What Makes the Adirondacks so Pure?

In the most recent reading from Paul Schnider’s The Adirondacks: A History of America’s First, I was particularly fascinated with the Romantic conception that God is omnipresent in nature. As an individual who is not religious, I found this reading especially thought-provoking. First, Schnider writes, “…the terror wilderness evoked in the hearts and minds of mortals was due not to the presence of the devil, as had earlier been believed, but to awe in the face of God’s creative power” (160). To early Romantics, the Adirondacks at first seemed intimidating because they were unexplored and uninhabited. However, people were now frightened by how strong God’s powers are to have created the Adirondacks in the first place.

As Phillip Terrie in Forever Wild points out, there was a romantic belief that God was omnipresent in nature, and this omnipresence gave the Adirondacks a sacred connotation. For example, people believed that guides lived closer to God since they lived in the Adirondacks all year round. Moreover, the pastor of the influential Park Street Church in Boston suggested that every congregation should send their minister to the Adirondacks for a month each year. In doing this, the minister would be purified and would therefore become closer to God.

Additionally, Schnider also writes, “What endangered the soul was not the presence of wilderness at all, it turned out, but ‘the din and struggle’ of Broadway and Wall Street” (165). Again, the previous conception was that wilderness was impure because it was largely unknown to what exactly inhabited the forests. As mentioned in the quote above, it was widely accepted that a devil resided in the Adirondacks. However, Romantics emphasized that urban areas made an individual’s soul impure, and that a trip to the wilderness would help purify it. God created nature and resided in nature, and therefore a trip to the Adirondacks would strengthen and individual’s relationship with God. The fact that people saw God in nature made the Adirondacks more approachable and a more desirable destination. One could argue that we can thank religion for creating a bridge between humanity and nature that augmented the notion of tourism.