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Declaring that the movement to name one of the peaks in the Seward range Mount Donaldson, in honor of Alfred Donaldson, well-known writer of Adirondack history, was inappropriate, O. Byron Brewster, district attorney of Essex County, has entered a protest against the renaming of this peak.

The mountain which the Adirondack Mountain Club has chosen as a monument to Mr. Donaldson is known as North Seward. Members of the club at a recent meeting unanimously passed a resolution to apply to the State Board of Geographic Names to have this peak officially designated Mount Donaldson.

In his letter to the News, Mr. Brewster said, in part, “With all due respect to Mr. Donaldson, and with due gratitude for his literary contribution to the cause of local history, I personally feel that this movement to name a mountain in his honor is inappropriate, uncalled for and silly. Without expressing the reasons for my belief, which, of course, would not be of any interest to your readers, nevertheless I send you herewith an excerpt from Waterson’s ‘History of Essex County,’ written just after the Civil War, and published in 1869, wherein the writer sums up the situation in his characteristic style. And with his conclusion, I believe a majority of the citizens of this county, as well as summer visitors, are in agreement.”

Mr. Brewster sent in the following quotation from Watson’s book: “Public sentiment will not ratify the acts of private men, who would obliterate the aboriginal names of the great physical features of this continent, and substitute those of individuals, however eminent and esteemed their private characters. The Indian nomenclature is singularly rich in its force and euphony, and in the beauty and illustrative appropriateness of its designations. The names they have attached to physical objects will soon be only the vestige of their existence. They will leave no other monuments of their former presence on the land they once possessed.”

(In 1945, local historian Marjorie Lansing Porter, 1891-1973, wrote about the origins of mountain names in the Adirondacks. “It is a matter of regret that the old Native American names of these mountains were not retained for they, almost without exception, convey some idea or association peculiar to the locality to which they relate,” she wrote. “What could be more appropriate than Mt. Seward’s original name Ou-Kar-lah, the Great Eye; McIntyre, Henoga, Home of Thunder; Mt. Colden, Ounowarlah, Scalp Mountain; Whiteface, Thei-o-no-guen, White Head; Indian Pass, Henodoawda, the Path of the Thunderer; Mt. Marcy, Tahawus, He Splits the Sky; Wilmington Notch, Kurloom, Spot of the Death Song; Lake Colden, Tawistas, the Mountain Cup …” She said many of the High Peaks — Marcy, Seward, McIntyre, Colden, Henderson and Dix — were named by professors Ebeneezer Emmons or William Redfield, who both climbed Mount Marcy on Aug. 5, 1837, which was the first recorded ascent up New York’s tallest mountain by a non-Native American. Emmons named Seward Mountain after William Henry Seward, who was elected governor in 1838 and later served as U.S. secretary of state.)

EXPLORE the Lake Placid News archives for yourself. Beware, though, you can easily fall into a rabbit hole while rummaging through this history. Have fun!