Country Public Radio and Mountain Lake
PBS, from bestsellers like Hillbilly Elegy to
poverty-themed symposia and confer-
ences in Plattsburgh and Lake Placid,
the subject owns the spot. But that spot-
light’s on the present. These pages take
up something else. Not poverty itself,
but the imagery, the spin, the gauze of
rhetoric that comes between us and the
thing itself.
Framed by image-makers past and
present—county and regional historians,
travel writers, wilderness ideologues,
reporters, painters, marketeers—the
Adirondack idea of impoverishment
partakes of moralistic pieties, folklore,
pseudo-science plus denial, terror and
revulsion. In pioneer days, poverty was
a proving ground of moral and patriotic
worth. Later, it stood for incapacity and
stagnation, and even genetic degrada-
tion. Not a few Adirondack image-mak-
ers wore spectacles so glazed with their
own ardor for the wilderness they never
saw the poor at all—never bothered to
recall that Adirondack, a word so won-
derfully unrushable and redolent of wild-
ness and beauty, also meant a hunger so
extreme it drove the early dwellers in the
region to eat tree bark, or starve.
On his summer hunting trips in the
Adirondacks in the early 1840s, Massa-
chusetts minister John Todd softened his
discovery of the poverty he found with
the optimism of his faith. The 14 fam-
ilies in the rough-hewn settlement of
Long Lake (all New Englanders like him)
lacked a store, grist- or sawmill, doctor,
preacher, church or school. But the rever-
end was unfazed. With industry and pas-
toral support, progress would be made
and more. Long Lake would furnish the
“foundation of a great community ... a
blessed community—sanctifying all who
will hereafter fill the region.” Adirondack
rural poverty was nothing lasting. It was,
by Todd’s Calvinistic lights, a faith-test-
ing opportunity, a challenge to be met
and won. We take it on and triumph. We
best it, and it proves our worth.
John Todd’s fellow clergyman and crit-
ic Joel Headley was unconvinced. Head-
ley came to Long Lake a little later, and to
his mind this bone-poor settlement was
doomed to destitution so long as “Lakes
here are in the place of valleys, and rocks
in the place of earth.” Go to these woods
for health, beauty or refreshment, Head-
ley urged, but try to farm, you’ll only go
from poor to poorer. Geology was fate.
At least Headley and Todd kept pover-
ty in the viewshed. Not so Charles Loring
Brace, the pioneering champion of chil-
dren’s rights and welfare in New York
City. Brace’s vision was unflinching when
it came to identifying homeless “Street
Arabs” in the big city (his Orphan Trains
would haul 200,000 impoverished chil-
dren to new homes in the West). But on
vacations in Lake Placid in the 1870s and
’80s, he registered no rural destitution.
In his cherished weeks of “rest and rec-
reation,” the reformer’s vision thinned.
Brace wore blinders that let him pick his
view with care. | Continued on page 66