New York’s historical marker program began in 1926 as part of the state education department’s plan to celebrate the sesquicentennial of the American Revolution. The catalyst for the program limited the subject matter of the signs from the very beginning. A 1959 article in the Knickerbocker Times reported that Hamilton County, one of only two counties completely within the bounds of the Adirondack Park, was the only county in New York that had no marker at all. The article surmised that “until lumbermen, miners, and vacationers began going there, that Adirondack county didn’t experience much history,” an inaccurate conclusion—but one that could be easily reached if the only history you knew about the Adirondacks was collected through its state historical markers. The region’s markers leave an impression of history beginning with the French and Indian War and ending shortly after the creation of the park in the late 19th century, as if history started calcifying before anyone who lives here now was born, and that all the stories about what happened here have already been told.
There aren’t many state historical markers that acknowledge the indigenous history of the park. One in Essex is about Split Rock, a boundary between the territory of the Mohawk and Algonquin people. Other sites are summarized as places where white settlers sought refuge from Indians or were massacred by them, verbs of victimization preserving a fiction that has been told for a long time—that the mountains were not being used before white settlers arrived, and that the empty land, therefore, was the settlers’ to claim. It’s a myth “based on this Western concept of where we spend our days,” says Tim Messner, an archaeologist at SUNY–Potsdam who has excavated sites around the Adirondacks, finding artifacts that prove people lived here 10,000 years ago—both down by the water and up in the High Peaks. “For the majority of human history, people didn’t live in one place ever. You’re mobile hunter and gatherers; you live in a region. That was home.”