Adirondack People And Places

Archival photographs and text describe the history, social life and customs of the Adriondack Mountain region in New York.

New York's mountainous Adirondack region, once considered foreboding and impassable, has evolved during the last three centuries into a desirable place for people to live and visit. Native Americans, trappers, hunters, and anglers first arrived to tap the wilderness resources offered by the Adirondack Mountains. Lumbermen, miners, and tannery workers settled the back woodlands to harvest the logs, dig the minerals, and collect the hemlock bark. Others came to clear trees and farm the land, and settlements soon dotted the landscape. The travelling public found the healthy, pure air and the beautiful mountains with miles of waterways a welcomed alternative to the hot, smoky cities. The tourist industry grew and flourished with hotels, cabins, cottages, summer homes, and wealthy estates spreading throughout the six million acres of Adirondack Park. Communities also continued to thrive as visitors found the area impossible to leave. Adirondack People and Places celebrates this mountainous country where the wilderness truly became a place for people.

Henry M. Beach was a prolific and accomplished upstate New York photographer who documented the North Country during the first quarter of the twentieth century. Although much less known and celebrated, Beach's work is as important to the twentieth-century Adirondacks as Seneca Ray Stoddard's is to the nineteenth century. Illustrated with over 250 examples of his work including ten panoramic foldouts, this book covers the range of Beach's subject matter. Robert Bogdan's lively and accessible approach to the photographer's work encourages the reader to explore the North Country's people and places through Beach's photography and life. Although Beach's postcard pictures and other photographs were taken to sell in bulk to hotel managers, tourist shop owners, and other retail merchants, they are not just mass-produced, stylized, pretty pictures. Beside the bubbling brooks and shady woodland paths are factory boomtowns and paper mills belching pollution. As the rails brought increasing numbers of middle-class tourists to the Adirondacks, the wealthy created their own exclusive wilderness playground. Beach photographed dandy visitors at play as well as manual laborers sweating in the forest, logging camps, factories, mines, and construction sites. Images of "great camps" sit next to modest abodes, small stores, and family-owned resorts. Pictures of trains in scenic surroundings give way to mangled wrecks after tragic railroad accidents. In addition to standard view cards, he produced montages and advertisement postcards serious visual commentary as well as lighthearted picture play. Beach's best works stir the heart and provoke the imagination, and his whimsical, down-to-earth approach to photography produced images that are a treat to the eye.

An evocative and personal history of a unique historic place in the Adirondacks. In 1968 Fran and Jay Yardley, a young couple with pioneering spirit, moved to a remote corner of the Adirondacks to revive the long-abandoned but historic Bartlett Carry Club, with its one thousand acres and thirty-seven buildings. The Saranac Lake–area property had been in Jay’s family for generations, and his dream was to restore this summer resort to support himself and, eventually, a growing family. Fran chronicles their journey and, along the way, unearths the history of those who came before, from the 1800s to the present. Offering an evocative glimpse into the past, Finding True North traces the challenges and transformations of one of the world’s most beautiful, least-celebrated places and the people who were tirelessly devoted to it. “Fran Yardley is a superb storyteller, and this is a superb story—of a camp and of a marriage, illuminating a key corner of the slightly out-of-time paradise that is the Adirondacks.” — Bill McKibben, author of Radio Free Vermont: A Fable of Resistance “Fran Yardley has given us an emotionally moving book, combining memoir and Adirondack history. With a singular and powerful voice, in a tightly organized narrative, she deftly weaves together two distinct strands: her own remarkable story and the history of Bartlett’s Carry.” — Philip Terrie, author of Seeing the Forest: Reviews, Musings, and Opinions from an Adirondack Historian “Fran Yardley—storyteller, actress, writer, and stalwart Adirondacker—takes us behind the balsam curtain to a truly magical place on the Saranac Lakes. Finding True North is the tale of families, forests, tragedy, and triumph told from the heart with deep insight. It’s a terrific, immersive read.” — Elizabeth Folwell, editor-at-large, Adirondack Life “Gifted storyteller Fran Yardley has harnessed her many voices to the printed page in this remarkable memoir. Yardley interweaves her firsthand experience hinged to historic documentation with her imagination as she reveals the lives and ways of those who went before and coexisted with her and Jay Yardley at Bartlett Carry. Finding True North is a must-read love story about Adirondack place and people.” — Caroline M. Welsh, Director Emerita, Adirondack Museum “In Finding True North, Fran Yardley has produced an immediate and necessary addition to the body of Adirondack literature and history. Long in the making, it is beautifully written, authoritative, and moving.” — Christopher Shaw, author of Sacred Monkey River: A Canoe Trip with the Gods and former editor of Adirondack Life “Author and master storyteller Fran Yardley tells of the early history of the aquatic Adirondack crossroads known as Bartlett Carry, the later history of the place as a club for families eager to swap conventional orbits outside the mountains for the natural world within, and the reinvention of the place by the author and her visionary late husband, Jay. The stories that flow together here touch the heart and bring the reader to tears and laughter. For lovers of the Adirondacks and particularly for those keen on understanding how the past shapes the present and the future, this is a must read.” — Ed Kanze, author of Adirondack: Life and Wildlife in the Wild, Wild East

The Adirondacks have been an Indigenous homeland for millennia, and the presence of Native people in the region was obvious but not well documented by Europeans, who did not venture into the interior between the seventeenth and early nineteenth centuries. Yet, by the late nineteenth century, historians had scarcely any record of their long-lasting and vibrant existence in the area. With Rural Indigenousness, Otis shines a light on the rich history of Algonquian and Iroquoian people, offering the first comprehensive study of the relationship between Native Americans and the Adirondacks. While Otis focuses on the nineteenth century, she extends her analysis to periods before and after this era, revealing both the continuity and change that characterize the relationship over time. Otis argues that the landscape was much more than a mere hunting ground for Native residents; rather, it a "location of exchange," a space of interaction where the land was woven into the fabric of their lives as an essential source of refuge and survival. Drawing upon archival research, material culture, and oral histories, Otis examines the nature of Indigenous populations living in predominantly Euroamerican communities to identify the ways in which some maintained their distinct identity while also making selective adaptations exemplifying the concept of "survivance." In doing so, Rural Indigenousness develops a new conversation in the field of Native American studies that expands our understanding of urban and rural indigeneity.

The most complete account of ancient man in the New York area ever published in one volume, this book traces a rich, 8000-year story of human prehistory. Beginning with the first known inhabitants, Paleo-Indian hunters who lived approximately 7000 B.C., the author gives a detailed chronological account of the complex of cultural units that have existed in the area, culminating in the Iroquois tribes encountered by the European colonists at the dawn of the seventeenth century. All of the major archaeological sites in the region are described in detail and representative artifacts from all the major cultural units are illustrated in over 100 plates and drawings. The entire account is informed by the most recently obtained radio-carbon dates. In addition to giving much new, previously unpublished information, the author has synthesized all earlier published material and from this he has drawn as many inferences as the material affords regarding the nature of these early inhabitants, where they came from, and how they lived. Each cultural unit is systematically described: its discovery and naming; its ecological and chronological setting; the physical characteristics of the related people; economy; housing and settlement pattern; dress and ornament; technology; transportation; trade relationships; warfare; esthetic and recreational activities; social and political organization; mortuary customs; and religio-magical and ceremonial customs.