DURING THE LATE 1980s I was visiting a friend in Onchiota, when my companion pointed to a nearby stream and said, “That’s N—r Brook.” The official name was changed to Negro Brook decades ago, but years later it still nagged at me. How did such an offensive label arise in this lily-white corner of northern New York?
Later, a path of inquiry into the backstory of the brook arose naturally from my research at Paul Smith’s College, which focuses on reconstructing environmental history from layered archives of sediment beneath lakes. While comparing records from the Adirondacks with others in the Northeast, I had added the iconic Walden Pond to the list of study sites. Its association with Henry DavidThoreau also created a homeward pull when Martha Swan, director of the human rights organization John Brown Lives!, approached me in May 2019. The group was planning to honor the birthday of abolitionist John Brown at his grave site near Lake Placid.
“I hear that you’ve been working at Walden Pond,” she said. “How would you like to read some excerpts from Thoreau’s essay ‘A Plea for Captain John Brown’ for us during our celebration at the farm?”
I accepted, in part, because I was embarrassed. I knew much more about the ecology of Walden Pond than about Thoreau’s connection to abolitionism, but that would soon change. Re-reading Thoreau led me to the story of John Brown, a tragically misunderstood Adirondacker who gave his life to liberate people of color from bondage. In time, I also began to realize that Brown moved here in the first place because of a larger narrative of African-American pioneers.
During the mid-1800s, human-rights
