The Sticks: A Profile of Essex County, New York

Far north of New York City, up near the Canadian border, lies Essex County, New York-a massive, mountainous chunk of almost forgotten real estate, a keystone of the Adirondack North Country, or what the city people call The Sticks, A county with probably more history than any other in the nation, with natural resources that made some of America's earliest for-tunes, and with wild beauty unsurpassed in the East, Essex is now a region that has heavily suffered the plight of so much of present-day America. Indeed, it is a microcosm of what is known as the Appalachian Condition: dying farms, closed mines, abandoned mills, and proud rugged individualists, the children of pioneers, forced into the grinding, degrading trap of poverty and welfare.

Burton Bernstein has lived in Essex County and knows its people, from the broken farmers, miners, and mill hands to the new tourist-attraction elite. Such disparate folk as a retired rumrunner and the late artist, Rockwell Kent, are included, and Bernstein reports their trials and joys with accuracy, feeling, and concern. He presents here a profile of an essential and symbolic part of America and its citizenry, a profile in The New Yorker tradition of thoroughness and grace.