A Collaborative History

Thomas Durant’s Adirondack Railroad stretched 60 miles from Saratoga Springs to a point in the wilderness three miles beyond the North Creek Deport, which today is a museum.

Thanks to Thomas C. Durant, who between 1864 and 1871 laid exactly 60 miles of track from Saratoga Springs into the heart of the Adirondack wilderness, passengers who disembarked from stations in Hadley, Stony Creek, North Creek and others could take stagecoaches over bad roads to a rapidly expanding assortment of camps and hotels located on many of the Adirondacks’ most scenic lakes.

In the 1850s, vacationers would have found only a scattering of hotels in the Adirondacks. By the 1870s, there were more than 200. It was here that American popular culture first confronted and embraced the idea of a permanent wilderness.

Celebrating this history, the Warren County Department of Planning and Community Development in 1998 introduced the First Wilderness Heritage Corridor as a unifying concept for its towns on the Upper Hudson. Over the last two decades, this initiative has generated millions of dollars in state and federal funding in support of heritage tourism.

The Planning Department this month teamed with the Warren County Historian, the Warren County Historical Society and Cliff & Redfield Interactive to support community development and tourism through storytelling on Stories from Open Space and other media to be explored going forward.