Timbuctoo: Gerrit Smith's Black Farming Settlement
Near Lake Placid, New York
The reason John Brown came to this remote corner of the Adirondacks is a story too few people know. In the eighteen forties, New York law let Black men vote only if they owned at least two hundred fifty dollars in property, a barrier that kept most from the ballot box. A wealthy abolitionist named Gerrit Smith set out to change that.
Between eighteen forty six and eighteen fifty, Smith gave away roughly one hundred twenty thousand acres of Adirondack land, dividing it into forty acre parcels and deeding them to some three thousand free Black New Yorkers, so they could own property, farm, and vote. A number of these families settled here in North Elba, in a community John Brown called Timbuctoo, after the fabled African city. The land, though, was rugged, the growing season short, and the soil thin, and few families managed to make the farms succeed.
John Brown, who had farming experience, moved here specifically to help his new neighbors work their land. Timbuctoo faded within a generation, but it stands as a remarkable early experiment in land, justice, and Black self determination, and it is the reason one of history's most famous abolitionists is buried in these mountains. Historians today are still working to map exactly where the settlement stood.
