which identified upwards of a million
acres of abandoned Adirondack farm-
land between 1880 and 1925. In 1932,
the state Department of Conservation
dismissed penalties imposed on 669 ille-
gal hunters “because of poverty” (convic-
tions were in the thousands elsewhere).
That same year, the Whelan drug store
in Plattsburgh gave free prescriptions
to the sick and out of work, and the J.
& J. Rogers pulp and paper company
made a woodlot available to Jay fam-
ilies running short on fuel. But visitors
ruffling through promotional brochures
for hotels and waterfalls and scenic
drives would not have known this, or
discovered any hint of it in the region’s
leading popular history, Alfred Donald-
son’s two-volume tome that dominated
the field for many generations with its
humorous, brightly sketched accounts of
Adirondack dreamer-schemers brought
to ruin and up-from-under scramblers
who achieved some grand political or
professional success.
Come the Depression, Franklin Roos-
evelt’s New Deal made the federal relief
of rampant poverty a national priority.
And thanks to new progressive mea-
sures, and also to the good work of pho-
tographers, artists and oral historians,
poverty gained more visibility. Walker
Evans’s tenant farmers imaged the want
and worry of a nation, and newsreels
about the TVA its hopefulness and grit.
But poverty still stigmatized. This has
never really changed. Half a century after
the findings of the Jukes report were dis-
credited, Adirondack social workers still
urged town officials to read the caution-
ary report and keep a sharp eye out for
“pest spots” in their communities—as if
poverty was something catching. In 1932,
Au Sable Forks organized “Donation Days
for the Deserving Poor”—the undeserv-
ing, however destitute, having apparent-
ly been judged unworthy of largesse. And
from the first days of public assistance,
the threat of welfare fraud was bruited
with more zeal than it was ever docu-
mented. (In 1973, 805 residents of Essex
County received welfare benefits. One
got nailed for fraud.) Yet an Adirondack
town historian in 1976 could still wax
misty for a golden age when privation
beefed up character and, “No one shirkedA POOR VIEWSeptember + October 2019 ADIRONDACK LIFE 73
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