Breaking Trail: Remarkable Women of the Adirondacks

Breaking Trail: Remarkable Women of the Adirondacks
By Peggy Lynn and Sandra Weber

Just in case you somehow missed the news, March is Women’s History Month! That brings with it an interesting array of programs here in the Elmira-Corning area. One of the events which will be held here at the Southeast Steuben County Library is a book talk by Professor Louise Sullivan-Blum of Mansfield University next Tuesday night at 6 pm on Breaking Trail: Remarkable Women of the Adirondacks by Peggy Lynn and Sandra Webber. (The authors will also be in town next Saturday night for a performance of the stories in the book through word and song.)

To most of us, the Adirondacks are that huge state park when you get up past Albany. We don’t really know too much about it except that it’s a pretty wild place. This book brings together twenty-five women who lived and explored the Adirondacks and celebrates their accomplishments. From a hotelier to an abolitionist, a poet to an entrepreneur, they left their mark and were marked in turn by the six million acre park.

Mrs. Arnold was a pioneering woman who raised ten healthy daughters in the wilderness of Northern Herkimer County. The girls were known for their prowess with horses and they made welcome many travelers in their home, building a small fortune from the commerce. Mrs. Arnold seemed to stave off the bad luck that had previously overshadowed the home they moved into with her smudges, that also kept the black flies at bay.

Inez Mulholland hailed from Lewis, New York and was the original super woman before women had the vote. Educated, beautiful, intelligent and energetic, she was a voice for the suffragist movement. She became a legend and symbol for the movement when she died at just thirty years old.

The history of women is not always the history that is told most often in our textbooks. The great and grand deeds of men were written about by men and published by men. In this book, we find women writing about other women, delving into our shared history, when the exploits of these women were often done quietly and yet suffered condemnation by men and society in general. Today we hold them up as paving the way for the freedoms we now enjoy. We marvel at their tenacity given the circumstances. I personally find the tales of their exploits inspiring. I hope you will too.