2025, March + April Adirondack Life
BY THOMAS WELCH
Originally published in Adirondack Life, March + April 2025
PLACED BY THE ADIRONDACK MOUNTAIN CLUB and the New York State Conservation Department on the 1937 centenary of the first ascent, the bronze plaque on Marcy’s summit names 15 in the first climbing party. Setting aside a few historical hiccups (the mountain was not “also known by the Indian name Tahawus” and a few of the named climbers were not part of the group), the sign recognizes a little-appreciated event in the history of science.
Many of the names are known to anyone familiar with Adirondack history: Henderson, Cheney, Holt, MacIntyre, for example. Most of the others are hardly household names, although two-Redfield and Emmons-are recognized as Adirondack 46s. But the party that set foot on Mount Marcy on August 5, 1837, may have been the most distinguished assemblage of American scientists in the 19th century-being on the first ascent of Mount Marcy is barely a footnote in many of their impressive careers.
GEOLOGIST
Ebenezer Emmons (1799-1863)
Emmons’s name appears first on the plaque, often cited as the expedition leader. He is identified as “state geologist” from “Williams [College].” While this is accurate, it understates his background and career. He received his undergraduate degree from Williams College and an MD from Berkshire Medical College. He practiced medicine in Massachusetts, but also dabbled in geology, his first love. After a few years he resumed his education, joining the first class at the Rensselaer School (now RPI) to focus on geology. His most important mentor there was Professor Amos Eaton.
At the time of the Marcy ascent, Emmons was professor of chemistry and geology at Williams, and professor of obstetrics at Albany Medical College. At the time he was also chief geologist of the northern district of New York, and his reports in this role discussed his scientific findings on the expedition. He is generally credited with being first to use the term ”Adirondacks” to refer to our mountains.
Emmons’s career as a geologist flourished after the 1837 expedition, and he made several major contributions to the field. All came to a sad ending, however. One of his students,James Hall, accompanied him on the Marcy ascent. Hall ultimately eclipsed his mentor in geologic fame, and the two of them descended into an ugly public dispute over the age of a rock group, the Taconic System. Ultimately, the dispute, dubbed the “Great Taconic Controversy,” led to lawsuits and countersuits, and resulted in Emmons being barred from practicing geology in New York. He began another career phase as state geologist of North Carolina, where he died trapped in the state by the Civil War. His body was returned to New York, and is interred next to that of his student, nemesis and expedition colleague,James Hall.
METEOROLOGIST
William Redfield (1789-1857)
Clearly the most senior of the scientists on the expedition, Redfield authored the definitive scientific report of the climb in the American Journal of Science and Arts. He had no formal education after grammar school and was largely self-taught.
Redfield’s reputation as a scientist had been established earlier with major discoveries about the nature of Atlantic storms and hurricanes. From a series of careful observations (such as the pattern of tree fall), he deduced the counterclockwise rotation of hurricanes. He described the familiar path of Atlantic storms from the Caribbean up the coast to the northeast. Early 19th-century nautical guides credited his work with allowing sailors to predict storms and minimize their impact.
Much of Redfield’s work involved barometers. He is credited with a number of barometric designs and modifications and popularized their use for the study of weather. His measurements during the expedition demonstrated for the first time that the Adirondacks were higher than the Catskills; Emmons later used the data to develop mathematical models for determining altitude. Their conclusions about the height of Mount Marcy hold today.
Redfield’s fame grew following the Marcy expedition. He may be best known as the founder and first president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, which publishes the journal Science.
BOTANIST
John Torrey (1796-1873)
Torrey’s education began, curiously, in what we would now call a “minimum security” prison in New York, where his father was warden. When John was a teenager, his father let him interact with some inmates . Among these was Amos Eaton (later Emmons’s professor), who’d been charged with forgery in connection with a land dispute. Eaton was well versed in many of the sciences and tutored young Torrey in botany.
Torrey chose medicine for his formal education, although his real love was botany. He received his MD from the College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York, now a part of Columbia University. He held faculty positions at West Point, City College of New York, and Columbia. At the time of the Marcy climb, he was also professor of chemistry at the College of New Jersey (now Princeton University). No matter where he was or what he was doing, he continued to study plants, amassing what was to become an extensive collection of American flora. Parts of this collection remain today at the New York Botanical Garden and the herbarium of Columbia University.
The year before the Marcy expedition, Torrey was appointed botanist of the State of New York, and began work on a catalog of the state’s flora. The climb was an opportunity for him to collect specimens of alpine and subalpine flora (before this became illegal). Six years after the climb, Torrey published his two-volume Flora of the State of New York, a compendium of all plants found in the state.
After 1837 his reputation as a botanist grew exponentially. He accompanied John C. Fremont on an expedition to the Pacific northwest, studying that region’s flora extensively. He founded the New York Academy of Sciences and was elected as one of the early members of the National Academy of Sciences. He established the Torrey Botanical Society in New York City, which exists to this day. The Journal of the Torrey Botanical Society is a leading scientific botanical publication.
GEOLOGIST
James Hall (1811-1898)
Hall, the other “geologist” memorialized on the plaque, was only 25 years old at the time of the expedition. He had graduated from Rensselaer, where he had been a student of both Emmons and Amos Eaton. He stayed on as a faculty member and collaborated with Emmons until the two had their famous falling out.
After his work on the Adirondack exploration, he became chief geologist of one of the other districts in New York. His work gradually moved into paleontology, and he is largely considered to have established paleontology as a field in the U.S. Hall’s magnum opus was the 13-volume Palaeontology of the State of New York. Along with Torrey, he was a founder and early member of the National Academy of Sciences.
ARTIST
C. C. (Charles Cromwell) Ingham (1797-1863)
Ingham, shown above, was an artist, as fully accomplished in that field as the rest of the team was in natural science. He was renowned as a portrait painter in New York City, specializing in socially prominent young women. His work is included in the permanent collection of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art and he was a founder of the National Academy of Design.
For a couple of reasons, Ingham was a peculiar choice for the expedition. First, he was not known for landscapes. More important, Ingham was not an outdoorsman. The rest of the explorers were not ivory tower academics. Their work regularly took them on extended treks into uncharted territory. Emmons, Torrey, and the others would have been entirely comfortable in the Adirondack wilderness. Not so for Ingham, who apparently was more comfortable in Manhattan salons than crossing the Opalescent. He reportedly had a great deal of difficulty on the final climb of Mount Marcy, fainting several times and spending much of the summit time resting, not sketching.
Some of lngham’s landscape sketches from the expedition were colorized, lithographed and published in Emmons’s reports. They were also produced separately for purchase. He used at least one of them, a view of Indian Pass, to produce a larger oil landscape which is now at the Adirondack Experience, in Blue Mountain Lake.
ARTIST
Ebenezer Emmons, Jr. (1822-1907)
Emmons’s 15-year-old son accompanied his father on the expedition. As the youngest member, by far, he was also the only one to see the dawn of the 20th century. His obituary mentions the Marcy expedition as a turning point in the boy’s life, setting him on a career path. He went on to become a nature artist of considerable repute, working at first with his father, providing illustrations of plants, insects and fossils for his father’s scientific reports. He finished his career as a nature illustrator for the state. Many of Emmon’s Junior’s natural history drawings were made into lithographs which are still on the market. Some of these images are spectacular and demand a good price.
Topics: History Adirondaks, Marcy first Acsent
