Tracing the Route of the Underground Railroad
DRAFT
Glenn Pearsall never considered himself a writer. When he got out of the service in 1975, he joined his father in establishing Pearsall Realty at the intersection of Routes 8 and 28 in Wevertown, five miles from North Creek and the slopes of the Gore Mountain Ski Area.
Spending days with clients looking at properties, Glenn started stockpiling stories about the area he told to inform and entertain potential buyers. Impressed by his storytelling, a friend said, "You have to start writing these down."
Glenn published his first 400-page edition of Echoes in These Mountains in 2008. Twenty-five years later, in December, he published his much expanded second edition with 500 pages and 400 photos. The book takes us all over Johnsburg, encompassing North Creek, North River, Silver Lake, Sodom, Bakers Mills, Garnet Lake, the Glen, Wevertown, and Riparius.
If it's interesting and historic, you can be sure that Glenn has included it among the 55 sites he spotlights with precise GPS coordinates. These were considered a great innovation when Glenn introduced them in his 2008 edition, and they're of great value to us still as we transition into "spatial storytelling" with the Warren County Planning Department.
By a twist of fate, Glenn has published his new expanded work at the very moment we're gearing up to start uploading points of interest to the The Gore Region Story Cloud. We plan to produce short audio adaptations of his chapters to be triggered on our phones by GPS markers. We also will publish longer adaptations of his chapters as Stories from Open Space features.
So it is that we're privileged to publish the first of what we foresee as many Pearsall-penned pieces: his chronicle of the Mill Creek Wesleyan Methodist Church established by Wesley Somerville and the Rev. Enos Putnam in the abolitionists movement of the 1850s. This story fits nicely in Warren County's Underground Railroad ArcGIS StoryMap.
Allison's latest project is still in development, but we're able to share the start she has made on it with Zoom interviews we've hosted with two experts:
Jacqueline Madison, president of the North Star Underground Railroad Museum, who gives us the big picture on the thousands of freedom seekers who made their way to Canada through the Adirondacks between the 1820s and the end of the Civil War;
Donna Lagoy, Chestertown historian, who -- as author of The Underground Railroad in the Adirondack Town of Chester -- provides a closer look at the abolitionist movement and Underground Railroad in Warren County.
We hope you'll also enjoy our conversation with Glenn Pearsall about his lifelong love of Johnsburg and his multi-decade commitment to writing its history. His foundation's gift of $132,000 to the Johnsburg Historical Society to purchase the Robert and Electa Waddell House for a museum is a further demonstration of his commitment to local history and storytelling.
