A People's History
of the Adirondacks.

Samuel de Champlain, traveling south from New France with Huron and Algonquin allies, becomes the first European on record to see the long inland sea that now forms the Park's eastern boundary — and to fire a musket on its shore.

Irish-born merchant William Gilliland founds a short-lived settlement on the Boquet River — one of the first sustained European attempts to put down roots inside what would become the Blue Line. The Revolutionary War erases it within a decade.

State geologist Ebenezer Emmons leads the first recorded ascent of the state's highest peak and proposes the name “Adirondack” for the range — from a Mohawk term sometimes translated as “bark-eaters.” He names the mountain for Governor William L. Marcy.

The abolitionist John Brown moves his family to a hardscrabble farm at North Elba, joining Gerrit Smith's experiment to settle free Black families on Adirondack land. He is buried there in 1859 after the raid on Harpers Ferry.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, Louis Agassiz, James Russell Lowell and six other luminaries spend two weeks camping on Follensby Pond under the guidance of William J. Stillman. Emerson's poem “The Adirondacs” fixes the region in the American literary imagination.

William H. H. Murray publishes *Adventures in the Wilderness*, a breezy guide to camping and fishing in the Adirondacks. Rail- and stage-loads of city visitors — the “Murray's Fools” — arrive that summer and ignite the region's tourist economy.

At 25, Colvin is appointed superintendent of the Adirondack Survey. For the next quarter-century he measures peaks, maps watersheds, and argues relentlessly for state protection of the forest. His reports are the intellectual foundation of the Park.

On Raquette Lake, William West Durant begins the first “Great Camp” — a rustic-luxe compound of peeled-log lodges that defines an entire architectural vocabulary. Sagamore, Santanoni, Topridge and Kamp Kill Kare follow over the next three decades.

Dr. Edward Livingston Trudeau, himself tubercular, opens the Adirondack Cottage Sanitarium on Mount Pisgah — the first American facility to treat tuberculosis with the “fresh-air cure.” Saranac Lake becomes a medical destination for the next 60 years.

New York establishes the Forest Preserve, declaring state-owned lands in the Adirondacks (and Catskills) shall be kept as wild forest. It is a statutory protection — the constitutional one comes nine years later.

The Legislature draws the Blue Line on the state map, creating the Adirondack Park — today roughly six million acres of public and private land intermingled, the largest publicly protected area in the contiguous United States.

Article XIV of the New York State Constitution enshrines the Forest Preserve as “forever kept as wild forest lands.” No federal wilderness statute is as strong, and no amendment has weakened it in the 130 years since.

Vice President Theodore Roosevelt is hiking near Mount Marcy when word arrives that President McKinley is dying. A relay of buckboards carries him through the night to North Creek, where he learns he has become the 26th president.

Brothers Bob and George Marshall, guided by Herb Clark, complete what is believed to be the first ascent of all 46 Adirondack peaks originally measured at 4,000 feet or higher. The Adirondack Forty-Sixers club follows in 1937.

Lake Placid hosts the first Winter Olympics held in the United States — a small-town Games built around a new bobsled run on Mount Van Hoevenberg and an outdoor speed-skating oval behind the high school.

Fishing on Great Sacandaga Lake, Amsterdam-area angler Peter Dubuc lands a 46-pound 2-ounce northern pike — a catch that stands as the IGFA all-tackle world record for the species for 46 years and remains the New York state record to this day. The reservoir had been impounded only 10 years earlier.

Governor Nelson Rockefeller signs the APA Act, creating a state agency to plan land use across both public and private lands inside the Blue Line. The Adirondack Park is the first in the country governed by a comprehensive public/private land-use plan.

Lake Placid hosts the Winter Games again. A U.S. team of college players beats the Soviet national team 4–3 in the medal round — the “Miracle on Ice” — and goes on to win gold two days later. Eric Heiden sweeps five speed-skating golds at the same Games.

Governor Pataki completes the purchase of 144,000 acres from Champion International — the largest single addition to the Forest Preserve in a generation, opening new paddling and backcountry routes in the northwestern Adirondacks.

The state completes a multi-year acquisition of 69,000 acres of former Finch, Pruyn paper-company timberlands, including the OK Slip Falls and Essex Chain Lakes tracts. It is the largest addition to the Forest Preserve since the Champion purchase.

The state classifies the Boreas Ponds tract, completing a decade of acquisitions from the former Finch, Pruyn holdings and opening some of the High Peaks' most dramatic southern views to the public for the first time.