Ausable Chasm, New York
AA-2026-37F3EF
On the image
The rock face at Ausable Chasm rises out of a dense forest of conifers and hardwoods in what someone in the 1950s would have regarded as proper wilderness, though it was already a tourist destination on the map. A small label reading "Ausable Chasm" is glued to the lower left corner of what appears to be a color slide, the kind of amateur notation that suggests this was someone's vacation documentation, not a professional survey. The photographer stood among the scraggly brush overhanging the gorge and pointed upward at the stratified sandstone walls, capturing the chasm not as a geological lesson but as a site visited, seen, and marked for the family archive. The gesture of labeling it—as if the viewer might forget what they were looking at—says everything about how Americans in this era approached natural landmarks: you went there, you photographed it, you identified it, and then you were done.
The historian's note
Ausable Chasm is a sandstone gorge carved by the Ausable River in northeastern New York near Keeseville, in the foothills of the Adirondacks. The site opened to public tourism in the mid-19th century and by the 1950s was an established regional attraction, accessible by highway and marketed through the postcard and guidebook industry. The stratified walls visible here are characteristic of the upper Paleozoic sedimentary formations typical of the region. Color transparency film, such as Kodachrome or Ektachrome stock common in amateur photography of the period, was the standard means by which middle-class Americans documented travel between the late 1940s and early 1960s, making such slides abundant in family collections and institutional archives.
Subjects & keywords — each links to a search
Visually related — by likeness
Ausable Chasm, New York, 1950s. 1950–1959. Archive & Atlas, Historical Image Library, AA-2026-37F3EF. https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/ausable-chasm-new-york-1950s.
@misc{aaAA202637F3EF,
title = {Ausable Chasm, New York, 1950s},
year = {1950–1959},
howpublished = {Archive \& Atlas, Historical Image Library},
note = {Accession AA-2026-37F3EF},
url = {https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/ausable-chasm-new-york-1950s}
}TY - ART TI - Ausable Chasm, New York, 1950s PY - 1950–1959 PB - Archive & Atlas, Historical Image Library AN - AA-2026-37F3EF UR - https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/ausable-chasm-new-york-1950s ER -
From the community
Identifications, corrections, and discussion from readers — reviewed by a librarian before appearing here.
Sign in to add an identification, correction, or comment.
No notes yet — be the first to add what you know about this image.