The Other Side of the Mountains: Mining at the Adirondack Museum

Abstract

Museums, much as individual scholars, bring a certain perspective to their recounting of history. The Adirondack Museum in Blue Mountain Lake, New York, is no exception. Strolling the grounds high above beautiful Blue Mountain Lake, visitors contemplate and enjoy scrupulously preserved guide boats, rustic furniture, and displays of camp life. With a few notable exceptions, the museum provides an amiable and reassuring view of the region as a backwoods summer retreat. Thus, for vacationing campers and resorters, the past offers a comforting, even romantic, sense of continuity with the present. Some of this is healthy-the search for continuity is central to history. However, the L. L. Bean perspective adopted at Blue Mountain Lake has obvious limits. The museum seems far less adept in tracing alternate threads from the region's past or in speaking to other classes of visitors. For instance, one wonders whether the year-round inhabitants earning their living in the Adirondacks feel much kinship with this museum. Can their past be found in the Adirondack Museum? Happily, a new exhibit promises some fresh outlooks on the region. Spurred by the 1978 Historic American Engineering Record (HAER) survey of a nearby ironworks, the museum recently opened a permanent display on mining in the Adirondacks. Initial plans called for an exhibit centering on HAER's subject, the McIntyre furnace at Tahawus. However, when a subsequent National Endowment for the Humanities planning grant revealed some 300 mining sites in the Adirondacks, the exhibit expanded to cover mining throughout the region. The result is an engaging exhibit that turns attention to frequently overlooked aspects of Adirondack life. Within a limited display area, visitors glimpse both the technical and social dimensions of mining.