I read Oliver Reil’s column, “Into the Trees: A Cultural Destination in the Snow,” with great interest, but what a pity this writer was unable to visit the “Dreaming of Timbuctoo” exhibition in the upper barn, which only opens in the spring. It would have challenged his summary of Gerrit Smith’s high-aiming plan as “largely a bust.”

Certainly, Smith was embarrassed by it. The failure of a mass migration of Black pioneers to materialize underscored key flaws in his idea. He did not grasp his deedholders’ need for start-up capital, or their other need, and early on, for white allies on the ground. He did not foresee their reluctance to risk a new beginning in a white world they knew might resent them. He didn’t think it through.

But the story doesn’t stop with Smith. These shortfalls notwithstanding, settlers came and made their mark. The fleeting enclave known locally as Timbucto was one of several. Black pioneers also labored in North Elba, St. Armand, Franklin, Duane and Loon Lake. They cleared Adirondack trails, took on town appointments, helped found churches, schools, and cemeteries, and some descendants bore the names of the first settlers into this century. Smith had cause for his distress. But his same effort gifted this remote region with a legacy of racial diversity and stirring evidence of integrated community-building. Smith’s verdict need not stand for ours.

Amy Godine

Saratoga Springs

(Independent scholar and Adirondack Life contributor Amy Godine is the author of “The Black Woods: Pursuing Racial Justice on the Adirondack Frontier,” Cornell, 2023.)