ABOUT THE JOURNAL

E.A. Merritt was a Potsdam, NY, resident who served in the U.S. Civil War and was appointed surveyor of northern New York State after being discharged from the military at the end of the war in 1865. The surveys noted in the booklet may be the first surveys Merritt ever did in the Adirondacks prior to his being appointment in 1877 as the surveyor of the port of New York by President Rutherford B. Hayes. Little is known about surveyor Henry Thompson other than the fact that he and Merritt were born in the same generation.

The time of the surveys in Piercefield, 1865, was very early for surveys in the Adirondacks as it was still mainly a forested region with few industries other than logging and guiding. One famous Adirondack guide who was present during the Merritt and Thompson surveys was Orson Phelps, who was active from 1849 to 1869. The surveys completed are at locations in the Great Tract no. 2 and Township no. 6. Some of the locations that Thompson and Merritt surveyed include Jock Pond, Wolf Pond, Blue Mountain, and Long Pond, which are fairly central in the Adirondack region. The journal’s notes are careful surveys with some descriptions providing the types of land being surveyed. The descriptions also put the land into categories such as Forest or Agriculture. Early surveying had intentions to mark boundaries between areas of land for eventual sale for logging. In many locations they they visited, Merritt and Thompson may have been the first Euro-Americans to have stepped foot there, as previous surveys had not been done in numerous Adirondack locations. The surveyors’ intentions were to find new profitable lands. These surveys done by Merritt and Thompson present a larger picture of the direction the Adirondacks were headed. Early surveys were the first steps in preparing the Adirondacks for later human population and resource extraction. -Henry Anderson

 

E.A. Merritt and Henry Thompson
Field Notes of Piercefield, 1865
Small booklet, with entries written in pen on lined paper, 5 x 3 in.
Adirondack Collection, mss. 32.
Special Collections
Owen D. Young Library
St. Lawrence University
Canton, NY