Most histories of the Adirondacks have been written by white men, about white men. Thankfully, that is changing: Indigenous peoples, African-Americans, women and other neglected cohorts are finally beginning to get their due.

It is women — “Remarkable Women of the Adirondacks” proclaims its subtitle — who populate “Breaking Trail.” Singer-songwriter Peggy Lynn and historian and author Sandra Weber, two remarkable women in their own ways, told the stories of 25 of them in the first edition, published by Purple Mountain Press in 2004. The second, updated edition, also from Purple Mountain Press, was released earlier in 2025.

The women who are featured “have shaped the region as it is today,” in the words of North Country Public Radio’s Emily Russell, who wrote a fine and concise preface to the new edition. And so we have Esther Combs (or McComb), whose true identity is murky, but who nevertheless is credited with being the first person known to climb what became Esther Mountain, a bridesmaid of Whiteface. And Lydia Martin Smith, wife of hotelier Paul Smith who preferred to sit around and tell stories while she built and ran a very successful business. And Mary Brown, an abolitionist as ardent as her better-known martyred husband, John Brown. We learn about journalist and social reformer Kate Field, who years before the creation of the Preserve and Park was “advocating for the state to buy up land and preserve forests (and) already saw the Adirondacks as a place for recuperation and recreation,” Lynn told Russell in an NCPR interview last summer.

We have Inez Milholland of tiny Lewis, who worked herself to death alongside Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton in the cause of women’s suffrage. And Jeanne Robert Foster (a pen name), who went from an 1880s childhood on a hardscrabble farm in the southeastern Adirondacks to heights of renown as a model and avant-garde poet. We find guides and folk singers, entrepreneurs, pioneer 46ers (Grace Hudowalski), civil rights activists (the Lake Champlain iron fields’ Alice Paden Green), arts center founders, gifted naturalists (Orra Phelps) and outspoken conservationists.

Photos and art, both old-time and recent, and song lyrics by Lynn further enliven the stories. Matilda Fielding of “Hitch-up, Matilda” fame rates both an 1800s Seneca Ray Stoddard sketch and a Lynn song from more than 100 years later (“Hitch up Matilda, your dress is getting wet / You’re sinking off Bill [Nye’s] shoulders faster than the sun can set”) amplify the hilarious tale. Updates bring some of the stories closer to the present.

“Breaking trail” means forging ahead; leading by example through obstacles like blowdown on a trailless peak, or deep powder on a cross-country ski trek, or misogyny; laying a path for those who will follow. It’s the perfect title for this book, for that’s what all of the women, each in her own unique way, was doing. Two thumbs up for the reissue of this important contribution to reconfiguring the telling of Adirondack history. With all of its subjects now deceased, one hopes Volume II, on contemporary women trail-breakers, is not far off.