- [Narrator] In 1892, New York state lawmakers established the Adirondack Park, which set aside a network of forest preserves and declared that they be forever reserved for the free use of all the people, an important conservation achievement.

In recent years, activists, educators, and policymakers have questioned whether this vast collection of forever wild preserves, residential communities, and private lands has ever lived up to this democratic ideal.

Adirondack history has long centered on the experiences of Euro-American settlers taming and conserving the wilderness.

And yet the tapestry of human experience in the Adirondacks is much more rich and complex than this single thread.

The Adirondacks are more than a success story of wilderness preservation, but also an Indigenous homeland.

- We came to the mountains to hunt, to fish, to gather medicinal plants, food plants that grow at certain times of the year.

Despite losing the land, the Adirondacks, in particular, we've always had a connection here.

- [Narrator] We also celebrate the Adirondacks experiment with multiracial democracy.

- In 1846, you can't vote if you're Black unless you own $250 in real estate in land.

And overwhelmingly, this law has effectively disenfranchised an entire potential Black electorate in New York.

So Gerrit Smith, he gives away in that year as much as the 120,000 acres to 3000 free Black New Yorkers.

- So it was an amazing experiment.

I've mapped out where every single lot was, and when you put all of the lots together, about half of Franklin was Black owned and about half of North Elba.

- [Narrator] This tapestry includes women who played an essential role advocating for forest preservation and commemorating the work of radical abolition and racial equality.

- Kate Field said, "The moral of the Adirondacks is freedom."

That statement is a blueprint for the Adirondacks, and particularly, John Brown's farm is a place of liberty, justice, equality, literal human freedom.

And also that freedom to go into the woods to become close with nature.

- This is beautiful.

I'm taking it all in.

I love it outdoors.

(upbeat music) - [Narrator] All of these communities shaped the land just as the land shaped them and continues to do so today, producing a unique patchwork of human experience in the wilderness.

This expansive view of history opened space for diverse communities within the ongoing story of the Adirondacks.

- So I bring people up and I tell them there's a history here.

We've been here with John Brown, Gerrit Smith providing land.

We are here, you know, we're not just in the prisons, and we have every right to be here.

- These stories are getting unearthed of these other people that were here that actually were part of making the Adirondacks what we know to be true now.

So we know that it wasn't one person or two people that did this.

We know that it was a collective effort that took everyone.

- [Narrator] Environmental justice in the Adirondacks emerges from the region's unique story of human presence on the land, an inclusive sense of belonging and a shared commitment to stewarding the land for future generations.

Acknowledging the struggle for freedom and equality while confronting legacies of dispossession and exclusion with the ultimate goal of moving us forward towards an Adirondacks for all.

- [Announcer] Production of "Adirondacks For All" was made possible in part by the Adirondack Experience, The Museum on Blue Mountain Lake.

And the generosity of these donors.

(Indigenous music) - [Narrator] The story of the Adirondacks begins with the region's original inhabitants.

Indigenous peoples whose history on the land is older than the forests.

- The Mohawk people were one of six nations of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, occupied what is now called New York state, and that includes the Adirondacks.

The Mohawks traditionally had villages near the Mohawk River Valley and the St. Louis River Valley.

And in between those two valleys are these mountains.

One of the popular sayings is that it was barren wastelands, wild, no humans.

I never believed that.

We came to the mountains to hunt, to fish, to gather medicinal plants, food plants that grow at certain times of the year, and we'd harvest those resources.

These mountains were always a part of our lives, our culture, and in the the larger picture, our confederacy.

As far as Haudenosaunee culturally, anywhere from 3-5,000 years, we've been in what is now New York state, including these mountains.

But there have been discoveries in the Adirondacks of projectile points that were around at a time when the glaciers were retreating and these mountains were exposed.

And they say that there was people here before there were trees.

- [Narrator] During the Revolutionary War, Haudenosaunee nations often found themselves in the difficult position of choosing sides between the English and the former colonists, while struggling to maintain sovereignty.

It became a civil war for the Haudenosaunee, and the Mohawk lost much of their lands through violence and fraudulent treaties.

- President Washington sent General Sullivan and General Clinton all across Iroquois territory in the scorched earth policy.

And they destroyed every village, burned their crops, burned their orchards right before winter.

And survivors who fled the armies, many of them starved to death because that was their food for the coming winter, and they settled in what is now Canada.

And there was a treaty that was signed with the Americans by a Mohawk named Joseph Brant, and he basically ceded 9 million acres of Mohawk land.

You gotta keep in mind that our confederacy was severely weakened from war, disease.

It took a toll.

There was hardly any of us left, and Joseph Brant didn't have the authority to cede anything.

He wasn't a chief, but the Americans accepted it.

We lost all this land because of that, and that's why most Iroquois communities are in Canada right now.

Despite losing the land, the Adirondacks, in particular, we've always had a connection here.

- [Narrator] After the Revolutionary War, Euro-American settlement continued to expand across the Adirondacks.

Farmers, loggers, miners, and later wilderness preservation advocates all left their imprint on the landscape.

But by the mid 19th century, the Adirondacks also embarked on a radical experiment with racial justice.

(upbeat music) In 1846, radical abolitionists and philanthropist Gerrit Smith granted over 120,000 acres of Adirondack land to 3000 free African Americans, so they could meet state property requirements to vote.

- Gerrit Smith wanting to help enfranchise Black men and make them full citizens and help to give them full rights of citizenship.

He identifies that many eligible Black men for free gifts of land, mostly in 40 acre lots.

Most people never are able to move.

They can't afford it.

But those that do start coming a little later in 1848, 1849.

And altogether, people and as many as five settlements scattered around Essex and Franklin counties.

The best known is Timbuctoo because that's the one closest to the home of John Brown, the militant abolitionist who seizes Harpers Ferry and helps polarize the nation and launches us towards civil war.

That's the colony most people know of and the one most historians of written about.

But there are also colonies in Blacksville, a little bit to the north on Loon Lake and (indistinct).

These families probably come to as many as 200 people, including everybody, women, children, and fellow travelers.

And most of them don't stay, but those that do are in the region until the 21st century.

- These were given out to people farther down state who were already employed and they were living in the city.

They had kids, and they didn't necessarily have the resources to move up here.

So most of them never actually settled here, but several dozen did come here and settle.

Usually not on the parcel that was granted to them because it was low quality farmland.

- The reason why most of them can't stay is, in my view, because they probably can't afford to stay.

To homestead on the frontier, you can't be dead broke to start with.

Very few are so well set up that they come to the land with that kind of money in the first place.

It's kind of a classic paradigm of a failed liberal strategy that goes so far, but not to the next point that makes it workable and manageable and affordable, and it stalls at that point.

Lyman Epps is one of several grantees who come from the city of Troy.

Lyman Epps settles in what we now call North Elba and becomes a fast friend of John Brown, who really admires his work ethic and his talent as a farmer.

And he's not only a farmer, he's an Adirondack guide.

He becomes a community builder.

And his son Lyman Jr. stays in the Adirondacks all his life and is devoted to the memory of John Brown, his father's friend.

(gentle music) - [Narrator] John Thomas inhabits a special place in the story of Adirondack freedom.

During the 1840s, Thomas escaped a slave plantation in the South, journeyed north towards New York state, and later became a successful farmer and respected citizen in the Adirondacks.

- He buys land in the town of Franklin, and he farms profitably.

At the end of the day, he owns many hundreds of acres.

He's doing well enough to write Gerrit Smith a thank you letter.

- [VO] We enjoy our rural home in peace and quiet, but advancing years notify me that the toils of life are nearly done.

My family now consists of a wife and two daughters.

I have breasted the storm of prejudice and opposition until I begin to be regarded as an American citizen.

- His story is thrilling, not just because of what he writes, but because of what his neighbors told a historian that John Thomas had been pursued by slave hunters before the Civil War, and they had scared the bounty hunters away by telling them, "John Thomas is armed.

He's not planning to leave or go with you.

He'd sooner die than be captured.

And what's more, we're gonna defend him.

He's our neighbor."

- [Narrator] But there is another side to this story.

- They met with racism, they were discouraged, and that is part of the story.

There were racist guides who took them to the wrong lots and fooled them and tricked them into selling their land.

There were insincere surveyors who did a botched, lousy job of getting their landlines straight.

They had to be redone by John Brown.

There were thieving shopkeepers.

But there were many moving and heartening stories as well that I discovered of white neighbors helping out and being helped by their Black neighbors in finding the common ground of community.

- So with that, we have the responsibility to bring forward stories of women, stories of Indigenous people, stories of people with abilities.

And as we move forward, for us to be able to leave the legacy for the next generation that I think we're trying to leave, we cannot be ahistorical about all of the many fingerprints that are all over this region to make it this amazing place that we all love now.

- [Narrator] In fact, women would play a critical role advocating for the preservation of Adirondack wilderness.

(serene music) - Women have been left out of the narrative of the Adirondacks in large part, because men were coming to the Adirondacks to test their manliness.

So they didn't really want women in the woods with them.

So unless women wrote their own stories and told their own narrative, it generally wasn't in the history books.

There isn't one woman's voice or one woman's experience.

It's very varied.

But in terms of preserving the Adirondacks, the one woman that stands out above any of the others is Kate Field.

She became an advocate for preserving the forest of the Adirondacks.

She saw it as a place for people to heal, a place for women and men, of course, to go into the woods and to improve their health and to recreate.

And beyond that, in 1869, she is proposing already that New York State carve out an Adirondack park and that the state manage this park to preserve the forest and to preserve the watershed.

And she said that the John Brown Farm should be the center or the nucleus of this Adirondack Park.

When she visited, she came to the John Brown Farm, and she couldn't believe the place was for sale.

And so she convinced 19 other people to go in with her and buy the John Brown Farm to preserve the history.

She felt it was sacred ground, and to preserve the forest and to make it part of this Adirondack forest preserve that she was dreaming of back in 1870.

After visiting the John Brown Farm, she did a lecture about the Adirondacks in Boston, Chicago, all over the place.

And she talks about, you know, "Standing here at the John Brown Farm, I see John Brown going off to Harpers Ferry.

I see his body coming back," you know, et cetera.

And she then says a most profound statement, "The moral of the Adirondacks is freedom."

So she says this in the context of John Brown.

Of that, I think she sees that the most important message that we can get from the Adirondacks is this message of freedom that John Brown planted here.

This message of liberty, equality, justice.

And she sees this as the most important lesson of the Adirondacks - [Narrator] For Kate Field, John Brown's farm represented the soul of the park and linked the region's history of freedom and equality with the wilderness area that promised freedom to appreciate and enjoy the Adirondacks' natural beauty.

But the legacy of John Brown's farm was in stark contrast to the appearance of prisons inside the boundaries of the park.

(somber music) - I grew up in the Adirondacks during the '50s and '60s.

Nobody talked about the prisons, but I soon learned that there were a number of prisons and they were growing with the Rockefeller drug laws.

- The first prison opened in the Adirondacks in 1845.

At the time, though, the state was also interested in modernizing the infrastructure of the North Country, which was still a very remote and isolated part of the state.

Investing money in building roads and other infrastructure that could be used to uplift the area's economy.

For more than a century during that time, Clinton was the only prison in the area.

And from 1976 to 1999, nearly a dozen new prisons were open.

So you really can't separate the Adirondack Park from the prison system, and you can't separate the prison system from the Adirondack Park.

Starting in the 1970s and going into the, you know, 21st century, you have many incarcerated people in minimum security prisons going out into local communities to do a variety of different jobs, including working on hiking trails, building state campgrounds and camp sites, and improving roadways.

All of which enhance the wilderness of the Adirondacks and all of which help promote the area's tourist economy.

So you really can't separate Adirondack wilderness from the prison system that exists in that wilderness.

- And when I look at statistics, I discovered that 70% of the African Americans, people of color, who were in this Adirondack community were incarcerated.

So out of the total population of African Americans and Blacks, they were the ones who were incarcerated.

There have been some changes, certainly the prison population has been reduced, which is great.

So we're hopeful that we can get people to start talking about this, and having the kinds of contacts we need with people who are part of this community in the Adirondacks, and people from the communities that are most directly impacted by incarceration.

If we could get them to understand each other and learn what the impact of incarceration is.

- I think that as a historian, it's important that when we think about inclusivity, we have to think about history very broadly.

So when we think about the history of the North Country, they think about the Adirondack Park, they might think about the Winter Olympics in Lake Placid, They might even think about the area's military history.

but making history here more inclusive would also acknowledge the area's role as a site of incarceration of a large population of vulnerable individuals.

So whether it was Irish immigrants in the 19th century, Native American people, Italian immigrants, populations that have historically been discriminated against, or African-Americans and Latinos, acknowledging that history and using these spaces to tell that story I think will be very important moving forward to make the Adirondacks a more inclusive space and to make it more welcoming to people who might not otherwise think about coming here.

(inspiring music) - I am so proud of this huge piece of land that's in our state, over 6 million acres, and it grows.

You could fit five national parks in our park.

I mean, we're a green space that's important to climate change.

To have that much contiguous land that is actually contributing to clean air and the environment.

When I talk to people in the community and ask them, you know, "Have you ever been to the Adirondacks?"

A lot of them say, "No."

And I'll say, "Well, why not?"

They're like, "Well, that's not for, you know, "people of color," or you know, "All there are, are prisons up in the Adirondacks.

Why would I want to go there?"

Or, "There are no Black people up there," or, "No Latino people up there."

And there are.

We've been here.

I say this all the time when I do bus trips.

I host a bus trip for the Adirondack experience.

So I bring people up and I tell them, "There's a history here.

We've been here with John Brown, through Gerrit Smith providing land.

We are here.

You know, we're not just in the prisons, and we have every right to be here."

- This is beautiful.

I'm taking it all in.

I love it outdoors.

- [Benita] To make the the Adirondack a more inclusive space, we really need to get people to see this place and space, to experience it, to come here and see people who look like them.

- I used to call myself the Black girl hiking because I'd come up to the Adirondacks hiking, and I'd be the only one.

I'd say, "Where are all of us?"

And so now I see where we are.

We're with this group.

And so it's a boon to be able to find them and to connect with them.

- [Benita] There are people here who recognize that it's all of us.

It's not just for this group over here.

- This time of year, if you're driving on any back road or the main roads in the Adirondack, you might see Mohawks gathering sweet grass.

And that's a grass that grows that has a very sweet aroma that is used in our basketry.

In the fall, a lot of people come to the mountains to harvest certain medicinal plants.

There's only, you know, a handful of people that have that knowledge still.

But it's still here, and it's being taught to our own people.

So we still come here.

- [Narrator] During the summer of 2023, a group of educators, activists, Indigenous people and community members gathered to celebrate the unveiling of several historic markers recognizing the historical presence and legacy of African-American settlers showcasing the progress local communities have made towards a more diverse, inclusive, and expansive history of the Adirondacks.

- So here is John Thomas brook.

Officially has that name as of this year in April.

So what we've done is researched the story of this brook, realized it was named in a pejorative fashion after African American settlers of the area in the 1800s.

And so rather than just refer to these people's skin color, we think it's appropriate to acknowledge their names and their stories.

So John Thomas was a settler on this brook farther downstream, escaped from enslavement, came up here, became a successful farmer and a valued citizen.

So we're naming it after him, and we'll be unveiling a historic roadside marker today with a large group of people who helped make it happen.

And because of the broad base community support, it sailed right through the process and we won the battle.

What we've been doing here in the Adirondacks is in recovering the greater depths and complexity of our story actually fits with a larger national movement that's been going on with the national parks, examining where the names of places come from and realizing they're covering up a deeper history.

So it's part of a larger awakening of the culture.

I think people wanna know what our heritage really is.

How did we really get here?

Who are we really as Americans?

And in this case as Adirondackers.

- You know, it's an overwhelming sensation.

I do a lot of speaking engagements, and usually I can kind of keep it together.

But this, I think also having my family here, like having my 2-year-old here and being able to come to a space that I would never, ever come to again, that now feels like I have ownership over it.

It's an overwhelming experience.

And I'm sure tonight I will just like burst into the happiest of tears.

When you're in the middle of like, you know, a history making moment, sometimes we don't always recognize it.

Nothing can happen without community support.

And like I said, the words matter.

It shows our values, like it shows our collective values.

I love to push back when people say that progress isn't being made.

It's like, no, it is.

You can only move at the change of progress though, and that means that we have to move together.

And so there's as much as Curt, you know, the logistics of it, he couldn't do it without community support.

And so them understanding and righting this wrong is a signal of what our values are now and what our values are to future generations.

- By learning about the diversity of human history in a place like this, which is iconic as a representation of wild nature and the interaction of people in the environment and our place in the natural world.

By learning about what has happened in the past helps us see how we got here, mistakes people have made in the past, contributions people have made in the past that we overlooked.

Success stories that we've overlooked as well.

Thinking that it's all really about us just here and now.

We're not really that alone in history.

And by connecting to our roots like that, that really anchors us as we try to grow forward into the future.

(upbeat music) (crowd applauds) - [Announcer] Production of "Adirondacks For All" was made possible in part by the Adirondack Experience, The Museum on Blue Mountain Lake, and the generosity of these donors.

(upbeat music) (upbeat music continues) (upbeat music continues) (upbeat music continues) (upbeat music continues) (nature sounds)