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Hi, I'm Sunita Hallas, and I'm an ecologist on the advisory council of Adirondack Wild. I'd like to share some history about the Whitney lands near Long Lake that I researched when I was doing my masters at Cornell University.
This property had ecological significance when the Whitney family first purchased it around the turn of the 20th century, and this continues today. It's important not only in the Adirondacks but also nationally, and it can be considered the cradle of American forestry.
From 1998 to 2000, for my graduate work, I conducted an ecological resource inventory for New York State at the William C. Whitney Wilderness around Little Tupper Lake, right after the state's purchase of the property. The land shares its very interesting forest management history with the neighboring 36,000 acres that are currently being offered for sale to the south of the current William C. Whitney Wilderness.
The lands were originally part of the Tottenham Crossfield purchase of 1771. William C. Whitney, who was a former secretary of the navy in Grover Cleveland's cabinet, was a member of the Hamilton Park Sportsmen's Club, which owned land around Forked Lake and Little Forked Lake. And when he learned that parcels were becoming available in that area, he began to piece together his vast estate. This was around 1897. By 1901, Whitney Park included 74,800 acres of prime spruce land, and it was one of the last remaining virgin forests in the Adirondacks, perhaps because of the lowland wetland nature of the area, which made logging operations more challenging.
Large-volume timber harvests were the trend around the turn of the 20th century. In the 1890s, New York State had 75 of the total 237 mills in the United States, and 64 of the 75 mills that were in New York State were supplied entirely with Adirondack wood. By 1898, when Whitney began the harvest operations at Whitney Park, already two-thirds of Adirondack forests had been logged for softwoods.
Whitney became interested in the practice of scientific forestry, which was a theory set forth by Gifford Pinchot: that recurring periods of harvest and forest recovery, the leaving of seed trees, and encouraging recruitment of younger trees in the understory would allow for a consistent yield. Gifford Pinchot was the first head of the U.S. Forest Service under Theodore Roosevelt, and he later served as governor of Pennsylvania. He had studied forestry in Europe, and he was all about promoting this scientific forestry in the U.S., which led him to the Adirondacks in 1896. Pinchot had developed a working plan for the neighboring Nehasane Park (Lake Lila), which at that time was owned by Dr. William Seward Webb, where spruce and other softwoods were going to be harvested. Whitney, next door, agreed to allow and pay for the U.S. Forest Service to oversee operations on his property as well.
And there are a number of highly entertaining stories from this time period that I collected in my thesis, and I would be very happy to share them. I have it all on a PDF, so it's easy to email if anyone is interested. But Pinchot said of the Whitney tract in 1899 that it, quote, "supplies the first instance of the practice of systematic forestry by a lumber company in the Adirondacks and by far the most extensive example of forest management in the United States." The Whitney property is therefore nationally significant for this reason, and as I said in the beginning, it should be known as the cradle of American forestry.
You can still see the remnants of Pinchot's well-thought-out attempt at sustainability in the 200-foot old-growth buffer that's still fairly intact around Little Tupper Lake and Rock Pond in the William C. Whitney Wilderness. There were a number of other scientifically documented cuts (timber harvests) through the first half of the 20th century. The Isaac Walton League conducted fish studies in the 1940s and 50s on the property. Students from Cornell and the State College of Forestry and the Ranger School at Wanakena and Paul Smith's College all held field trips to Whitney Park. The company policy was stated to be, um, "the policy of the company is to cooperate fully in scientific and educational activities in forestry and the conservation fields." That was their mission.
Then, around the mid-1960s, things get a bit more murky, with more and more unsupervised crews and high grading. By 1978, Nehasane Park (with Lake Lila) was no longer a profitable lumber operation due to high grading, and it was sold to the state. Then, in 1997, the Whitney family came to a similar conclusion for the lands around Little Tupper Lake. They submitted a plan to the Adirondack Park Agency to subdivide the Little Tupper Lake portion of the property (the northern portion of Whitney Park) into 40 great lots, which was very controversial among stakeholder groups in the park. Governor Pataki announced that the state would purchase the 14,700 acres of the northern portion of Whitney Park for 13.9 million dollars. This was announced in 1997, and that was $955 an acre in 1997 dollars. In addition, the state would purchase Whitney headquarters for an additional 3.2 million dollars and Camp Bliss at the end of Little Tupper for five hundred thousand dollars. The Adirondack Nature Conservancy and Land Trust attempted to secure a 10-year preservation agreement for three million dollars at that time on the remaining 36,000 acres (which is the property that's currently for sale), but the family declined this.
So this property has always held a place of importance and influence, being so vast and located right in the middle of the park. And because of this, residents and nearby communities, and scientists and recreationists—we all become stakeholders sharing in the fate of Whitney Park, even today. Thanks.