Up the Shingle Shanty: July 3, 1851

We take it for granted that the Adirondack wilderness with its grand forests, mountains, lakes, and streams is a sublimely beautiful place, but for most of the colonial period up until the Civil War the Adirondacks were generally considered a hard, forbidding place full of unknown dangers, unfit for settlement. Then as the Industrial Revolution swept across America, a small group of landscape artists began to look at the wilderness with new eyes. Where others had seen only dismal forests, they saw awe-inspiring beauty. The paintings they created showed Americans for the first time that they had a unique wilderness heritage that deserved recognition and protection. In time, this group of American landscape painters would come to be known as the Hudson River School; named for the favorite locale of Thomas Cole and his talented student, Frederic E. Church.

 

In his influential 1836 “Essay on American Scenery,” Thomas Cole declared, “the most distinctive and perhaps the most impressive, characteristic of American scenery is its wildness.” In his view, American landscape painting could offer the world a vision not available to artists in Europe where there was no wild country left to paint. America had impressive mountains, lakes, waterfalls and rivers. America had vast aged forests that blazed with color each fall. The American sky, the soul of all scenery, provided light not found anywhere else in the world. 

 

Inspired by Cole and Church, two young artists from the Hudson Valley took a wilderness sketching trip during the summer of 1851 to gather ideas for paintings that they hoped would establish them as serious landscape artists. Jervis McEntee and Joseph Tubby, both from Rondout near Kingston, NY, were long-time friends. McEntee was 23, Tubby 29. Neither had yet developed much of a reputation as a landscape painter, but both were determined to do so. 

Jervis McEntee

Joseph Tubby

They could easily have chosen the Catskill Mountains near their home for their sketching trip. Instead, they chose a difficult one-hundred-and-seventy-mile trek across the central Adirondacks. One reason for this choice was probably the fact that Cole had painted in the Adirondacks. McEntee later remarked, however, that the deciding factor was the romantic descriptions of wild Adirondack scenes in Joel T. Headley’s 1849 account of his trips to the central Adirondacks called The Adirondack; or, Life in the Woods.

 

Finding wilderness scenes to paint in those days involved a certain amount of privation and physical risk. Although they had little or no camping experience, McEntee and Tubby were both young, in good health and were used to taking long walks in the vicinity of their homes in the Hudson Valley. It is easy to imagine they were eager to test themselves against the trials of the Adirondack wilderness as a sort of entrance examination into the world of professional artists.

 

Fortunately, they chose Asa Puffer to be their guide. Puffer was then 33 years old, a seasoned woodsman from the town of Watson in Lewis County on the edge of the wilderness. Puffer had acquired his guiding skills by working as a farmer, a logger, and as an axe-man for surveying parties. He knew the central Adirondacks as well as anyone since he was part of the surveying party that laid out the Carthage-to-Lake Champlain Road, or as he called it, the Catamount road. Since most of the trip would be along this road, Puffer’s experience would prove to be invaluable.

 

McEntee and Tubby both kept journals of the trip. Because they left such highly detailed accounts, we are able to vicariously participate in their everyday joys and hardships. An excellent sample of the rigors of their sketching trip can be found in the events of July 3, 1851 as they travelled from their camp on Smith’s Lake, called Lake Lila today, and made for Brandreth Lake by way of the Shingle Shanty Brook.

 

The day had begun auspiciously enough. It was cloudy but comfortably warm. They packed up the Smith’s Lake camp where they had just spent the past two weeks and loaded the gear into two boats. By 9 am McEntee and Tubby had settled into one boat with their sketching boxes, fishing gear, guns and some personal items stuffed into knapsacks. Puffer, their guide, led the way in the second boat loaded with everything else. They fished for about an hour then rowed into the mouth of a little stream that they believed would allow them to navigate to within a short hike of the day’s destination.

 

As they headed upstream on the Shingle Shanty Brook, Puffer shot a deer and they scared up a moose. Before they had made much forward progress, the twisting stream narrowed and became choked with alder brush and beaver dams. There were some deeper sections but they mostly had to wade and pull the boats over shallows. McEntee later remembered how he and Tubby laughed at each other when they slipped and splashed on obstacles hidden underwater.

 

In the afternoon it began to lightly rain. They presently came to a fork in the stream and didn’t know which way to turn. When they landed to consider the matter, they saw foot prints leading up the right fork so they decided to go that way. It was the wrong choice. After struggling on for what seemed an eternity, the rain increased and clouds of blackflies descended on them. Their previous lightheartedness turned into unspoken desperation. 

 

They were soaked to the skin by the time Puffer pulled his boat on shore and announced that he thought further progress up the little stream was impossible. Jervis McEntee gave a final hard pull on the oars but his boat ran aground a foot short of the bank. Joseph Tubby stepped out of the boat intending to pull it the rest of the way, but he instantly sank to his waist in soft mud. The smell of swamp gas rising from the muck was one they would long remember. Once on shore, Puffer lit a smoky fire so they could dry their clothes a little and drive off the bugs.

Puffer admitted he had never personally followed this route before, but he confidently declared that the road lay only a few miles south of their position. McEntee and Tubby had become so disoriented by the turns in the stream that when Puffer pointed in the direction he wanted to go, they argued with him. Luckily, they had a compass which proved Puffer right. As they slogged through the marshy underbrush carrying only their guns and knapsacks with a day’s provisions, they could not help but feel that they might be hopelessly lost. Puffer just calmly kept on his compass course. After a bit more than an hour of hard going across soft ground covered by tangles of witch-hopple, they climbed a low hill, and spied the road in the near distance. They never doubted Puffer's judgment again.

 

It was 7 o’clock and getting dark as they trudged along the road in the downpour. Across a log corduroy bridge over a little brook they spotted an old bark shanty that had recently been repaired. It was still in rough shape but sound enough to get them out of the rain. Puffer built a fire and cooked supper of venison and pan bread. Even though the shanty leaked badly, they were soon asleep. McEntee claimed that Puffer slept in the rain that night except for his head and supported that claim with this sketch.

 

The artists’ full sketching trip took from mid-June until mid-August. Not every day was filled with adventure but there were other days of great excitement and even physical peril. They paddled across Raquette Lake in the dark as a violent thunderstorm approached. They climbed trailless Blue Mountain in the rain even though they knew there would be no view. They climbed Mt. Marcy from the Upper Iron Works and soldiered on even though McEntee sprained his knee on the way up. 

 

In 1852, the year after the trip, McEntee and Tubby each exhibited two oil paintings derived from their Adirondack sketches at the National Academy of Design. McEntee showed “A View in the Forest of Northern New York – Outlet of Smith’s Lake” and “Saw Mill at the Adirondac Iron Works.” Tully exhibited “Landscape, Adirondac” and “Landscape, Indian Pass in the Adirondac.“ If these four paintings survive, their whereabouts are unknown.

 

McEntee and Tubby were among a very small handful of early Adirondack tourists that came to the great north woods seeking beauty and tranquility. Over the intervening years their romantic vision of the Adirondack wilderness has gained legions of adherents. Millions have followed in their faint footsteps without ever knowing that they passed this way one hundred and seventy years ago seeking the sublime. Their Adirondack adventures deserve to be remembered.

 

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The 1867 portrait of Jervis McEntee is by Napoleon Saroney. It originally appeared in American Artist Life,by Henry T. Tuckerman. The undated portrait of Joseph Tubby is by Parkinson’s Studio, New York City. Both portraits can be found in the Archive of American Art at the Smithsonian Institution.

 

The illustrations are copies of wood engravings made by the firm of Loomis & Annin from sketches by Jervis McEntee for an article McEntee wrote about the sketching trip called “The Lakes of the Wilderness,” Great Republic Monthly, April 1, 1859.