Often people think of the Adirondack Park as being the Adirondack Mountains, a very rugged and mountainous area. But as one would see from exploring much of the Southern and Western Adirondacks, a lot of the Adirondack Park is relatively flat. Not flat like Kansas, but with peaks who elevation change rival other portions of the state not in the Adirondack Park.
Most of NY State east or south of Finger Lakes is not flat. There can be significant rise in hills in these area, but we don’t consider such regions to be portions of Adirondack Park or even Catskill Park. Those lands are un-designated and not managed on a regional basis. They aren’t called a park. But what makes the Adirondack Park a cohesive unit is lack of agriculture occurring on it. Few portions of the Adirondack Park have a growing season long enough to support corn farming.
Corn is the basis of much contemporary and historical agriculture. It primarily is grown in NY State to feed dairy cattle. Dairy cattle are important, because they can provide a year round income for a farm family in form of milk sales throughout the year. Where corn can grown, silage can be made, and dairy farms can be sustained. Where there are dairies in NY State, their often is an agricultural support system that allows other farms to exists. Moreover, dairy farming is typically a mark of land able to sustain some kind of farming — if you can’t raise corn on a piece of land nearby, it’s unlikely that it would allow fruit or vegetable growing.
Moreover, without an agricultural base, their is little reason historically for people to move to Adirondack Park. People traditionally where reliant on local food supplies. Little food could be grown in the park. Even if people could import food into the park, their historically was few jobs outside of logging and mining — occupations that could only support a limited number of workers. Without an agricultural basis, few cities could spring up within the park.
Most of the land in the Adirondack Park historically was logged or mined. Logging operations are a long-term investment, with many species of trees taking 30-50 years to grow to a profitable size. Many loggers historically stripped the land of it’s trees, and then abandoned the land or otherwise turned it over to the state. That’s how the state ended up with so much land in the park. If it had been productive farm land, much if it would still be in agricultural production, with remaining lands being converted into rural residential lands, or smaller privately owned forests.
It wasn’t an act of the legislature that prevented the Adirondack Park from becoming too developed. It was a lack of corn and cattle based agriculture, as the elevation way too high to support such farming. No farms meant no civilization, and most of the park remaining timberlands, much abandoned to state use. If Adirondack Valleys where low enough to support some agriculture, their would have been much more development and civilization, then the largely wild and undeveloped Adirondack Park of today.
