7
with the creation of a forest preserve in 1885, and a state park seven years later, the idea
had finally achieved political legitimacy. It was public opinion which pressed to have
the matter written into the state constitution.
25
The delegates’ decision that day (combined with thirty other amendments from
the convention) was ratified by the citizens of New York through a popular vote two
months later. There were, as the editors of the Times noted, some “objectionable
propositions in the lot,” including a prohibition against several forms of gambling
which they thought to be “provincial, narrow and puritanical.” It was, however, a long
and patient list that contained other amendments that in their view “would be a public
misfortune to lose.”
26
The Forestry Amendment was one of them.
This is a story of the Adirondack Park, and of the rhetoric that newspapers used
to advance its creation between 1864 and 1894. But even more than that, it is the story
of how an idea and an ideology came together in the politics of 19
th
century America to
produce one of the most appealing myths in environmental history. The idea spawned
a movement to create the world’s first nature parks and forest preserves; the ideology
was democracy itself. In theory, their convergence was instrumental in the creation of
the parks by lending political voice and legitimacy to growing public demands for
wilderness preservation. Yet as the following pages attest, the origin of a “people’s
park” in the Adirondacks, reveals a tangled fusion of fact and fiction that is far more
complex.
Convention