Dozens sign petition to retitle hill with racist name

BLOOMINGDALE — Dozens of locals packed the Hex and Hop brewery on Wednesday to learn about the history of a hill around three miles away, currently called No Hill, and to show their support to the U.S. Board of Geographical Names to rename the hill after the Murrys, a Black family who owned a portion of the hill in the 1800s.

Last year, Paul Smith’s College natural science professor Curt Stager led an effort to change the nearby No Brook to John Thomas Brook, named after a Black farmer who lived near its banks.

“It was an embarrassment,” Stager said of the old name.

More than 100 people came to a plaque unveiling commemorating the renaming of the brook in honor of John Thomas last September.

Now, Franklin town Councilman Rich Brandt and local resident Dave Filsinger are leading an effort to do the same for the hill, after Stager unearthed more history.

Brant and Filsinger have been gathering letters of support to rename the hill from government organizations like the Franklin Town Council, state Department of Environmental Conservation and Adirondack Park Agency. The goal is to show the USBGN broad, reputable support for the name change, including from the local public.

Their petition had 62 signatures by Wednesday night, and petitioners plan to have a couple at the Adirondack Voters for Change Saranac Lake storefront when it opens.

Name shame

USBGN officials previously told Stager that changing the name of a place named after a person is much harder. Since the brook was named after a slur and not a person, it was easier to change. The same should go for the hill, he said.

“Names are signifiers and indicators of community values, thoughts and beliefs,” Adirondack Diversity Initiative Director Tiffany Rea-Fisher said in an email to the Enterprise.

She recalled meeting a woman at the John Thomas Brook plaque unveiling who was embarrassed to be living next to it under its former name.

“We want to feel pride in our neighborhood and communities and renaming landmarks is a wonderful way to signal to future generations what we stand for,” Rea-Fisher said.

She was excited to see the momentum from the brook renaming carried on to the hill.

“Sometimes people underestimate the power of collective action, but the results are undeniable,” she said.

There’s been a desire for decades to call the brook and the hill by better names.

Many maps leave the hill unlabeled rather than printing the offensive word. The hill used to be known by an even more offensive name — NHill. Decades ago, it was changed to No hill.

Ezra Schwartzberg said when he started creating the Green Goat maps for local hiking, fishing, skiing and boating in 2018, he left the hill and brook names off. He was excited on Wednesday to say that the latest version of the maps include a label for John Thomas Brook and said he’d add the hill’s new name if it is accepted by the USBGN.

Hidden history

Over the years, as he’s discussed the hill name with people, Stager said most did not fully know why the brook and the hill were called that. In researching the reason, he found an interesting and overlooked history of this part of the Adirondacks.

In his memoir, James Wardner who owned the Rainbow Inn at Rainbow Lake, confirmed the reason for the names.

“Because of the nes the brook was called by the white people ‘Nr Brook,’” Wardner wrote.

The Murry family owned property on the hill, granted to them by the abolitionist Gerrit Smith, who granted 120,000 acres in Franklin and Essex counties to 3,000 Black New Yorkers. After manually plotting all 3,000, Stager found that half of the towns of North Elba, Franklin, Bellmont and St. Armand were Black-owned in the 1800s.

New York officially abolished slavery on July 4, 1827, but the state implemented a law requiring Black men to own $250 in property to have the right to vote here.

This empowerment through land ownership, overcoming racist laws denying Black Americans the right to vote and giving them a place to settle before the Civil War was recognized in the abolition movement.

“The sharp axe of the sable-armed pioneer should at once be lifted over the soil of Franklin and Essex counties,” abolitionist Frederick Douglass wrote in his newspaper The North Star.

Stager said there’s a semi-common reaction to renaming efforts that doing so is “erasing history.”

“We’re not erasing history. We’re recovering history that was erased,” he said.

Alfred Donaldson has long been known as the “go-to guy” for Adirondack history with his book, “A History of the Adirondacks,” but his writing obscured stories and people through prejudice and assumptions, according to Stager.

“The Adirondack wilderness for obvious reasons, was least attractive and least suited to the no,” Donaldson wrote of the project in his book. “Of course, the attempt to combine an escaped slave with a so-called Adirondack farm was about as promising of agricultural results as would be the placing of an Italian lizard on a Norwegian iceberg.

“They did nothing for themselves or for their own land,” Donaldson wrote. “As a no colony it was a failure and soon dwindled away.”

As absurd as these claims are on their face, Stager said Donaldson had not done his due diligence and research to back them up. He never interviewed the Black residents of the area.

“We can do better than this,” Stager said.

Recent research has revealed that several Black families lived and farmed in this area on granted or purchased land, that they had successful farms for the time and that they lived in a largely integrated community.

While many of these people simply owned the property for its voting value, some moved here to start families, farms and lives in the community. and many are buried in the Union Cemetery in Vermontville, where this spring, college students used radar to search for unmarked graves. This part of the region’s history was overlooked for decades.

Census records show the Murry farm was valued at $600, more than twice what was needed to vote. Stager said they embodied the dream of Smith’s project.

Donaldson has a High Peak named after him. Meanwhile, Stager said, the people he overlooked have a hill named after a tame version of a slur.

“History should be revised when prejudices are put aside,” Filsinger said.

He had always heard that Smith’s venture failed when the Black land grantees couldn’t hack it in the Adirondacks as farmers in the remote, cold landscape. Now, with a better understanding of history, he said they should correct the record to reflect that was not true.

Rea-Fisher pointed out that most geological names have been changed at least once from their original names given to them by the Indigenous first residents of the area.

“The insistence on keeping current names that are detrimental to the evolution of social progress is ridiculous,” she said. “We as a people do not get to pick a place in history and say all knowledge, information, and progress stops here because this is where our comfort lies. We need to stop being a-historical and open ourselves up to being part of a continuum that requires us to push to do the right thing when given the opportunity.”

“It’s an opportunity for people to engage with history,” Historic Saranac Lake Executive Director Amy Catania said of the renaming. “It’s actually a way of making history come alive.”

History is always changing as historians learn more, she said, adding that it’s easy for people to go through life thinking they know everything. She said realizing that she doesn’t know something, and then exploring it, is a joy.

Meet the Murrys

It is unclear if the Murrys ever lived or farmed on their property on the hill. It is presumed they lived and farmed at a larger property on the corner of Muzzy Road and Oregon Plains Road, near John Thomas’ farm.

Stager said census records show the Murrys grew potatoes and wheat, raised livestock and tapped maple syrup at that larger property.

Wesley Murry was born around 1819. His wife, Phebe Murry was born in 1826. Phebe and Wesley moved to Vermontville in 1855. Around 1846, Wesley received 40-acre lot from Gerrit Smith on the northern slope of the hill. They had two sons — James and John.

While they were successful with their agricultural endeavors, life was hard at times.

James died in 1860 at the age of 8, five years after their move to the area. In the same year, John Thomas’ son Richard died. Stager imagines it must have been a tragic time.

Wesley died relatively young in 1867. His gravestone in Union Cemetery says he was 48. After Wesley’s death, Phebe continued to farm the land with John and a new son. Several years later, Phebe moved to Malone about 1875, and later to Brunswick, New York. But her records are unclear after that.

Filsinger said Phebe had the Adirondack spirit and that the Murrys should be given credit for their work and contributions to the area.

“People are coming into this area and they’re seeking something,” Filsinger, who owns the Trestle Street community art space in Saranac Lake, said. “This is all part of it — inclusion, community.”

Today, the hill the Murrys owned a piece of is pretty inaccessible. It sits in a remote area hemmed in by several key connector roads, but there is not much directly around the hill and it is not a common recreation spot. Stager said it is mostly used by hunters. He’s made two attempts to bushwhack in, but he has not been successful so far. Hunters he knows say there’s evidence of farming on the hill. If that is the Murrys or not, is impossible to tell now.

“I feel proud to be living in a time where people want to dig into the past, give credit where credit is due, and are re-writing the wrongs that have been done,” Rea-Fisher said. “Acknowledging the cultural tapestry of what makes this place so special is important for generations past, present, and future.”