The Jay Entertainment and Music Society Presents:

“The Hammersmith: The Odyssey of a Self-freed Slave, Private Thomas Elliott, who made the Adirondacks home”.  Lecture and Q&A.  

Join Amy to hear about local Jay history from her recently published book, The Black Woods: Pursuing Racial Justice on the Adirondack Frontier (Cornell).  Amy will tell us about a land-rich abolitionist’s attempt in 1846 to colonize swaths of Essex and Franklin Counties with poor Black New Yorkers who needed land in order to gain the right to vote.  Among the people drawn to Gerrit Smith’s “gift lands” was an ex-slave and Union veteran who found his way to Jay, worked as a hammersmith, and won the respect of his community.  Godine traces Thomas Elliott’s odyssey from antebellum Virginia to the Adirondacks and New Jersey and fixes his trajectory in the context of Adirondack social history.  

From Saratoga Springs, New York, independent scholar Amy Godine has been writing and speaking about ethnic, migratory, and Black Adirondack history for more than three decades. Exhibits she has curated include Dreaming of Timbuctoo at the John Brown Farm State Historic Site in North Elba, New York.

“The Black Woods is a beautifully written, painstakingly researched, and uncommonly nuanced story, heretofore a footnote in the ongoing saga of race in America. But here is a real story, liberated from the chains of arrogant historiography and willing to look into dark corners of our national narrative and climb to summits that offer a panoramic ‘us.’” —Ken Burns, filmmaker

Sponsored by Trustco Bank

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