In the Adirondack Library
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New York State’s famous Adirondack landscape is immense, spanning over six million acres of public forests, lakes, rivers, mountains, and private lands. In full color featuring hundreds of detailed maps and photos, Mapping the Adirondacks celebrates it all with the first clear account of the original surveyor who explored and fully comprehended it—Verplanck Colvin. “Everywhere below,” Colvin wrote, “were lakes and mountains so different from all maps, yet so immovably true.” His monumental accomplishment helped motivate the citizens of New York in 1894 to legally protect it for generations to come.
Author Thatcher Hogan has carefully gleaned narratives and illustrations from Colvin’s notoriously dense annual reports and reassembled them with additional historic photographs to chronicle a compelling, true story of rugged exploration. After a novice’s explanation of Colvin and Blake’s surveying terms, the book follows their progress with one hundred of Hogan’s new maps and summit views. The Adirondack landscape remains formidable and fascinating—many of the views are those that Colvin first discovered. Along the way, Hogan uncovers a story of intense ambition, physical hardships, and a weatherproof friendship.
Thatcher Hogan began paying closer attention to Verplanck Colvin’s dense annual reports (first published in the 1870s) when he began designing and illustrating his popular “Peak Finder” decks of Adirondack summit views in 2010. Realizing that Colvin and his survey crews bushwhacked up hundreds of trailless Adirondack peaks that have since become perennial favorites of hikers today, Thatcher’s interest in discovering the “how” and “why” of Colvin’s work soon became a much larger project.
This is a virtual program. Corinth, New York, once home to International Paper’s historic Hudson River Mill, forms the...
This is a virtual program. Did you know the very first map from Green Goat Maps is in our library’s archive? Ezra...
This is a virtual program. Ever since he began hiking the mountains of the Adirondacks, John Sasso has been intrigued with...
The Beater Room Boys: Growing Up in an Adirondack Mill Town. 
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