The Black Woods

Winner of the Charles A. Weyerhaeuser Forest History Society Book Award The Black Woods chronicles the history of Black pioneers in New York's northern wilderness. From the late 1840s to the 1860s, they migrated to the Adirondacks to build the farms that helped them meet a $250 property requirement imposed on Black New York voters in 1821. Abolitionist Gerrit Smith gifted 120,000 acres to 3,000 landless Black New Yorkers, with the support of Frederick Douglass, John Brown and other abolitionists