Rediscovering the First Wilderness
Heading into North Creek
That’s Gore Mountain beyond this bend in the Hudson River. In the foreground are the increasingly overgrown tracks of the Adirondack Railroad. Thomas C. Durant started building in Saratoga Springs in 1864 and reached North Creek in 1871. He had to lay 60 miles of track in order to receive 700,000 acres of prime forest promised by the state and that’s exactly how many he pud down.
Durant wanted to go all the way to Lake Ontario and the St. Lawrence River, but he was nearly wiped out by the Financial Panic of 1873. He had to call his two kids home from Europe and put them to work rebuilding the family fortune. His son William went on to invent the Adirondack Great Camp and built a number of impressive chalet-styled outposts around Raquette Lake, hub of the Durant empire.
Durant and his family built hotels and “great camps,” ran stage coaches and steamships, and sold land to loggers. Enough of the forest ultimately was destroyed that downstate interests started worrying about their water supply. To their credit, state legislators stepped in and changed the state constitution to ensure the preservation of both the Adirondacks and the Catskills.
Today, Warren County owns this section of the rail corridor, having bought 40 miles of it in 1998. No trains have run on the track since 2018 and so there’s talk now about a rail trail. There’s also talk about a 99-mile natural-surface trail that might someday run all the way from Corinth to the High Peaks Trail Hub at the Upper Works in Tahawus.
It Started in Saratoga Springs
At left is the headquarters and depot Durant built shortly before selling the railroad to the D&H. You’ll find it at 117 Grand Avenue in Saratoga Springs, In 1875, he sold the railroad but kept most of the land for his family’s other operations, including the Great Camps built by his son William.
When Durant started building the railroad in Saratoga Springs in 1864, The New York Times observed:
“To people in general, Adirondack is still a realm of mystery. Although the waters of the Hudson, which to-day mingle with those of the ocean in our harbor, yesterday rippled over its rocks, and though on all sides of it have grown up villages, and have been created busy thoroughfares, yet so little has this "wonderful wilderness" been penetrated by enterprise or art, that our community is practically ignorant of its enormous capacities, both for the imparting of pleasure and the increase of wealth.”
The Times continued:
“The gay denizens of Saratoga this season are excited by an occasional glimpse of a railroad grade running north from that town toward the Upper Hudson, and aiming directly at the heart of the wilderness. A thousand men are now cutting down and filling up and blasting and bridging ‘on this line;’ and before Winter twenty to thirty miles of the distance will daily be measured by the locomotive.”
The Delaware & Hudson Railroad bought the Adirondack Railroad from Durant in 1876. During World War II, National Lead extended the line another 40 miles to the big mine in Newcomb that Archibald McIntyre opened in the 1830s to meet the nation’s growing demand for iron, needed to support the Industrial Revolution. The mine turned out to be a great source of titanium that America needed for its war effort in the 1940s.
Trains haven’t run in the corridor since 2018 and the chances they’ll run on these tracks again appear slim. Some say the huge piles of tailings at the Upper Works in Tahawus have sufficient value as gravel to be worth carting by train to New Jersey or Long Island. Others say there are too many hands along the way that want their piece of it. That makes it uneconomical.
Also: Is it likely that Corinth will need freight service for the industrial park it’s developing on the site of the International Paper site? Is there a better use for the First Wilderness Rail Corridor?
We’ll explore that question and others.
Warren County West
Having already enjoyed stunning views of Lake George offered by the county's eastern peaks, I'm now exploring the more sparsely populated, wilder west. Avoiding the Northway, I head north through the rustic ambiance of towns like Corinth, Hadley, Lake Luzerne, Stony Creek, and Johnsburg.
This is the route Durant followed when, starting in Saratoga Springs in 1864, he chiseled through the dense forest a 60-mile railroad that for the first time brought vacationers to the interior of the Adirondacks. Passengers who disembarked at North Creek took Durant-owned stagecoaches over 30 miles of bad roads to Indian Lake and Blue Mountain Lake, and further on to Raquette Lake via rowboats, which Durant later replaced with steamers.
Long before Europeans explored this region in the 1600s, Iroquoian peoples hunted, travelled, and lived there. They were largely displaced by the nineteenth century, when wealthy industrialists and vacationers from eastern cities began to look to the Adirondacks for recreation.
Vacationers who ventured north in the 1850s would have found just a scattering of hotels, but only twenty years later, there were more than two hundred. Such was the impact of books like the Rev. William H.H. Murray's Adventures in the Wilderness; or, Camp-Life in the Adirondacks and magazine accounts about the Adirondacks written by other authors for The Atlantic, Scribner's, and Saturday Evening Post.
"This corridor was the place where American popular culture first confronted and first embraced the idea of a permanent wilderness," noted a Warren County study that in 1998 proposed the revitalization of the northern Hudson region. County leaders coined "The First Wilderness" as their name for the plan, which more than 20 years later continues to guide their collaboration with ten Hudson River communities. They aim to expand tourism services, lodging, historic interpretive sites, cultural destinations, economic development opportunities and -- good news for hikers -- recreational trails.
High on their list: a 99-mile single-track, wilderness-type trail that links small communities along the Upper Hudson River, providing a hiking and mountain-biking experience from Corinth to Tahawus.
In their initial First Wilderness proposal, Warren County leaders proposed an excursion train from Saratoga Springs as one key element. Such a train actually ran between 2011 and 2018, but there has been no service on the line since. The status of the right of way -- of which Warren County owns 40 miles and the Town of Corinth 11 -- is now in limbo. A proposal to pull up the tracks and build a rail trail may gain momentum when the Department of Environmental Conservation completes in 2023 a much-anticipated 34-mile multi-use trail in the heart of the Adirondacks from Tupper Lake to Lake Placid.
"We believe a multi-use trail would make a great centerpiece for the First Wilderness Corridor," says Curt Austin, founder of Friends of the Upper Hudson Rail Trail. "Visitors would enjoy a more intimate experience and more freedom. No schedules. No ticket required. Greater mobility. Open seven days."
"This could be one of the great multi-use public recreation trails in New York and the eastern U.S.," says Peter Bauer, executive director of Protect the Adirondacks. "More than 30 miles of this trail would be located along the Hudson River, where each bend in the river provides a different great view."
ADK calls the conversion of the railroad into a multi recreational-use rail trail "a very worthy project which should be closely studied and evaluated."
LAKES AND PONDS
CHESTER CHALLENGE
Navigating the First Wilderness
You'll find directions, maps and trail guides for all of the hikes referenced in this story in the interactive Warren County Recreation Mapper.
Sarah Frankenfeld’s GIS team in the Warren County Planning Department created both this hugely helpful site and the Warren County History and Cultural Mapper. Put them together and you have the complete guide to open space in Warren County.
Thanks to the Adirondack Mountain Club
… for permitting us to share this article with you, which is adapted from an article published in the September/October issue of Adirondac magazine. You may buy individual copies here and subscriptions by joining the ADK here.
