"Make of Them Grand Parks, Owned in Common": The Role of Newspaper Editorials in Promoting the Adirondack Park, 1864-1894

On Tuesday, August 9, 1864, the New York Times published an unassuming editorial titled "Adirondack."¹ Despite consuming nearly a full column down the right side of the page, to a causal reader that day the topic might have seemed trivial, or at the very least indistinguishable from the news that surrounded it. Included was a report of the city's expenses for the coming year, intelligence of Admiral Farragut's campaign against the port of Mobile, and a letter praising the good people of New York for providing blackberry wine "for our noble and suffering soldiers" entrenched in their third year of civil war.² Inspired perhaps by the oppressive summer heat, the unnamed author—long suspected to be Charles Loring Brace—felt compelled to extol the advantages of the vast North Woods, where "within an easy day's ride of our great City," there exists, "a tract of country fitted to make a Central Park for the world."³

By 1864, the city of New York had swelled to more than 800,000 inhabitants, easily surpassing Philadelphia as the most populous city in America. Over a span of less than twenty years, New York had doubled in size into a metropolis that rivaled the great commercial and manufacturing centers of the world.⁴ But its working class was increasingly wedged into a dense labyrinth of tenements, where close quarters made tempers boil between racial and immigrant groups, and where stale air and stagnant water made living dangerous for everyone. Newspapers sometimes published weekly reports of the city's dead, summing into neat columns the numbers of those who had fallen victim to contagious diseases like typhus, cholera, and consumption.

It was not until 1865 that a report on the sanitary condition of the city was finally released, sympathizing with the plight of families routinely exposed to "repulsive and nauseous scenes in the abodes of misery and want, and to the infectious localities and homes of disease and death."⁵ And it was not until 1865, after decades of conflict between the city and the state, that construction finally began on an ambitious network of aqueducts and sewers to amend the problem.⁶ It was, as Theodore Roosevelt later recalled, "the worst decade in the city's political annals."⁷

The suffocating realities of the industrial age must have made the solitude of wilderness seem irresistibly attractive. According to the editors of the New York Times, the Adirondacks were a place "to which we can easily escape during the intervals of business, and where we can replenish our fountains of vitality, exhausted by the feverish drain of over-effort."⁸ Moreover, it was a destination well within reach of the newspaper's urban subscribers, given the steady advance of stage lines and railroads. They noted that "the jaded merchant, or financier, or litterateur, or politician, feeling excited within him again the old passion for nature ... has only to take an early morning train, in order, if he chooses, to sleep in the same night in the shadow of kingly hills, and waken with his memory filled with pleasant dreams, woven from the ceaseless music of mountain streams."⁹

That anyone could have recommended untamed forest land as a spiritual retreat might have seemed lunatic (or at the very least eccentric) to someone living a generation before. On his journey through the United States in the 1830s, Alexis de Tocqueville observed that Americans rarely gave the wilds around them a second thought. They were, he said, "insensible to the wonders of inanimate nature and they may be said not to perceive the mighty forests that surround them till they fall beneath the hatchet." He lamented the sight of men "draining swamps, turning the course of rivers, peopling solitudes, and subduing nature."¹⁰ The trouble in rural America, quite simply, was that the whole of society lived too close to nature to appreciate it.¹¹

Yet by the mid-nineteenth century, a shift in popular sentiment was under way, one that would eventually replace...