The rise and fall of Timbuctoo in modern memory

Jul. 2—LAKE PLACID — There's a whole section on historiography in "The Black Woods: A Scheme of Justice and Benevolence in the Adirondack Mountains" by Amy Godine, which will be published by Cornell University Press in 2023.

The curator of, "Dreaming of Timbuctoo," leads a walk-thru of the exhibit from 2:30 p.m. to 3 p.m. today in the Upper Barn at the John Brown Farm State Historic Site.

It is followed by a Roundtable Discussion & Reception under the tent at the John Brown Farm.

The events are part of a daylong celebration of the unveiling of the 'Timbuctoo' marker, part of the Pomeroy Foundation's New York State Historic Marker Grant Program.

WHY JOHN BROWN CAME

"I think Timbuctoo gets remembered originally through the lens of John Brown's residency there, and that comes to public attention after Harpers Ferry," Godine, an independent scholar with a longstanding interest in Adirondack Black and ethnic history, said.

"So, it all follows interest in John Brown because he doesn't stay there long. The interest of history doesn't stay there long either. Historians move on with him. His family moves away not long after he dies, so that's that for the John Brown family presence there and mostly for interest in the Gerrit Smith grantees who came there in the first instance and whose presence there got John Brown to move there.

Smith's initiative is written about in early Adirondack histories and in county histories.

"It's mostly unfavorable," Godine said.

"It's mostly trotted out as an example of Black unfitness for Adirondack life. It becomes sort of a cautionary fable. It becomes a weapon in the effort to racialize the Adirondacks as a White country, a White domain. That doesn't really start to reverse for a very long time.

"There are some sympathetic accounts that follows, but most Black or progressive historians are dealing with old, unexamined sources for a long time, and they are not looking at Black archives that can give the deeper story of voter suffrage and what this had to do with land for votes initiative.

Even W. E. B. Dubois didn't grasp the deeper interest of this story for racial justice."

SOMETHING ABOUT MARY

Late local historian Mary McKenzie was the first to take a very granular interest in the lives of the Black grantees in her town North Elba/Lake Placid. "That doesn't encompass all of the communities that had Black pioneers," Godine said.

"She doesn't range far, but she went deep. What she missed is the larger political context for the give-away. She really did well by the lives of the settlers on the land, how long they stayed, what they farmed, how well they did as farmers.

She really vindicated a place for them in Adirondack and in North Elba history."

McKenzie's main aim was to counter the racist account of Alfred Donaldson, the great Adirondack historian who caricatured the settlement at Timbuctoo.

"And made it kind of laughing stock for generations of historians who took it at face value," Godine said.

"She's the first to say, and to say adamantly, this is fake news. There's much more to this story than that. So, all historians since owe her a big debt for digging as deep as she did into the lives of all the Black settlers in North Elba."

Unfortunately, Franklin County didn't have anybody doing that kind of research when McKenzie was doing hers.

"So, it kind of suffered in comparison," Godine said.

"Nobody was doing that for Franklin, which was a big miss. What Mary McKenzie didn't get, didn't pay attention to, maybe because she didn't have access to Black newspapers at that time was meaning of this land give-away for Black voting rights and that's a huge chunk of this story. That takes another generation."

RIGGING THE SYSTEM

In 1821, the New York State Constitutional Convention passed a resolution that male Black residents could not vote unless they could prove they owned $250 in real property.

"This voting requirement was not imposed on any other group," Godine said.

"It stayed until 1870. It resisted numerous challenges at the polls, and every time New Yorkers voted to reinstate it. New York's track record on Black voting rights was not pretty. It took federal law to intervene and insist on full citizenship for Black (male) New Yorkers."

MILLENNIAL REVEAL

This suffrage aspect of Timbuctoo was buried until John Brown Lives!, executive director Martha Swan, and Godine's 2000 exhibition, which first brings to light the extreme importance of suffrage rights and their relationship to land ownership and how this history underscores this connection like no other.

"There is an attempt in 1976 to introduce a new narrative to the John Brown, which would encompass and honor the role of the Black settlement there that got John Brown there in the first place," Godine said.

"The State Historic Sites Division under Parks gets pretty far with this. It's a big grant to develop an interpretive center as part of this. I wrote about this in an article you might find online (Adirondack Life). It's called 'Ambushed.' It's a pretty horrific story of how local forces in the Adirondacks scuttled this plan because they didn't want to see this site historicized. They didn't want to see this story introduced to the narrative.

"They wanted to keep John Brown's story very abstract but kind of generic. They also wanted to keep more local control over the narrative and what the John Brown Farm offered people. I think it had become by that time a kind of regional shrine to itself and to local memory, and that didn't always represent the full story of what happened there."

That initiative to develop the site with new interpretation, new site management, new oversight and an interpretative center, a historical center was abandoned by Historic Sites in the face of intense local opposition.

"It's much forgotten now," Godine said.

"I think it's a very cautionary instance about the importance of cultivating local buy-in before you try and change how a place is understood. Even if you have a better idea, if you don't work with local sentiment you get in big trouble. The state saw several years of work go up in smoke. That's an effort to bring history and story of Timbuctoo and the story of the voting rights initiative into the viewfinder in the '70s, but it doesn't happen. It doesn't happen. We only learn of it when we're researching the story of Timbuctoo down in the State Archives, we turn up all of this documentation and heartbreak about this scuttled plan."

Swan and Godine's millennial exhibit aroused considerable interest at the Adirondack Museum (now The Adirondack Experience), where it was hosted.

"For the first month of its time in the public, it was thrilling," Godine said.

"It brought the most Black people to that museum in Blue Mountain Lake that it had ever seen. It got well and wonderfully reviewed. It was amplified by a number of lectures, panels and presentations. That was great. It gave us kind of a launchpad, a springboard of legitimacy for taking it around the state."

The exhibit traveled to the New York State Museum, the State Capitol Building, Albany City Hall, Brooklyn Main Branch Public Library, the New York State Fair (twice), a prison, granges, house museums, a half dozen colleges and universities including Skidmore, Utica, St. Lawrence and Paul Smith's.

"When the State Historic Sites offered John Brown Lives! a permanent home for it on the John Brown Farm, which was sort of a longtime dream, we jumped," Godine said.

"It was an opportunity to upgrade the exhibition, to introduce lots of fresh research and links to present crises like voters suppression right now that we hadn't made as clear as we should have in the in the first iteration."

Godine has written about these things in "The Black Woods."

"The descendants of pioneers in Franklin County were around generations longer than they were in North Elba," she said.

"It's a more long-lived colony, even though it didn't have a John Brown to put it on history's map. It doesn't get the spotlight."

COMMUNITY MATTERS

Timbuctoo's relevance in the 21st century is community matters.

"That on the ground, face to face, neighbor to neighbor, equality and justice can be achieved over and over in small ways, but if you don't have support from the top as well it won't last," Godine said.

"These are my take-home lessons from my own research. I'm able to trace stories in much more detail, of course, in the book. That is really a stunning thing to see in this remote, poor, rural community, Black families accepted roughly as equals. Not as full equals in terms of some civic entitlements.

"You don't see Black pioneers on juries. You don't see them attaining any high office. You don't see them gaining economic power. Those are huge disadvantages and slights."

Unlike many parts of the nation, the Black pioneers here are present in local cemeteries, schools and churches.

"Fully integrated," Godine said.

"On worksites that are integrated, at social events that are fully integrated, there is a level of parity here that is pretty exceptional, and I think Gerrit Smith enabled this, helped make this happen."

Brown is mythic. Smith, not so much.

"I think Americans are very uncomfortable with the profound role of philanthropists advancing social justice mostly because so many philanthropists were also robber-barons and cut-throat opportunists in the marketplace," Godine said.

"That makes sense to me, but on the other hand some were pretty heroic and selfless in their largess."

Smith made things happened.

"I go back and look at Gerrit Smith, and I don't think he gets enough respect for his role in changing the face of the Adirondacks, as not just a land baron but a social reformer," Godine said.

"John Brown has an enormous meaning for Adirondackers whatever side of the political spectrum they're on. There's a place of pride in the hearts of Adirondackers for John Brown that's very deep.

"They can thank Gerrit Smith for that. It was his gesture that got John Brown here in the first place, and set him up at the farm, and then gave him his mission to help the Black farmers, and then set him up with more support for his work out West, in Kansas and eventually at Harpers Ferry."

THE BIG DIG

Dr. Hadley Kruczek-Aaron, chair of Anthropology at SUNY Potsdam and director of the Timbuctoo Archaeology Project, and her students are in their third week of a dig in the vicinity of the lots associated with the Timbuctoo families near Heaven Hill Farm in Lake Placid.

"Timbuctoo, originally as far as we know, is a plot," Godine said.

"There's three families and their farms, two brothers, the Jeffersons, and another friend of theirs from Troy, James Henderson. Then it becomes expanded by the time John Brown's gets there to include more of the scattered community of Black pioneers in North Elba.

"It's distinct from the little settlement at Freeman's Home on the Cascade Pass. It seems to be considered different from that. It's not on any map. Neither is Timbuctoo. We know Timbuctoo is there because it's in several letters as an address, as a place, and it seems to refer to more than just the three families. It seems to encompass more of a neighborhood, which makes sense to me."

The term Timbuctoo becomes more generalized in years to come to refer to the entire scope of Smith's effort.

"We probably helped push that along, too," Godine said.

"It becomes kind of a short hand for the whole what I call the Black woods. But really that's not the right use of it. It refers to one neighborhood. I think that's as as wide as we dare to go."

Email: rcaudell@pressrepublican.com

Twitter@RobinCaudell