2026 Digital Preservation Intern: Sam Lasher
AARCH is excited to announce Sam Lasher as our new Digital Preservation Intern this spring! This internship was made possible by a grant from the Saranac Chapter of the National Society Daughters of the American Revolution (NSDAR). Sam is working on setting up a digital preservation system for AARCH’s digital files, which includes hundreds of historical photographs of Great Camp Santanoni. This project will also include saving digital files in multiple locations, like Vault. Created by the same people that run Internet Archive (archive.org), Vault is a great way of storing historical digital records.
Sam is also participating in the 2026 cohort of Community Web training in conjunction with Documentary Heritage and Preservation Services for New York. This training assists public libraries and cultural heritage organizations with projects involving web archiving, digital preservation, and community archiving. This includes video calls every month to discuss the projects and learn more from the experts on the call.
Sam graduated from Bucknell University in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania in May of 2025 with a Bachelor of Arts in History and Political Science. He will attend graduate school for dual master’s degrees in History and Archives Management this fall and this internship is great experience for his future work in history and archives. In 2025, Sam worked as an exhibit assistant for the Adirondack Experience: The Museum on Blue Mountain Lake (ADKX), where he also spent one day a week working in the archive.
Sam grew up in Cobleskill, New York, but spent just about every summer of his life in the Adirondacks. Most summers, he ran around as a “staff kid” at Skye Farm Camp (a summer camp in the southeastern Adirondacks). His parents, high school special education teachers, spent their summers working at Skye Farm, where they met in elementary school. He also spent many weekends and summers at his family’s cottage on the Hudson River in Riparius, NY. His access to the Adirondacks, and ambitious parents, introduced him and his sisters to many outdoor experiences and the uniqueness of the Adirondack Park. He did not truly appreciate how unique the Adirondacks are until researching Adirondack history at Bucknell University.
Sam’s love for Adirondack history stems from his family’s long history there. They first settled in the Adirondacks in 1801 in Bakers Mills and have maintained a deep connection to the region since. They were involved at Riverside (now Riparius) around the founding in the 1870s and built one of the first cabins around 1900. His great-grandmother hiked Mount Marcy in 1930 with her husband, father, and brother. His family was also part of the founding of Skye Farm Camp in 1942. His grandparents became Adirondack 46ers in the 1970s, his parents in the 1990s, himself in 2015 at age 12, and his sister in 2022. Learning more of his personal history in the Adirondacks led Sam to spend two summers in undergrad researching Adirondack history.
His research over the summer of 2023, including archival research at the ADKX, led to a four-part blog series, “Forever Kept As Wild Forest Lands,” focusing on Charles Sargent and his 1885 report to the New York State Legislature. This report was used to write the law that created the Adirondack Forest Preserve in 1885. With a fascination for Sargent, Sam also spent the summer of 2024 researching Sargent and his relationship with the Adirondacks, forest protection on the national level, and his young friend-turned-rival, Gifford Pinchot. This research led Sam to doing archival research at the Library of Congress and turned into a thirty-five-page paper for his senior culminating experience in history at Bucknell University.
Sam is excited for the rest of this project and thankful for the opportunity that AARCH and the Saranac Chapter of the NSDAR have made possible. We are delighted to have Sam as part of our team this spring and grateful for his help organizing our digital archives!
