The Door in the Mountain

The Village of Northville has been the seat of my Adirondack research for the last two years, following stints in Inlet, Wells, Lake Pleasant, Pottersville, Raquette Lake, Benson and my hometown of Bleecker over the course of an intermittent half-century of acquaintance with these mountains. While many places lay claim to the status of “gateway to the Adirondacks,” Northville genuinely feels like it. After crossing the Blue Line on Route 30 in Mayfield and traversing the grassy flatlands of the Sacandaga Basin south of the village, the mountains begin to rise even as the highway hugs the river valley past the Northville Bridge, growing wilder and lonelier with every mile north. With the intervening towns of Benson and Hope largely rural, Northville feels like the Last Homely House for tens of miles of forest tenanted only by bear, bobcat, owl and the occasional lonely homestead until the village of Wells nearly twenty miles on. Indeed standing on Main Street looking north, the view is as into a wall: Prospect Hill rising a steep 400 feet above the village. The dead live here, gathered in their thousands in Prospect Hill Cemetery from the village and miles thereabouts. At the foot of the hill in which they lay, it feels as though there may well lay a door straight into the side of the mountain, though I have not found one yet. Expand and click the topics below for more on this strangely beautiful place on the edge of the wild.

  • Northville’s story is the tale of a vanishing. The most significant moment in its history is one that is now invisible in the built environment to all but the archaeologist. In 1930, much of the surrounding lands were swallowed by the damming of the Sacandaga River and the creation of the Great Sacandaga Reservoir. Read more here.

  • With the drowning of the town, the Village became a peninsula, orphaned on three sides from the rest of the landscape by the rising waters of the reservoir. The only road that leads to Northville by means other than a bridge is Maple Grove, which tumbles down from the hills of Hardscrabble in the Town of Hope to the north. Read more here.

  • The rhythm of Northville results from the clash of capitalistic and ecological time, as the village struggles to reconcile the demands of regularized industrial time with the obdurate impositions of nature: most pointedly, the large quantities of snow which fall steadily for at least four months out of the year, and must be moved to make way for human activity. Read more here.

  • While the village itself is home to about a thousand souls, like most Adirondack places its population swells to large but indeterminate numbers with the return of the transient tidefolk who come to summer on the shores of the its Adirondack waters. Inhabiting camps mostly outside the Village, they wash in and out daily for provisions, entertainment and company. Read more here.

  • What you will learn about Northville from an AI depends acutely on what you ask of it. Geologically, topographically, and demographically, it knows a great deal. Culturally, we are something of a mystery to the machines which scape data from the digital universe to paint a portrait of this obscure little village. Read more here.