Tag Archive for "Preservation" - The Adirondack Almanack

Posts Tagged ‘Preservation’

Wednesday, July 12, 2017

Poke-O-Moonshine Fire Tower Marking 100 Years

They started put being paid $60 a month for their half-year, all-weather stints in the fire tower. Overall, there were twenty-one Fire Observers on Poke-O-Moonshine from 1912 through 1988. Most came from nearby Keeseville, and the first three worked in the original wooden tower before the current one was built in 1917.

That makes the fire tower 100 years old. It was part of a crop of standardized steel towers that New York State built in response to the catastrophic forest fires of the early 20th Century. Drought, high winds, lightning, heaps of logging slash, and sparks from lumber-hauling trains had combined to burn almost a million acres of New York forest over two decades. » Continue Reading.

Monday, April 3, 2017

Steven Engelhart: Making of a Preservationist

by Steven Engelhart

5 Comments

I grew up in Plattsburgh, which I think makes me a local. My father was a professor at SUNY Plattsburgh and taught the literature of Emerson and Thoreau and other late 19th century American writers.

When a PBS documentary was made in the 1990s about the creation of the Adirondack Park, he was interviewed about Emerson and his outing to the Philosopher’s Camp in 1858. Like Emerson, he had a deep appreciation for nature, which we all inherited, but I can’t say that this translated into wilderness adventuring as a family. This I would discover later on my own. » Continue Reading.

Wednesday, September 2, 2015

Historic “Queen of the Night” Costume at The Sembrich

by Diane Chase

1 Comment

It is the balance of arts and nature that draws my family to the Adirondacks. We have always been the type of people that have hiked a High Peak and then gone to a play at one on the area’s professional theatres or musical venues. Whether past of present, the Adirondacks continue to be a source of inspiration to a variety of performers as well as patrons of the arts.

For anyone interested in history and opera, the original The Magic Flute costume display at The Sembrich, Bolton Landing is worth a visit. According to Executive Director Beth Barton Navitsky the opportunity to see Marcella Sembrich’s original Queen of the Night costume from the 1900 Metropolitan Opera’s premiere of Mozart’s The Magic Flute will be ending September 15, 2015. » Continue Reading.

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