Rural Abandonment in the American North: Archaeology at Frost Town, New York

Summary

This is an abstract from the "On Both Sides of the Atlantic: Historical Archaeology of Rural Modernization from the American and European Traditions" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Frost Town is located in the Fingers Lakes Region of New York and was once home to an industrial logging site that harvested old-growth timber in the 19th century by Euro-American settler colonialists. Frost Town eventually became a rural town after the timber was harvested and was eventually abandoned in the 1910s and 1920s. Today, the area exhibits trails, nature centers, and scattered housing, rather than agricultural fields and logging stands.

But Frost Town was never technically a town, just an unofficial name of a place that looms in the minds of people living in the surrounding landscape. The story of Frost Town is the story of many American rural places, where a town was established around an industry and then subsequently abandoned when that industry was no longer viable. This paper will discuss the manner in which Frost Town’s rurality has been critically approached, asking how the site and the story of an abandoned logging-then-farming town can be seen as a bellwether of regional or even national sociopolitical dynamics. Finally, this paper asks how the identity surrounding Frost Town persists into the present in the modern social fabric of the Finger Lakes region.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• On Both Sides of the Atlantic: Historical Archaeology of Rural Modernization from the American and European Traditions   •
• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 52776