Thanks to two new digitization initiatives there are now much larger collections of books online about the Adirondacks. The full text and images of some 140,000 books in the public domain, most published before 1923, are now available at the Internet Archive. The books come from the collections of the Library of Congress and Cornell University – many with Adirondack connections.

The newly available books from Cornell cover a variety of subject areas, from American history, literature, astronomy, food and wine, engineering, science history, home economics, travel and tourism, labor relations, Native American studies, ornithology, veterinary medicine and women’s studies.

The Library of Congress collection covers the period from 1865–1922 and include many difficult to obtain works, including hard-to-find Civil War regimental histories. The oldest work from the Library of Congress is from 1707 and covers the trial of two Presbyterian ministers in New York, but many of the works relate to the Adirondack region.

Among the new Adirondack works now available are:

E.R. Wallace – Descriptive guide to the Adirondacks (1894)

A. L. Byron-Curtiss – The life and adventures of Nat Foster, trapper and hunter of the Adirondacks (1897)

Albert Abraham Kraus – A hemlock bark study in culled forests of the western Adirondacks (1918)

Bob Marshall – The high peaks of the Adirondacks (1922)

Nathaniel Bartlett Sylvester – Historical sketches of northern New York and the Adirondac wilderness (1877)

Warwick Stevens Carpenter – The summer paradise in history; a compilation of fact and tradition covering Lake George, Lake Champlain, the Adirondack Mountains, and other sections reached by the rail and steamer lines of the Delaware and Hudson Company (1914)

Henry W. Raymond – The story of Saranac; a chapter in Adirondack history (1909)

Report of the Adirondack Committee, [New York State] Assembly of 1902 (1903)

And a lot more…

Photo: Rusisseaumont Hotel, Lake Placid, c. 1900 from “The eastern slope of the Adirondacks. its mountains, lakes & springs” [1901]. The hotel was built in 1892 by the Lake Placid Improvement Company. It was destroyed by fire on July 2, 1909 and never rebuilt.