Concept

Adirondack Park

Summary
The Adirondack Park is a part of New York's Forest Preserve in northeastern New York, United States. The park was established in 1892 for "the free use of all the people for their health and pleasure", and for watershed protection. The park's boundary roughly corresponds with the Adirondack Mountains. Unlike most state parks, about 52 percent of the land is privately owned inholdings. State lands within the park are known as Forest Preserve. Land use on public and private lands in the park is regulated by the Adirondack Park Agency. This area contains 102 towns and villages, as well as numerous farms, businesses and an active timber-harvesting industry. The year-round population is 132,000, with 200,000 seasonal residents. The inclusion of human communities makes the park one of the great experiments in conservation in the industrialized world. The Forest Preserve was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1963. The park's include more than 10,000 lakes, 30,000 miles of rivers and streams, and a wide variety of habitats including wetlands and an estimated 200,000 acres of old-growth forests. For the history of the area before the formation of the park, see History of the Adirondack Mountains. Before the 19th century, the wilderness was viewed as desolate and forbidding. As Romanticism developed in the United States, the view of wilderness became more positive, as seen in the writings of James Fenimore Cooper, Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson. The 1849 publication of Joel Tyler Headley's Adirondack; or, Life in the Woods triggered the development of hotels and stage coach lines. William Henry Harrison Murray's 1869 wilderness guidebook depicted the area as a place of relaxation and pleasure rather than a natural obstacle. Financier and railroad promoter Thomas Clark Durant acquired a large tract of central Adirondack land and built a railroad from Saratoga Springs to North Creek. By 1875, there were more than two hundred hotels in the Adirondacks including Paul Smith's Hotel.
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