, and white rafters, drifting past, greeted him with a fusillade of racist slurs. In 2020, Nicky Hylton-Patterson, the Black director of the Adirondack Diversity Initiative, took a morning jog in Saranac Lake and on the railroad trestle above her trail was a newly sprayed comet of graffiti—“Go Back to Africa,” and worse.⁷¹

It’s not frequent. It’s not even typical. It’s that it doesn’t go away.

Challenging the Narrative

There is no fast fix here, not for any piece of this. The wrongs that moved Gerrit Smith to do what he did in 1846 are all still with us: voter suppression tactics that block Black access to the ballot; a wealth gap that cleaves and destabilizes the world; systemic obstacles that stall the way to economic advancement and political empowerment. These were Gerrit Smith’s concerns in 1846; and ours, too, every one. Gains are made, but never so securely that we dare to look away. The beam of justice is not steady. It shines, falters; it needs minding all the time. The opportunity to track the progress of that beam as it breaks ground on the floor of daily life, lighting up this victory, that loss, might be the Black Woods’ best gift. History on a grand scale—an epic wartime presidency, a mass contagion, an economic crash—craves action, resolution, summary. But local history is different. Its capacity for paradox is huge. It makes room for the human factor, the slow mess that reminds us how easily derailed is the work of change.

In places with strong racial or ethnic populations (the Deep South, big cities, Indian reservations, intractably white suburbs, members-only residential communities), we grasp the work of racializing at a glance. But in places that have “lost” Black neighborhoods to arson, urban renewal, out-migration, redlining, or the insults of Jim Crow, a glance is not enough to call a missing narrative to mind. A more conscious kind of scrutiny is needed. And it’s happening. In the Adirondacks, Vermont, Oregon, Wisconsin, Maine, and Iowa, lay and local historians recover evidence of long-gone neighborhoods and enclaves. Will their findings dislodge deep-sunk, hard-defended narratives, or just splash them with fresh paint? That is, will they contend with whiteness and how it built and reinforced the presumption of Black incapacity, or stop with rote assertions of diversity?⁷²

It’s not enough to call out and celebrate the missing. Why they went missing, how they were disappeared, is the much tougher question. And in the Black Woods, the grantees and their descendants did much more than diversify. They challenged the white wilderness, and they changed it. Their coming roused anxiety, uneasiness, and loyalty, and subverted a default racism in a hundred small, startling ways. White Adirondackers soaked up race jokes in the Malone Palladium but scared off bounty hunters who came after a once-enslaved Black neighbor. Franklin farmers dubbed a river N—— Brook, yet when the time came to serve the Union, they took the Black Marylander James Brady into their company because—the law be hanged—they knew Brady and needed heads. When the penniless Lyme Epps had a stroke, Lake Placid villagers got up funds to help him, and when his impaired brother, Albert, died in the downstate institution where he’d lived most of his life, and no family was left to bring him home, Lake Placid saw to his return. He was an Eppes, after all. The town cemetery was where he had to be.

This dissonance clanged the other way as well. Recall the zeal of George S. Hale, who, with Francis Lee, chiseled John Brown’s name so deep into the great rock Brown adored that “neither morbid relic-seeking tourists nor the storms of centuries can blot it out,” yet, as a member of the Immigration Restriction League, labored to keep lesser races out. Or the volte-faces of the clubman Harry Wade Hicks, who championed John Brown and the Black pilgrims, rounded up pallbearers for Lyman Epps’s funeral, got speakers for John Brown Day, and produced an elegant brochure for the Black-organized memorial at Brown’s farm, yet kept lifelong faith with Melvil Dewey’s high church of white supremacism. Or, for that matter, the vexed legacy of Lake Placid itself, which basked in its business dealings with the most restrictive club around yet cultivated an alliance with Black pilgrims devoted to a vigilante who made war on his own government.⁷³

In John Brown country, the Adirondack surveyor Wait Lewis told a reporter he would like to see Gerrit Smith elected president—that’s how white-hot was his progressivism—but on the job, in the field, Black settlers smelled a fake. Here, Clarence Darrow, Oswald Garrison Villard, and William Shirer spoke rousingly of equal rights for Black Americans, then repaired to the Lake Placid Club for solace of class and kind. We dream of reconciliation, some way to square the circle, give us reason to declare that because Harry Wade Hicks was a bigot, his regard for Brown and his affection for Lyme Epps were untrue. Or, conversely, that because he did so much for the JBMA, he could not really hold with Dewey’s notions about racial purity. His colors showed at John Brown’s grave in May. But he was both, and there is nothing reconcilable about it.

The Black Woods was both too: a beacon for a better idea, and a tangle of false, forgotten, or misremembered narratives. Repeatedly, historiography othered the Black experience to accommodate a racialized agenda. Instead of honoring the Black Woods’ promise as a font of hope, a dream of something better, something transformational, writers and historians turned the story into a cautionary parable of Black incapacity. Not here, it said. Not yours. Not for you. And none of this was lost on John Thomas. “I begin to be regarded as an ‘American citizen,’ ” he told Gerrit Smith in 1872 (italics mine). Thirty-two years after he fled enslavement, twenty-five years after the giveaway, ten years after legal emancipation, and he was just beginning to see justice, to be counted by his neighbors as a stakeholder in the republic.

But better, always better, than if he had stayed south. Relative to that road not taken, John Thomas had gained ground. No matter if Gerrit Smith gave up on the giveaway before Thomas harvested his first load of hay. He still stewarded his gratitude “for the interest you have always taken in the welfare of my people”—always because Thomas knew that Smith’s giveaway was one effort in a long career of antislavery endeavors. And in declaring that he spoke “on behalf of my colored brothers generally,” Thomas made the same point for himself. He, too, had a long career “breasting prejudice and opposition.” You and I, he reminded his old benefactor, are in it for the long haul—combatants fighting hard with the resources at hand. You, with money, politics, and power. I, with the work of my own life. Bolstering his pride in his achievement was his memory of the hell he had left behind, a memory that few white Americans could grasp. To have been another’s property, disposable as livestock—I, too, have a trajectory, the ex-slave reminded Smith. My Adirondack chapter—it’s one of many in my book, which, like your book, sir, is hard packed. On one end, three decades of enslavement in Maryland. On the other, far from realized, the pursuit of full equality in the United States. The ascent from slave to fugitive to settler-farmer to citizen was more than the context for John Thomas’s appreciation for Smith’s gift. It was the continuum that helped him deal with Northern racism. Not to ignore it or excuse it, but to recall that things could be, had been, worse, and therefore could be, might get, better.

For whatever happened in the Black Woods was better than the day Mr. Merrick sold his wife, the reenslavement of Robert and Jacob McCray, or the age of neoslavery that dropped like a hood over the shards of Reconstruction. Adirondack bigotry could not be likened to a terrorist regime of systemic white supremacism. Black Adirondackers kept sight of the distinction.

They didn’t glory in it, though. Not like their white neighbors. From Civil War days to the civil rights era, Adirondack newspapers thrilled to Southern dispatches that confirmed the North’s monopoly on justice and racial tolerance. Horrific stories documenting racialized atrocities in the South worked Northerners into a pious lather while diverting them from undone work at home. For how much easier it was for white Adirondackers to salute their own progressivism than to imagine the prospects of the Black grantee-settlers and their descendants if they had gotten, and early on, the backup, loans, credit, and good faith to go for more: to head a jury, raise a regiment or organize a company in the Civil War, serve as county supervisor, join the school board, run a sawmill, run a factory, feed a savings account, and other rote entitlements and perquisites of those who “did not see race.” Some will offer that what might have been is none of history’s concern. But the breach between what happened in the Black Woods and what could not have happened (because it was blocked, outlawed, jailed, dismissed, never offered, never had a chance) may be the greatest unresolvable contradiction of them all. And there is nothing to be done about this, no way to rectify that gap.⁷⁴

But a gap is bridgeable. It may be spanned. To see it in the first place, walk its length, concede its depth—here, surely, is the start.