Adirondack Council Celebrates the 125th Birthday Of the Adirondack Park
By Kyle Plaske
Adirondack Council Clarence Petty Intern - Albany Office
This year marks the 125th anniversary of the Adirondack Park! On May 20, 1892, the New York State Legislature and Governor Roswell P. Flower created the Adirondack Park Enabling Act which essentially created the Park’s Blue Line boundary.
Sadly, after the Europeans arrived, a short history of the Adirondack region is a story of natural resource exploitation. But these events compelled forward-thinking conservationists to work to protect those resources and led to the Adirondack Park we know and love today. A place with breathtaking landscapes, rare ecosystems, pure waters, magnificent and adorable wildlife, expansive Wilderness areas, and unique communities.
Come along as I tell the story of our Adirondack Park to celebrate its 125th Birthday!
The first users of the Adirondack landscape were two Native American tribes, the Mohawks and the Algonquins. However, it is up for debate whether either tribe actually settled in the Adirondack mountains due to their harsh climate and rugged landscape. Nevertheless, the tribes did use the lands for hunting and fishing, and as a thoroughfare to other areas of the state. In fact, it has been said that the word "Adirondack" means “Barkeater” or "those who eat trees" in the language of the Mohawks. It is assumed by many to be a pejorative term used to describe the Algonquins that settled to the North.
Beginning in the early 1600s, European explorers struggled for control over the region’s waterways, valuable fur trade and plentiful timber. This also marked the beginning of nearly three centuries of relentless deforestation in the Adirondacks. Great white pines along the region’s lakeshores were taken for shipbuilding, and other softwoods were cut to construct major French and British forts. While the Europeans fought over the region’s water routes – essential for navigation and commerce – the Adirondack wilderness was generally viewed as a wasteland. Its winters were long and cold, and its rough mountainous terrain rendered travel difficult.
At the end of the Revolutionary War, soon after reclaiming all the lands once held in the hands of the British Crown, the state began auctioning off tracts of Adirondack forestland for next to nothing per acre. The state also established “military tracts,” which it offered up as bounty lands to soldiers who fought in the Revolution. But because of the remoteness of the Adirondacks – and likely because of the day’s attitudes toward wilderness, in general – few people took up the offer. Until the early 1800s, the Adirondacks remained little explored and largely uninhabited.
By the early 19th century, as the gears of the Industrial Revolution began to turn, wealthy industrialists began to view the Adirondack wilderness as a money making opportunity. Huge swaths of forestland near the region’s eastern fringes were bought up by the timber industry and promptly decimated. And while the timber companies removed only softwoods, the iron industry did not discriminate: they cut down any and all kinds of trees they could find and used the wood to make charcoal used to fire its iron smelting operations.
In the early to mid-1800s, lumbering was difficult and dangerous work. Using crude axes and handsaws, lumbermen worked round-the-clock through the cold winter months, clear cutting entire conifer, spruce, pine, and fir forests. The logs, cut into thirteen-foot lengths, would then be floated down the region’s major rivers to the sawmills during the springtime flood. The lumbermen’s hard work earned the timber industry enormous profits, and by mid-century, New York State was producing one fifth of the nation’s timber.
Unrestrained by regulations, the Adirondack region quickly became a stomping ground for wealthy industrialists hungry for profit. Advances in the paper pulp industry began to exacerbate the region’s widespread deforestation, and the advent of railroads brought even the most remote corners of the Adirondacks within industry’s reach.
Also in the 1830s, wealthy travelers began seeking refuge from New York City’s industrial-driven noise and pollution and started visiting the Adirondacks by rail. These vacationers traveled north, and for the first time, the destruction wrought by deforestation was laid bare to public view.