Name-change petition circulates for renaming hill in Franklin County after historic Black settlers
By David Escobar
Earlier this month in the small Adirondack community of Bloomingdale, several dozen people packed the Hex and Hop Brewery’s wooden picnic tables to participate in a crusade.
They listened to a presentation on the history of a hill just three miles away and to sign a petition to change its name, which uses a racial epithet.
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Maps refer to that landmark as “N***o Hill,” a name Paul Smith’s College natural science professor Curt Stager and his team are now trying to change to “Murry Hill.” That would honor a Black family who owned part of the property in the 1800s.
“We know [N***o Hill] was named after the African American community, but it’s nice to put a real name on there to help humanize it,” Stager said. “We were able to definitively link one family to that hill.”
Stager, along with Franklin Town Councilman Rich Brandt and local resident Dave Filsinger, have been working to educate the public about the lives of Wesley Murry and his family and to gather support on a name-change petition. Records show the Murrys most likely moved to the hill, just outside Vermontville, in the 1850s.
Black settlers in the North Country
The Murry family’s story is not an unusual tale within the broader context of Black settlers in the Adirondacks.
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About half of the land in the towns of Saint Armand, North Elba and Franklin were Black-owned during the 1800s, said Stager. He said many of the Adirondacks’ earliest Black families shared similar reasons for migrating to the North Country.
“Most of them were free people of color, well-established in urban areas in central and eastern New York, especially in and around New York City,” he said. “It was a story of people coming up [and] taking the challenge of becoming farmers.”
Enclaves of Black settlers did not end up in the North Country by coincidence. In the 1800s, abolitionist Frederick Douglass used his newspaper network to encourage Black people to make the journey north.
“The sharp axe of the sable-armed pioneer should at once be lifted over the soil of Franklin and Essex Counties,” said Douglass in 1848 in his paper The North Star.
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Like other Black Adirondackers in the area, the Murrys were granted their property from white abolitionist Gerrit Smith, who granted 120,000 acres of land in Franklin and Essex counties to thousands of Black New Yorkers.
Stager said these land grants allowed people like the Murrys to create livelihoods cultivating crops in conditions that were otherwise racially and environmentally hostile for Black farmers.
A community effort
Stager, Brandt, and Filsinger are familiar with the process of renaming landmarks. N***o Hill is adjacent to a nearby brook formerly known as “N***o Brook.” Last year, Stager helped lead an effort to rename the body of water after John Thomas, a Black farmer who lived near the brook and was neighbors with the Murry family.
As was the case with John Thomas Brook, community members and local officials now must show broad support for “Murry Hill” before a petition is sent U.S. Board on Geographic Names for approval.
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Stager said he hopes his presentation at Hex and Hop will inspire grassroots support for the renaming. Ellen Beberman, who resides in Vermontville, said Stager gave her a new perspective on her town’s relationship with its early residents.
“The Black community was here,” said Beberman. “They were settlers, and they built up this community in the 1800s. It’s disrespectful to call them by an epithet.”
Many of the people at brewery live around the hamlet of Vermontville, but attendee Nadine Bloch, who was visiting the Tri-Lakes region from Washington, D.C., said she felt pulled toward renaming.
“As a country, we have never really grappled with our racist colonial history,” Bloch said. “In order to move forward, we really need to learn the history and appreciate the diversity that has made us what we are today.”
Reckoning with the past
Over the past decade, activists across the country have worked to change the names of specific streets, statues, and schools that are derogatory or honor a racist figure.
Name changes have also occurred more broadly across the country. In 2022, the federal government changed the place names of 650 locations across federal lands that formerly using the word “squaw,” an epithet for Indigenous women that Native Americans find offensive.
Opponents of place name changes have cited multiple concerns with renaming landmarks, namely costs associated with changing signage and the potential erasure of historical figures.
Adirondack Diversity Initiative Director Tiffany Rea-Fisher disagrees with such criticism. She said she is proud of the community’s renewed effort in reshaping the narrative of N***o Hill.
“Acknowledging the cultural tapestry of what makes this place so special is important for generations past, present, and future,” Rea-Fisher said. “It’s important to not be a-historical and open ourselves up to being part of a continuum that requires us to push to do the right thing when given the opportunity.”
Stager said he is optimistic that “Murry Hill” will be approved. Unlike other places named for historical figures, he said N***o Hill’s name is simply derogatory, which has helped build strong community support behind the cause.
“I think part of it is because it’s not being framed as something that comes from the outside,” Stager said. “This is being framed as … the story of fellow Adirondackers, just like us living right where we live. Why would we not want to honor them?”
Stager said his work toward the name “Murry Hill” is about more than erasing a racial epithet from the map.
“The way I see the addition of this to our narrative of who we are as Adirondackers, is that it’s kind of like recognizing the full tapestry of humanity — the human stories here — instead of a single thread,” Stager said.
The renaming crusaders intend to gather broad support for the name “Murry Hill” before sending the petition to the U.S. Board on Geographic Names.
This reporting is a collaboration of The Adirondack Explorer and North Country Public Radio, with funding from Report for America.
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I’m going to guess I get a bit of flack over this… I think you are erasing history, not correcting it. Central and Northern NY, the Adirondacks are well established as abolishionist strongholds, for the reasons you mention her and more.
The word, negro, was not impolite or derogatory. It had common use in our language for centuries. No better or worse than calling someone Caucasian.
I am of the impression that these movements to erase historical context by renaming bridges, places and waterways is a huge mistake. If the original name was a slur, in this case, I would say then change it. But is not.
Negro Hill conotes an image of who and why the area became home to many refugees from slavery.
If I travelled through the area and saw Murray Hill, I would be clueless as to who or why or what color, as that seems important, it’s settlers were. Negro Hill, tells me something that I might want to know more about.
Your specific area of the Adirondacks, doesn’t need 21st century semantics. It’s history speaks proud volumes. Why don’t you let it continue doing that?
Well said!
While I have mixed feelings about changing place names to conform to the current “political correctness” movement, here is how I look at it. It isn’t erasing history, it is altering the future. They aren’t going back and burning old maps and books – those will remain for researchers and historians to peruse. What changes is what many would consider a more descriptive and positive procedure for place-name choices into the future. I would rather see a hill named using early settlers’ surnames than their racial description. After all, how descriptive is the old name in TODAY’s America? It honors neither our past or our present.
Trying to change history once again!
I am reading these articles and so very thankful for the people and communities that are conscious of the tapestry that is called the American story. I was born in Jamaica at the time of my birth was known as British West Indies. I was amazed coming here that the shame of the slave trade is not discussed, taught properly as one part of the American story, the past and the tremendous amount of work that people of good faith have accomplished to move the country forward. Yes, there is more work to be done especially in this political climate, but the American spirit is not broken.
The slave trade was not just an American issue in the West Indies we are taught as children about its history cause and effect and never to run away from historical context but to understand so we never allow such evil to return to humanity.
On a personal note, I have friends who are resident of Saranac Lake who have invited me there, I have been reluctant to accept the invitation over concern for my personal safety. These articles give me hope. Thank you.