The Black Woods

November 27, 2023
Historian Godine (Adirondack Odysseys) takes an eye-opening look at the forgotten presence of African American landowners in the mid-19th-century Adirondacks. The land was a gift from Gerrit Smith, a white landowner in Upstate New York who wanted to help Black New Yorkers overcome onerous voting requirements (since 1827, free Black men in New York State had needed to show proof of ownership of $250 in landed property in order to vote). Godine documents the vetting process for Smith’s 1846 gift of 3,000 lots to Black residents of New York City, who were also eager to escape the city’s virulent racism. She chronicles the challenges and pleasures of their rugged mountain life, and notes that after the 15th Amendment ensured Black voting rights in 1870, as many as 400 downstate Black citizens sold the plots, suggesting the land had been held primarily for the voting rights it conferred. Throughout, Godine astutely traces how, since the moment the gift was made public, it was misrepresented as merely a scheme, caricatured by racist depictions of African Americans out of place in a rural setting, when in fact, the Black homesteaders were as dedicated to the endeavor as any homesteaders of the era. The result is a vital contribution to African American history.