Adirondacks

The Adirondack Park is larger than Yellowstone, Yosemite, Grand Canyon, Glacier and Great Smoky Mountains combined, and roughly half of it is private land. It is not a national park and never has been.

What protects it is a sentence in the New York State constitution, added in 1894, saying the state forest preserve shall be forever kept as wild forest lands. That wording is unusually absolute for a legal document, it has survived every attempt to weaken it, and it is the reason the photographs from the 1890s and the view today are not very different.

The protection came from a commercial argument rather than a sentimental one. Downstate businessmen worried that clear-cutting the watershed would ruin the Hudson and the Erie Canal, and the loggers were beaten by shipping interests rather than by naturalists.

Before that, the region had been sold as a cure. Doctors sent tuberculosis patients to the mountain air, and Saranac Lake became a town built entirely around the treatment \u2014 cure cottages with open sleeping porches where patients lay wrapped in blankets through the winter. Those porches are still on the houses.

The great camps are the other subject and they are architecturally distinctive. Built by families with a great deal of money, they used peeled logs, bark siding, twig work and local stone to produce something that looked rustic and cost a fortune. A camp was not one building but a compound of them \u2014 sleeping cabins, a dining lodge, a boathouse \u2014 connected by covered walkways, on the theory that a fire should not take everything.

The guides are in a great many of these photographs and were the heart of the tourist economy. A guide met you at the station, rowed you where you wanted to go in a guideboat he had probably built himself, cooked, and knew where the fish were. The Adirondack guideboat is a genuinely refined piece of design \u2014 light enough for one man to carry over a portage, stable enough to fish from.

For dating, watch the transport. Steamboats on the larger lakes and railroads to the edge of the woods run through the 1890s and 1900s. The automobile arrives in the 1910s and changes who came and how long they stayed.

The forty-six High Peaks became a subject in their own right. A club formed in the 1920s for people who had climbed all of them, and the trail networks, lean-tos and summit registers that followed are visible in the later photographs. Climbing here was a middle-class pursuit long before it was elsewhere in America, because the mountains were reachable from New York by train in a day.

Winter is underrepresented and worth looking for. Logging happened in winter because frozen ground carried a sledge better than mud, so the logging camps, the ice roads and the river drives that followed the thaw are all cold-weather subjects photographed by men working in difficult conditions.

For anyone assembling this category, the material divides cleanly between the two economies — the resort and the extractive. Hotels, guides and camps on one side; logging, tanneries, iron mining and the men who did that work on the other. They occupied the same forest at the same time and were photographed by different people for different reasons.

The Bridge That Killed Its Designer