June 2, 2026 | 4:00 – 6:00 PM | Heaven Hill, Lake Placid
Thank you to everyone who joined us at Heaven Hill for our Annual Meeting in June! Alongside gathering to review the past year and elect board members, we were treated to the inaugural Engelhart Education Fund-supported talk by historian Amy Godine. Following the Annual Meeting and talk, we enjoyed a reception with light refreshments. Find more information about Amy Godine’s talk and our board elections below!
Thanks to funds raised through the Engelhart Education Fund, this event was free and open to the public.
Engelhart Education Fund Talk by Amy Godine
The Black Woods: An Antebellum Campaign for Black Voting Rights on the Adirondack Frontier
In August 1846, a land-rich New York abolitionist gave away 120,000 Adirondack acres to three thousand impoverished Black New Yorkers. Gerrit Smith’s ambition: to help his giftees gain the right to vote. Since 1821, Black New Yorkers who did not own landed property were disenfranchised. Amy Godine, author of The Black Woods, describes the impact of Smith’s dramatic land giveaway on the Black pioneers and tracks the afterlife of Smith’s “scheme of justice and benevolence” in local and Black memory. The Black Woods introduces a provocative and stirring chapter to New York’s rich history of racial justice.
Established in 2021, the Engelhart Education Fund (EEF) honors AARCH’s founding executive director, Steven Engelhart. Steven was a founding board member of AARCH and served as Executive Director for 27 years. Proceeds from this fund are used to further AARCH’s educational work in a variety of ways, including to develop new programs, fund new publications, bring more educational content online, and reach new audiences. AARCH published the “Welcome to Keeseville” coloring book as our first EEF project in 2023. This talk is our inaugural Engelhart Education Fund-supported lecture.
Amy Godine: Independent scholar and long-time Adirondack Life contributor Amy Godine has published scores of articles about Adirondack ethnic and social history. She has curated several exhibitions, including “Dreaming of Timbuctoo,” about an abolitionist-founded black settlement near North Elba. Godine has lectured widely in the region on migratory laborers, immigrants, ethnic neighborhoods and enclaves, peddlers, paupers, pilgrims, squatters, strikers, undocumented immigrants, and other Adirondack “non-elites.”
Board Elections
Board Members Renewing for an Additional Term
- Adam Bailey
- Susan Lynch
- Chris Rediehs
Advisory Council Members Renewing for an Additional Term
- Sally Berk
- Richard Frost
- Peter Sefton
Incoming Board Members
Samantha Bosshart has served as the Executive Director of the Saratoga Springs Preservation Foundation since 2008. Prior to joining the Foundation, she was the Director of Preservation Services at Historic Albany Foundation. Prior to completing her Master of Arts Historic Preservation Planning coursework at Cornell University, she worked at the Galveston Historical Foundation.
From 2018 – 2026, Samantha served on the Board of Directors of the National Preservation Partners Network (NPPN), a nonprofit dedicated to building and strengthening the capacity of individual partner preservation organizations. She also served as the Chair of NPPN for two years. She currently serves on the Board of Directors for Discover Saratoga, the convention and tourism bureau for Saratoga County. Samantha previously served on the AARCH Board of Directors and Executive Committee and is pleased to return.
Sam Huntington is a Historic Site Manager with the New York State Office of Parks, Recreation, and Historic Preservation (NYS OPRHP). He works at Crown Point State Historic Site, which contains the ruins of two forts, Fort St. Frederic, built by the French between 1734 and 1737, and His Majesty’s Fort at Crown Point, a British fort that was one of the largest military fortifications in North America in the 18th century. A native of the Adirondacks, Sam Huntington studied at the University at Albany and the University of Rochester, where he specialized in American cultural history. He has extensive experience in public history and has worked at a number of historic sites and museums including Fort Ticonderoga, The George Eastman Museum, and Crailo State Historic Site, a NYS OPRHP historic site dedicated to telling the history of the Colonial Dutch.
Jacqueline Madison is the President of the North Country Underground Railroad Historical Association (NCUGRHA) which oversees the North Star Underground Railroad Museum. She is on the Board of the Northern New York Library Network and the Women’s Rights Alliance of New York State. She is the Chair of the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Committee, the Colors of Freedom Juneteenth Committee and a member of Rotary. Jackie retired from Pfizer/Wyeth in 2010 and has degrees in Chemistry and Library and Information Management. She is a Vietnam Veteran. Her biggest contribution to the NCUGRHA as the President has been acquiring the building that house the North Star Underground Railroad Museum in June 2019. In recent years, she has received a New York State Outstanding Librarian Award for the North Country, the New York State Assembly Citation, the Women of Distinction Military Service Award from Assemblyman Billy Jones, and the Rotary Paul Harris Fellow Award: Honoring Service and Leadership.
In 2019, she had a once in a lifetime opportunity to visit a site that was an African American community composed of slaves and fugitives escaping slavery in St. Armand, Quebec. In 2021, Jackie with the assistance of interns from SUNY Plattsburgh produced a video on the Quaker Union in Peru, NY that focused on the root cellar in the barn of a former abolitionist, Stephen Keese Smith. She is currently working on collecting stories of People of Color in the Lake Champlain area of New York and has a website about them at jaqcalinfo.com.
Jackie is an avid reader, grows grapes, makes wine, and recently started restoring old trunks. Her husband, Calvin, is retired from the military and they have two daughters, Jaquenette and Calexandria.
Kim Pope holds a Bachelor of Science in geophysics and is a retired professional from Pfizer, as well as a former owner of a multi-doctor veterinary practice. Her passion for preservation began firsthand with her work restoring a grand historic camp in Blue Mountain Lake, New York. Charmed by the peace of lakeside living, she embraced the small Blue Mountain Lake community and its rich regional heritage. Today, she is an advocate for Adirondack history, land conservation, and architectural preservation, always seeking new ways to share the unique legacy of the North Woods with others.
Kim actively supports her neighbors as a member of the Blue Mountain Lake Volunteer Fire Department and serves local youth as a substitute teacher at the Indian Lake Central School.
In her free time, Kim enjoys fishing, immersing herself in history, visiting museums, and gardening having previously hosted a tour for the Garden Conservancy Open Days. She is also an avid collector who enjoys hunting for antiques, vintage cars and wooden boats, and attending auctions.
Incoming Advisory Council Members
Brad Edmondson is the author of A Wild Idea: How the Environmental Movement Tamed the Adirondacks (2021), Postwar Cornell (2016), Ice Cream Social: The Struggle for the Soul of Ben & Jerry’s (2014), the forthcoming Adirondack Green: The Local Struggle that Ignited Global Conservation (2027), and many shorter pieces for The American Scholar, The Atlantic Monthly, and other magazines. He was editor-in-chief of American Demographics, a three-time finalist for The National Magazine Award for General Excellence (1990-96); President of The Finger Lakes Land Trust (2006-10); and currently serves on the board of directors of The Cornell Daily Sun. He attended Deep Springs College and graduated from Cornell University. He lives in Ithaca New York with his spouse, Tania Werbizky.
Jamie Figg has had a lifetime interest in architectural history and preservation.
His connection to the Adirondacks began as a child spending summers in Essex, NY with his grandparents. He was later introduced to Upper St. Regis Lake and eventually he built a house in Keene Valley as well as a new camp at Upper St. Regis Lake. He was exposed to the Adirondacks and preservation during college while spending summers working as the in-house camp counselor for the grandchildren of Walter and Harold Hochschild at Eagle Nest, their camp near Blue Mountain Lake. It was there that he climbed mountains, canoed, and observed first-hand the Hochschild family’s founding of the Adirondack Museum.
During his professional career working in banking and real estate, he continued his pro-bono interest in architecture and preservation, serving as a Trustee on the Board of the Preservation League of New York State, the Wild Center in Tupper Lake, the Helen Hayes Theatre in Nyack, the Open Space Institute in Cold Spring, as well as the Advisory Board of the Hudson Riverkeeper. He currently resides in Charleston, SC in the winter, and Keene Valley and Upper St. Regis Lake in the summer.