The Black Woods in Flux

Grantees who were all for living in the country, just not the unreconstructed sticks, also stretched the boundaries of the Black Woods when they migrated from the gift land to small towns nearby, or skipped the wilderness entirely, opting for a small town from the first. Sometimes the loss of a spouse forced a migration, or better access to day work, a family doctor, a dear friend. “High and dry” Elizabethtown, the county seat, “with a surplus of the purest of pure air and water, free from fogs, mosquitos, black flies and malaria” (this from the Elizabethtown Post), was blossoming into a popular and lovely town, and all around it mill towns were generating work. Lively Westport on Lake Champlain was a draw. Day work might be found at foundries, bloomeries, mills, and docks. The grantee Edward Weeks and his wife, Hannah, chose Westport over gift land in North Elba. So did a Troy grantee, William Brown, when the Keene surveyor, Wait Lewis, let him know that his hilly lot in Township 12 was “hardly worth paying taxes on” (a judgment that, for all of Lewis’s uneasy reputation among the grantees, matched that of an expert Adirondack surveyor in 1804).¹¹

Westport was the preference of the Smith grantee Joseph James, as well. In fact, it may have been the two gift lots Smith gave this skilled bloomer that enabled him to stay in Westport and buy his home from his employer in 1850 near the bloomery at Merriam’s Forge. Joe’s wife, Adeline, the daughter of white abolitionists from the neighboring village of Crown Point, was an herbalist who made house calls; and by the end of her long life, good enough at what she did to be described in her obituary as the “best nurse in the county.” Both her and Joe’s good jobs suggest why this couple opted not to start again in the unknown infant hamlet of North Elba. Raising a big interracial family in a working-class company village outside Westport had its challenges. But these the Jameses were prepared for. They stuck with what they knew.¹²

And so would the grantee George W. Bell, a Black farmer in Willsboro, a village north of Westport. In this live wire of a town, Bell could amplify his meager living by hiring out to shipyards, bloomeries, limestone quarries, and “coaling” sites (where colliers prepared charcoal for the ironworks). Bell, originally from the South, spurned his gift lot and stayed with his small family in Willsboro for thirty years, working his own farm and other people’s fields.¹³

More Than Farms and Farming

The grantees left no aspect of Smith’s vision for his gift lands unedited, unchanged. He wanted them to farm, and they did—and then did more. Some used their gift land to secure other land. The Jeffersons hired out as teamsters. Henderson fixed shoes. Lyman Eppes and two grantees’ sons—Josiah Hasbrook from North Elba and Alexander Hazzard from St. Armand—were Adirondack guides. Alex Hazzard worked for the celebrated innkeeper Paul Smith. And while William and Eliza Carasaw farmed mainly for themselves, the family also worked a sugarbush that generated four hundred pounds of maple sugar for market. Black settlers picked up day work from their neighbors needing work crews. In the early twentieth century, old-timers in Newcomb, a crossroads hamlet south of North Elba, recalled “some of the colored out of the colony [who] used to go down through what is called Indian Pass through the mountains and work on farms. It is a very short distance by foot across the mountains, [but] 75 miles around by road.” The same story rang a bell with the elderly caretaker of Camp Santanoni, an Adirondack Great Camp, who grew up hearing about long-ago Black work crews at Montgomery Clearing, between Moose Mountain and Newcomb Lake.¹⁴

In Franklin County to the north, Black arrivals adapted too. Their nearness to the fledgling wilderness resort scene got them day jobs as housekeepers, cooks, and guides. Early Adirondack hostelries like Hunter’s Home at Loon Lake and its commodious and celebrated successor, Paul Smith’s; Merrill’s Inn in Merrillsville; and the more modest Rainbow Inn all hired Black settlers. Young Warren “Wash” Morehouse, son of the grantee Stephen Morehouse, was a “waiting man” in hotels on both sides of the Civil War, and camp cooked for hunting parties too (his slow-cooked, maple-syrup-smoky baked beans were in hot demand). The hotelier Paul Smith recalled with delight the woods-wise Wash bringing down a bevy of ruffed grouse with a few sure shots for a hunting party at Hunter’s Home. Smith promised his guests that his young employee was “as good as three niggers rolled into one” and would provide “an inexhaustible fund of merriment.” He reveled in Morehouse’s love of fancy words (“Now, doctors, what kind of tea do you diagnosticate upon today?”), even if the comedy of Morehouse’s diction tells us less about the camp cook than it does about the reflexive condescension of his boss.¹⁵

But not every memory was smirking. Wash Morehouse was also “handy … useful … [possessed of] rollicking good humour … great muscular strength and agility,” and was, overall, “a valuable addition to our party.” Morehouse also made an impression on an English traveler, who made the Black cook one of the handful of locals he profiled in a piece about his trip to the region in 1860. Morehouse likely never knew it, but Londoners were reading all about him in a popular weekly journal, All the Year Round, which was published by Charles Dickens.¹⁶

There was other part-time work that Adirondack pioneers, white or Black, took on when farmwork slowed or failed. At midcentury, and within a day’s wagon ride of Franklin and North Elba, were all the clangorous, unruly hamlets spawned and nurtured by the iron industry—sixty of them in the saddles of the wide Ausable Valley spanning Essex, Franklin, and Clinton Counties. Thanks to these rough boomtowns, day work could be had. Farmers with a horse or two matched their labor to the season, splitting wood for the voracious forges in the winter, chopping trees to open skid runs for the loggers. Maybe when they first arrived, in the glow of all the hype, Black settlers dreamed of living off the vaunted farm that subsidized and ran itself. But after a few seasons, nobody was banking on Reverend Garnet’s “perfect system of agrarianism” to keep the family clothed and fed.¹⁷

And no grantee better exemplified this frontier versatility than Lyman Eppes, even if this Troy farmer, the longest-lasting of the North Elba grantee-settlers, was never really honored for it. In Adirondack written memory, he was singled out for one thing only: his friendship with John Brown. In fact, his connection to the abolitionist—as confidante, sometime employee, acolyte, and lifelong mourner—so dominates accounts of him that it can seem he had no life outside it. He did, and it was rich. In North Elba, Eppes helped found a library, religious school, and choir. He was a voter and a family man (six of his and Annie’s eight children survived infancy; seven of them were Adirondack born), a temperance zealot, and belonged, with his daughter Eva, to the town chapter of the International Order of Good Templars. Relative to other newly arrived subsistence farmers in his neighborhood, his farming was more than creditable. No other neighbor in 1854, white or Black, raised such a lot of corn, along with fifteen bushels of rye, twelve bushels of peas, and three hundred bushels of turnips. The Eppeses’ four cows made milk enough for three hundred pounds of butter; their twelve sheep gave the family thirty pounds of wool. During the Civil War, he expanded his production on the eighty acres on Bear Cub Road he purchased from John Brown’s daughter and son-in-law, and this he worked for thirty years, only moving to the village when he could not manage a team.¹⁸

The Lake Placid historian Mary MacKenzie confidently credited Eppes’s farm skill to his free-born father, a Pequod Indian in Colchester, Connecticut, but his mother, long enslaved, likely had farming skills as well. Kate, or Candace Eppes had Lyman in 1815 when she was forty-one. By the letter of state law, her baby was born free. If Lyman’s mother was enslaved when he was born, however (a fair assumption since Connecticut only got around to abolishing slavery in 1848), state law would still compel Lyman to work wageless for his mother’s enslaver until he was twenty-one. New London County in Connecticut was the greatest slaveholding pocket in colonial New England, with the most enslaved people and the highest number of Black residents. Yet Colchester itself offered Black youths an unlikely and much-valued asset. In 1800, a woodworker turned philanthropist, Pierpont Bacon, endowed a town academy and a village “Negro School.” Bacon, an enslaver, wanted to ease the transition of ex-slaves’ children in the slaveless age to come. By the time Lyman Eppes was old enough to attend, Bacon’s Negro School was drawing applicants from all over Connecticut. Was this where young Lyman learned his cursive and gained his regard for literacy? In North Elba, all of his and Annie’s children went to school.¹⁹

What distinguished Eppes’s Adirondack chapter, however, was neither his zest for education nor his prowess with a hoe, but his range. He made the Adirondacks work for him not because he farmed, but because of all he did when he didn’t farm. When city sports and adventure seekers craved the best fishing hole, highest outlook, whitest falls, Eppes guided them; he cut the first trail through Indian Pass. He had an eye for property, making purchases over the years and managing an absentee grantee’s lot in Franklin County. His letter in Frederick Douglass’ Paper on the surging price of Adirondack lumber in 1854 suggests a shrewd feel for emerging markets: “A few years since, lumber contractors could get standard logs delivered on the banks of the Saranac for thirty-four cents apiece; now the same command nine shillings.” Eppes urged grantees to keep their gift land for its future value (as had his friend John Brown, who, too, had stressed “the importance of saving as much as consistent the spruce timber in North Elba”). Eppes also hired out as a house builder—hence the signature he scratched into an attic beam in John Brown’s home.²⁰

And Eppes hunted. Wolves were a favored target; a neighbor would recall how much Eppes did “to rid the Adirondacks of that pest” (headlines honored him and a white neighbor when they tracked and shot a wolf in 1865). And when there was money to be earned as a teamster or a music teacher, Eppes took it on—and was “a very excellent teacher,” according to John Brown’s daughter Ruth.²¹

Eppes and other grantees who compounded farming with other kinds of work stretched the giveaway’s ambition. Not all expansion in this other map, a living map, was topographical. It could be aspirational as well.

Gift Land without Gifts

The dynamism of our human map gained, too, from the arrival of nondeedholders seeking an integrated rural community. John and Mary Brown’s family was the best known of these, and William Appo of Philadelphia we have met. But there were more. The Frazier, Vinson, and Brady families, all deedless, were welcomed by grantees. The Delaware-born Mary Bailey, who came to Franklin with the Bradys (and may have been a Brady too) would eventually marry the grantee’s son Alex Hazzard. Between the deeded families and those without was no hierarchy, no divide. If being gifted with a deed suggested a virtual community when the giveaway was announced, once Black families were in the woods, what bound them wasn’t paper. It was skin. For their white neighbors made no distinction between the deed-bearing “Gerrit N—— s” and the others. To the bigot, all dark faces were equally offending. To the unbigoted, what newcomers chiefly signified was the promise of more hands and help on the frontier.²²

And just as lines faded fast between grantees and pioneers without portfolio, so would distinctions between free and fugitive be little labored over, notwithstanding Smith’s emphasis on gift land for Black New Yorkers (free people) only. But then, what else could he have said? To publicly encourage Black freedom seekers to the gift land would rouse a storm of fury from the proslavery press, and, worse, prick up the interest of bounty hunters, which could imperil his grantees. If, on the other hand, fugitives were to quietly arrive in the Black Woods on their own steam, well, that could not be held against him.

So the lines were fuzzed from the beginning—blurred and shifting here as they were across the nation. Grantees who were free New Yorkers brought aging parents with them who were once enslaved, and in these Adirondack households in proudly “free” northern New York, slavery remained a tangible fact of life. Survivors of enslavement carried lasting proof of trauma into the heart of the Black Woods. When young Lyman Epps Jr. saw scars on the back of his grandmother in North Elba, the vivid sight stuck fast. Sally Henderson, born in Virginia in 1770, also joined her son James’s family in Timbuctoo, and she, too, was likely once enslaved. The grantee-settler Thomas Jefferson and his wife, Jane, were enslaved decades before they got their land, as were the late parents of the giftee Josiah Hasbrook in the Hudson River Valley. In Franklin, the southern origins of James Brady, Mary Elizabeth Bailey, and the grantee Wesley Murray hint at earlier enslavement, and Louisa Brady’s first years as a slave are noted in her 1894 obituary. Her friend and neighbor, the farmer John Thomas, was a fugitive. John Brown’s family housed the young fugitive Cyrus Thomas for a spell. Little wonder local memory early on embraced the notion that the giveaway was made for fugitives. It was not. But it was, anyway. In every nook and corner of the Black Woods, slavery was as near as an elderly Black neighbor peeling apples on her stoop, as lasting as the sight of Candace Eppes’s welted spine.²³

A Sleepless Law, a Colder World

After the passage of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act, this sense of slavery’s at-handness quickened. What did freedom mean when half the nation regarded fugitives as self-stolen property? How strong was the divide? In his own eyes, the grantee John Thomas was free, but to his old Maryland enslaver he was a marketable commodity gone AWOL, never mind a ten-year residency in New York. And if he was property, then his free-born children, too, as the property of property, could be Merrick’s to reclaim as well.

Thus, politics, in 1850, would also influence the map of the Black Woods, and not for the more vibrant. Smith grantees viewed the unknown Adirondacks with unease even before the Slave Act was enacted. Reverend Loguen had furnished names of friendly contacts in several Adirondack towns, but how loyal might white strangers be when the new law outlawed any effort to defend a Black person said to be a fugitive? Help a runaway, defy a slave catcher, and a white Adirondacker faced a $1,000 fine and six months in jail. Fail to help a federally appointed slave catcher pursue a suspect, he broke the new law too. Track a fugitive, on the other hand, and a poor local could make some badly needed money. The grantees had already been told to keep an eye on profiteering surveyors and mercenary guides. This new Slave Act only multiplied the risks. Local whites resentful of the gift land were now armed with legislation that rationalized the harassment or pursuit of anybody with dark skin.²⁴

No wonder some prospective Adirondack pioneers, like Dennis and Phillis Washington, lost heart. Self-freed slaves from Kentucky living in Michigan, these out-of-staters did not qualify for a Smith gift deed, but what they read in their Ann Arbor abolition paper about Smith’s “scheme of justice and benevolence” in 1846 electrified them, and, poor as they were, they put down money on Adirondack land. Then Congress passed the Slave Act, and that was the end of that. No Black American dared build a life in this Negrophobic republic, declared Dennis Washington in the Voice of the Fugitive in 1852: “Emigration from the United States is absolutely necessary as long as the Fugitive Slave law exists.” Far from the Adirondacks, in Chatham, Canada West, he and Phillis made their next start.²⁵

Was this their first choice? It was, they felt, their only choice, and one to which they were likely urged by another fugitive, Henry Bibb. A few years before he moved to Canada, Bibb published an unflinchingly graphic account of his years in and out of bondage. His oratory and autobiography, detailing five escapes and numerous recaptures, took the antislavery world by storm, and in the same spirit with which Gerrit Smith welcomed Douglass to New York with a gift deed, Smith gave Henry Bibb free land. The grateful activist wrote Smith that he had often dreamed of a farm where he “could get a living for my famley,” and in 1849, he told the North Star that moving on the “land which has been so generously given” was a prospect “far better than gold or silver.” With the passage of the Slave Act, however, this happy prospect dimmed. Like the Washingtons, the Bibbs moved to Canada. And so did the fugitive Walter Hawkins, a Florence Colony pioneer who moved his family to Ontario, and never would regret it, but well recalled his sorrow when he fled his just-built Florence home.²⁶

William Jones, a slave-born congregant of Henry Highland Garnet, expressed no fear of slave catchers when he spoke to Troy grantees in 1848 about removing to his gift lot. But when the 1850 law put Black New Yorkers, slave born and otherwise, at risk of enslavement, when it denied suspect fugitives recourse to a jury trial or the right to testify on their own behalf, Jones’s prospects changed. The shared destiny of the enslaved southern millions and the now free-in-name-only Black citizens of the North was not news that broke with the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act (kidnappers and slave dealers had been stalking free Black Northerners since the first years of the republic). It was the 1850 law, however, that ripped up the illusion of government protection for Northern Blacks and compelled the recognition of a common cause with three million slaves.²⁷

The world was colder, and the stakes were huge. If the new law clarified the bond between free and enslaved African Americans and hastened the maturation of the Underground Railroad, it also tightened the connection between slave owners and their Northern defenders, especially those bankers, lawyers, merchants, and manufacturers determined to keep the machinery of a slavery-driven economy well oiled and efficient. In New York City, the proslavery Union Safety Committee drummed up $25,000 to cover the expense of enforcing the act and funding the reconnaissance of slave hunters. Businessmen in Albany and Troy also defended slave owners against any threat to their shared interests. Almost 90 percent of the 330 fugitives arrested in Northern states from 1850 to 1860 were reenslaved. Along New York river valleys and water routes on either side of the Adirondack region, Black people made for the border to the north, as many as 3,000 lighting down on “Freedom’s Soil” within three months of the Slave Act’s passage. The flood was epic, unprecedented, and unstoppable. Church congregations picked up and migrated en masse. In Douglass’s Rochester, the departure of a Kentucky-born pastor was followed by the exodus of all but two of his 114 congregants. At the urging of their minister, 130 members of a Baptist church in Buffalo went to Canada. Even before the law was signed, several hundred Black Pittsburghers made for Canada, armed and ready to do battle with any party that might presume to interfere. In a few weeks’ time, Cincinnati lost almost all of its 300 Black hotel waiters. In Columbia, Pennsylvania, 450 Black people—more than half that city’s Black population—headed north.²⁸

Might not the Adirondack region have seemed safer for its remoteness? If this ever was the case, it wasn’t after 1850. The New York–based American Anti-slavery Society documented every kidnapping attempt it learned of. Bounty hunters were tracking fugitives to rural hamlets and drowsy county seats all over: Dayville, Connecticut; Cedarville, Cumminsville, and New Athens, Ohio; and Byberry, Coatsville, and Christiana, Pennsylvania, among them. Harrison Williams, a teenage runaway from Virginia, was milking a cow in Busti Corners, Chautauqua County, New York, when slave catchers found him. Bound and thrust into a wagon, he was hauled to Buffalo. His employer, William Storum (a Smith grantee), tried to intervene, but Williams was reenslaved.²⁹

Moses Viney, a self-freed slave and Smith grantee, glimpsed his old enslaver at a Schenectady hotel just after the new law was passed. Did he make for his gift land? Viney was twenty-two when he escaped from the Maryland tobacco farm where he was Richard Murphy’s butler, the “pet slave” of the house. In slaveless Schenectady he’d found a fine job as valet to Eliphalet Nott, president of Union College. The antislavery Nott hoped to persuade Viney’s enslaver to let him be, but Murphy would not be deterred. And when Viney heard this, he may have wondered, If President Nott can’t stop this man, how would I fare in the Adirondacks, where I have no friends at all? Viney went to Canada, as would John Van Pelt and his family when slave catchers showed up in Glens Falls looking for his wife, a self-freed slave. Like Moses Viney, Van Pelt had a gift lot in the Adirondacks, but if the “blackbirders” came this far, they might well push farther north. He and his family made for the border, fast.³⁰

The new law was a game changer for the giveaway’s promoters, too. Those who felt themselves to be at risk went to Canada. Jermain Loguen was half a year away from his Syracuse home. Samuel Ringgold Ward went from Canada to Britain, and from there to Jamaica, and he never did come back to the United States. In New York City, Ray and McCune Smith, who had always put up fugitives, harbored more. It is, of course, impossible to know how many grantees who hoped to move to Essex or Franklin Counties changed their minds because of the new legislation or, for that matter, whether any of the Black settlers read it as a reason to get out, go to Canada, play it safe. Some may have felt, We’re so close to Canada anyway—why bother? But those of Smith’s grantees who were still, as far as they knew, regarded by long-ago enslavers as self-stolen goods well knew that the difference between the Smith Lands and Canada was no longer measurable in miles alone.³¹

The Phantom Map

As much as the Black Woods was a work in progress, always shifting, revising its cartography, it was never so chimerical that it didn’t leave a mark. Place names inspired by Smith’s giveaway endured for generations after grantees left. The name of Blacksville, conceived by Willis Hodges, would not outlast his use of it, but his name clings to Hodges Hill in Franklin County northeast of Loon Lake and to Hodges Bay below. To the south in Essex County, Craig Brook recalls the vanished cabin of Isaac and Jane Craig; as late as 1907, North Elbans were picking apples from the Craigs’ gnarled trees. The pond named for the Craigs’ neighbor, the “fighting” Silas Frazier, kept its name thirty years after his death. North Elba children living in the Cascade Pass along today’s Route 73 played in the abandoned “Tommy Brown lot” well into the Depression, generations after the man himself was gone.³²

In these ways, local memory pays a debt to this lost history where biography, historical signage, and regional history turn away. Freeman’s Home in the Cascade district outlived the Black grantees who furnished its name by a century, and even the state botanist’s 1889 monograph on North Elba plants recalled “Freemans Home” for its prolific cranberries and Sweet William (“introduced and cultivated for ornament but sometimes escaping from gardens and front yards”), which kept blooming long after grantees had left. A year later in the Troy Times, a Glens Falls publisher, C. H. Possons, called it Freedomville. But local memory kept it straight. In his Lake Placid history of 1946, Arthur Hayes reported stagecoaches stopping at Freeman’s Home just after “Keene Cascade,” and as late as 1965, a Keene physician recalled poking around Freeman’s Home when he was young: “Negro settlements comprised the whole area of Cascade and the surrounding territory… . In rambling around I have run across several of their little plots of land, and old log cabins—decayed logs with stones in the corner. One of those cabins was back of Bushy’s filling station. There was one on the bob run road [Bobsled Run Lane] near the bridge, one on the grounds of North Country School, and one in the woods back of Goff’s house.”³³

The toponymic origins of the tiny hamlet of Ray Brook also invite a speculative suggestion. Town chronicler Mary MacKenzie believed the name of this North Elba hamlet honored an early white homesteader, Daniel Ray, who ventured here in 1810, drifting away seven years later. But Ray Brook doesn’t crop up on maps until the 1870s, more than half a century after Daniel Ray moved on. The agent Charles Bennett Ray visited Essex County in 1849, and with Dr. McCune Smith parceled out some thirty deeds for lots near Ray Brook to people in Brooklyn and Manhattan. At least two grantees from Manhattan, Samuel Drummond and Samuel F. Hall, settled—or took a stab at settling—close to Ray Brook. Is it not imaginable that they or other Black pioneers named this place for Charles Bennett Ray, the giveaway’s great friend? In the spring of 1903, both the Plattsburgh Republican and the Elizabethtown Post offered the suggestion that “a man named Ray acted as Smith’s agent in New York City, and that Ray Brook, the site of the state Tuberculosis Hospital between Saranac Lake and Lake Placid, is probably named after him.”³⁴

Racist place names recalled the giveaway as well. In 1871, a Vermont- published tourist map of the Adirondack region showed a Negro Brook (or “N—— Brook,” to many locals) just west of Vermontville and southeast of Rainbow Lake. According to James Wardner, father of the Franklin memoirist Charles Wardner, this wide brook took its name from Black pioneers who were encouraged to develop farms along its banks by the St. Armand guide and farmer Ahaz Hayes. The problem with this explanation is that at midcentury, Ahaz was a baby. But someone gave the grantees a start here, even if the town historians never took their names and stories. The name white neighbors gave the settlement itself hung on for more than a century, and it is said the onions the Black settlers planted by the brook waved their bright green wands for years.³⁵

To the south of Negro Brook, near Averyville, was the “N—— Clearing” some old-timers were still talking about as late as the mid-twentieth century. Hunters, especially, recalled stories of a “forest hideout” where, it was offered, John Brown secreted fugitives. Rumor had it that a party of these unfortunates ran out of supplies during a bitterly cold winter, and, as “less and less food was brought to them [and] the game became harder to trap, cut off from their friends and deserted by Brown, they died one by one. And there they lie in a neat row of graves”—this from a Lake Placid sportswriter in March 1944. (Apparently these accommodating martyrs, though blizzard bound and starving, still managed to dig their graves in the dead of winter, carve their headstones, get themselves into their graves, and install their headstones too.) Later, in the spring, this columnist resolved to find these graves, “dig ’em up … as soon as the snow and ice goes,” and unearth the “buried booty from some unlawful raid… . Want to come along?”³⁶

Would that early mapmakers’ interest in the homes of Black Adirondackers was as robust as the local memory for racist place names. Black settlers’ names crop up on midcentury town maps of Franklin and St. Armand, but in North Elba, a mid-nineteenth-century map of this community omitted them entirely. Even the town historian Mary MacKenzie was unsettled. To another history buff she mused in 1994, “Did it ever occur to you as very odd that French’s map of 1858 showed not one name or house of a black colonist? This despite the fact that several of the families remained here into the 1860s and even the 1870s. Was French a racist?” ( John Homer French was a New York mapmaker who organized the first comprehensive statewide map and created the still-used 752-page state gazetteer.) Not the refusal of credit or insurance, but this blithe erasure of cartographic visibility—what was this if not redlining before redlining had a name?³⁷

We can thank no mapmaker for our knowledge of Timbuctoo but we know it existed because John Brown, his son, and the grantee James H. Henderson reference it in letters—John Brown writing to Willis Hodges, his son John (who spelled Timbuctoo with two o’s) in a letter to his mother, and Henderson in a letter to his former pastor, Henry Highland Garnet. No airy symbol or mere idea, Timbuctoo marked a place. Some used it to signify just the enclave where three families put up homes. John Brown’s “Timbucto” ranged wider; for him, it seemed to reference about a dozen Black North Elban households, not just the early three.³⁸

Who gave it this name in the first place? The even-weighted, slow-stepping syllables of this elegiac word still evoke the mystery of the ancient kingdom-city on the Niger. But even the scholar Caleb McDaniel, who has parsed this riddle with Talmudic rigor, concedes we may never know who gets naming rights for this community. When Gerrit Smith alluded to the best known of his Black settlements, he described it merely as his “little colored colony.” The Black agents recognized the Black enclaves only by the numbered townships that contained them; they never named the settlements themselves. Richard Henry Dana, recalling John Brown’s old neighborhood, did not name Timbuctoo. Nor did Seneca Ray Stoddard, the artist-writer whose impression of the North Elba colony made such a mark on public memory.³⁹

Casual toponymy recalls what history forgets—except for the unmapped Timbuctoo. Here it’s the opposite: history recalls what toponymy has forgotten. Partly this was the doing of the Adirondack historian Alfred Donaldson, whose mirthful sketch of a jerry-built shantytown littered with small square huts from which “little stovepipes protruded at varying angles,” distinguished by a “last touch of pure negroism … a large but dilapidated red flag … bearing the half-humorous, half- pathetic legend, ‘Timbuctoo,’ ” captivated generations of journalists and scholars. Mary MacKenzie, the town historian who first documented North Elba’s Black community in the early 1970s, despaired of Donaldson’s influence. Timbuctoo, she felt, was a label John Brown slapped on the settlement to distinguish it from Willis Hodges’s Blacksville, and one that locals mocked. Timbuctoo—that’s how out-of-place and far from home were the “Gerrit N—— s” here. Timbuctoo—where Black Americans belonged, in Africa, across the sea. She loathed the name, felt it demeaned. But would an insult strain for delicacy? Until Governor Mario Cuomo outlawed racist place names in New York in 1988, all the Adirondacks was amply salted with N—— Hills, Brooks, and Points. MacKenzie gave naming rights to John Brown because he loved history and Timbuctoo reflected this great passion, and she could not think who else but Brown would know this name, or register its value.⁴⁰

Let me offer some suggestions. “Perhaps no foreign name, thanks to the rhyme of ‘hymn-book-too,’—is better known in America … than Timbucktoo,” declared the Hartford Courant in 1879. But Black activists in New York were reading about Timbuctoo much earlier than this. Freedom’s Journal, the nation’s first Black newspaper, ran dispatches on European forays into sub-Saharan Africa as early as 1827, and speculation about the far-famed Timbuctoo (also Timbuktu, Tombucktoo, and Tambouctou) was rife. And never mind if this once commercial capital of the Mandingo and Songhai empires, renowned for its architecture, university, royal court, and libraries (eighty of them), blessed by the sweetness of its water, envied for the gold ingots in its treasury (as heavy, one traveler reported, as one thousand English pounds), was, by the early nineteenth century, three centuries past its prime. Fantasists were not discouraged. Observes Sanche de Gramont in The Strong Brown God, “Timbuctu the powerful became Timbuctu the mysterious. Its reputation, embellished beyond all measure, fired the imagination of explorers and poets”—and Black reformer-editors in the United States. The legendary crossroads for a thousand caravans bearing fine cloths, salt, and gold was a catalyst for Black orientalist fantasy no less than white.⁴¹

In 1827 alone, Freedom’s Journal published nine articles on African exploration, culture, and geography. It noted the Scots adventurer Alexander Gordon Laing’s doomed bid to penetrate Timbuctoo in 1826 (he was discovered and beheaded). It tracked the better-favored efforts of the Frenchman René Caillié in 1828, who survived his visit only because he learned Arabic and garbed himself as a trader. That year was also when the self-freed slave Prince Abdoul Rahahman introduced a great many Americans to slavery through his lectures. The grandson of the king of Timbuctoo, Rahahman was leading a war party when he was captured and delivered to British slave traders in 1788. Sold to a farmer in Natchez, Louisiana, he worked forty years on a plantation, raised a family, and never did stop yearning for his ancestral home. With the help of allies like Secretary of State Henry Clay, Rahahman won his freedom. A speaking tour to raise funds to free his African family took him to eight Northern cities. He wore royal robes, recited from the Koran, and reminisced about the world he left behind. His Timbuctoo, Freedom’s Journal reported, was “probably as large as New York,” “a place of great business,” “extremely fertile,” rich in coffee, seamed with gold, and studded with walled towns. If white subscribers to the New York Journal of Commerce thrilled to Rahahman’s reports for reasons more mercenary than culturally enthralled (here was an enormous territory traversed by a marvelously navigable river fairly leaping to be harnessed to American extractive interests), the Timbuctoo that roused the interest of Black reformers was a symbol of Black economic self-sufficiency, political independence, military prowess, and unassailability. Little wonder that in 1828, Freedom’s Journal ran thirteen features on the “Prince of Timbuctoo.”⁴²

This African American portrait of Timbuctoo did not lack for irony; among Christian abolitionists, the real Timbuctoo may have roused unease. It was Muslim. Its natives were polygamous. Its slave trade was robust. The most willful reading of the map would never get Timbuctoo near the Land of Cush, “Blameless Aethiopia,” or (another darling of Black Africanophiles) Pharaonic Egypt. But if Henry Garnet never named Timbuctoo when he rhapsodized about Black America’s debt to Africa, Ethiopia, or “Egypt, Africa’s dark browed queen,” it hardly mattered. Notes Wilson Jeremiah Moses in Afrotopia, “It was an exotic and heady brew of contradictory ideas that invigorated the Afrocentrism of those decades… . Christian, Jewish, classical and Germanic mythologies were combined in the making of an image of Africa suitable to the needs of Westernized Africans”—and nineteenth-century Afrocentrism had a gift for inclusivity. What Rahahman’s Timbuctoo signified was not a slave economy but a legacy of independence, not a violent xenophobia but a tradition of self-reliance and a quality of urbanism. Timbuctoo was civilized. Its attractive layout, robust markets, famed literacy, and schools were a match for any city in the West.⁴³

From 1837 until it folded in late 1841, the Colored American published thirty articles on Africa; references to Timbuctoo abounded. Black upstate reformers learned about Timbuctoo (Tomboktu) in William Desborough Cooley’s The Negroland of the Arabs Examined and Explained (1841), and in the antislavery reformer Wilson Armistead’s tome, Tribute for the Negro (1848), packed with the Moorish explorer Leo Africanus’s bold impressions of Timbuctoo from the 1500s. Black activists could ponder “The Interior of Africa” in the Albany Patriot, or “The Progress of Discovery in Central Africa” in the antislavery National Era. In 1848, Reverend Henry Highland Garnet introduced the Black women of Troy, New York, to his idealized ancient Africa, home of the queen of Sheba.⁴⁴

But Timbuctoo had another meaning in this era. To Black and white Americans, it also meant an outpost grievously forsaken, out of reach, irredeemably obscure. So maybe, as Caleb McDaniel muses, white North Elbans who didn’t care for Smith’s ideas or his beneficiaries were the ones to gift the enclave with a name they deemed a slur, and then “defiant Black settlers … repurposed [it and] made the name their own.” If so, it wouldn’t last. When the Hendersons and Jeffersons left their big lot, the name left with them, and it would not be revived until 1921 when the Adirondack historian Alfred Donaldson used it to denote the settlement at large. Or maybe it was Brown who named the enclave. Or those of Smith’s Black agents or subagents who read and wrote for antislavery papers, which might mean, really, any one of them. Ray. McCune Smith. Ward. Pennington. Garnet. Especially Garnet, with his fierce passion for African history and culture.⁴⁵

A gold mining enclave called Timbuctoo in Yuba County, California, emerged around the same time as North Elba’s. In Burlington County, New Jersey, a Timbuctoo was on the ground almost thirty years before Smith launched his giveaway. Might these have inspired the North Elban model? Called “Tombucktoo” in early deeds and legal documents, the name of the New Jersey settlement employed the spelling of early French explorers and cartographers but was dropped for “Timbuctoo,” maybe because the latter was a better fit for Anglophones. And this Timbuctoo took off! Bearing the ancient name was not just the settlement itself but its A.M.E. Zion Church, its school, and its burial ground. By 1860, this Timbuctoo was 125 people strong. In 1883, forty-four children were enrolled in Timbuctoo School District, No. 33.⁴⁶

All of which is to suggest how lushly Timbuctoo flourished in the Black American imagination before Gerrit Smith dreamed up his plan. Settlements were named for it. Editors reported on it. And mostly it meant something good, owned a resonance, a luster. It claimed an ancestral patrimony to a city, never seen, and a devotion to a name that still inspired. It invoked an idea of Africa much as white Americans honored Old World hubs of industry and culture when they named frontier outposts after (sticking just to upstate New York) Rome, Syracuse, Amsterdam, Lisbon, Potsdam, and Florence. And it tweaked and tugged the cultural geography of the Black Woods beyond anything Smith had imagined. It said, Not that Timbuctoo, but this one. In a green galaxy of towns and hamlets named for white men and their worlds, it said, This one’s ours.