Wood Work: Excavating the Wilderness Economy of New York’s Adirondack Mountains

Hadley F. Kruczek-Aaron

Wood Work: Excavating the Wilderness Economy of New York’s Adirondack Mountains

Year: 2016

Summary

At the end of the 19th century, New York's legislature responded to the clarion call of conservationists concerned for the state's diminishing timber resources and threatened watershed by creating the Adirondack Forest Preserve, which kept millions of acres of public land in northern New York "forever wild." At the same time, the Adirondack logging industry witnessed tremendous growth on account of expanded railroad networks and paper industry innovations that opened up new areas of private land to exploitation. In this paper, I will explore how these changes were lived at one remote homestead in the High Peaks wilderness. The emphasis will be on the strategies of production and consumption that one family of small-scale loggers employed as they negotiated pressures from the state, industry, and an unforgiving natural environment. The period before and after 1903, when a catastrophic forest fire destroyed their homestead and 14,000 acres, will be highlighted.

Cite this Record

Wood Work: Excavating the Wilderness Economy of New York’s Adirondack Mountains. Hadley F. Kruczek-Aaron. Presented at Society for Historical Archaeology, Washington, D.C. 2016 ( tDAR id: 435102)