Through the years, I’ve remembered the hard parts about growing up in my family. Sometimes I think the good times are more private, too precious to share. Even before my family left this earth, I didn’t talk about the Heldeberg Workshop or the people I rubbed shoulders with. A friend wondered why I was especially pleased when Martin Shaw, my latest literary favorite, responded to my comments. “Shouldn’t you be as excited about your readers?” she wondered. She has a point. I’m deeply grateful you show up faithfully to read my words, but I still answered, “These are my people.” Growing up around people with the stature of Del Logan and Paul Huey made it easy to walk into Kenneth Woodward’s office at Newsweek to tell him about Crossway Books’ latest releases. At any rate, here’s how I remember the archeologist who became a childhood friend.
When business coach, Jeffrey Davis suggested we recall what made us curious as children, I remembered when I took part in a dig at an 18th century home, where all that was left was the foundation. Every day we walked to the site and dug into the earth, noting the different colors of soil and carefully bagging fragments—broken pieces of pottery, hand wrought nails, sturgeon scales. These were pieces of material culture that let us get to know the people who lived at this home. The home was close to the Normans Kill, a tributary of the Hudson River. We found multiple sturgeon scales. I remember the archeologist, Paul Huey, saying that the Hudson could have been a caviar capital of the world if we hadn’t polluted it.
During assorted digs, I was impressed by the fine china people brought along with them as they traveled across the Atlantic to settle here. The artifacts dug up offered insights into the people, and the time they lived. I find it troubling that young people aren’t interested in carrying material culture into their lives and their children’s lives when their parents try to give them to them. We’ve been taught to get rid of our stuff, to live in homes easy to dust. But there’s something to eating off a hundred-year-old plate, knowing that people a couple generations before you ate off it. There’s something to running your hand over a table that is two hundred years old, knowing hands made it with care and craftsmanship. You can almost feel the people who ate at that table, including your own as they live in your memory. That plate, that table connect us to the generations that came before us.
My mother bought the above pitcher at an auction for twenty-five cents. It sat on her Shaker table until a neighbor’s child leaned on it, the table flipping up and sliding a whole tea service onto the floor breaking some of the pieces. I wasn’t there, but my mother blamed me. (A literary agent was appalled at that detail in my novel.) Every Christmas, my mother set out flow blue plates for Christmas dinner with our extended family. Awhile ago, I sent a few plates back to New York with my cousin to give to my other cousins because they remembered those Christmas dinners.
I brought this pitcher to Illinois after my parents died, my brother not happy that I was breaking up the collection of flow blue. I moved it from Elmhurst, to a couple towns in Northern Illinois to where I live now. After we renovated our house, we display it above our pantry shelves. Two weeks ago I dusted it for the first time since we moved here. Someday this piece will be placed in an auction. Maybe one day an archeologist will dig it up and wonder that these fragments don’t match the occupation sometime in the future. See the stories?
I was surprised those hours sitting in the hot sun, in a square of cool dirt was what I remembered when Davis asked us to recall our curiosity and what gave us delight. As a ten-year-old I was surprised how meticulous, archeologist Paul Huey was as far as teaching us to label lunch bags with the surveyed coordinates of the square and a description of the layer we were in. We’d change bags when the soil changed. Instead of digging with a shovel we scraped the dirt with a mason’s trowel. It was lovely to be respected enough to do sophisticated field archeology as a little kid. Every day we’d pack up our tools and follow a cattle path along a ridge, through a barb wire fence and through my parents’ field, past the rumored graveyard, where relatives of this foundation hole were buried.
As I mentioned earlier, my mother ran the Heldeberg Workshop, a school that tried to grab children’s interests by putting them with experts in the field, while respecting their curiosity. My mother wanted to show children how learning itself could be an adventure. Children could dabble in fields they were curious about without having to wade through years of schooling.
We were driving along Krumkill Road in upstate New York when I suggested she do a class in archeology. I’d just finished reading Adventures in Archeology by C.A. Burland. I could almost see a light go off because my mother saw the possibilities. Our area was full of early American history. Heck, the house where I grew up dated back to 1790. It turned out to be a Dutch aisled house, built somewhat like a church with a central nave and two aisles on either side.
I don’t know how she found Paul Huey, a grad student at the University of Pennsylvania, studying colonial archeology, but she did. Even as a young person, he’d worked at Crown Point, a revolutionary war fort on the shore of Lake Champlain. Later I would spend part of two summers working there because the training I’d received as a ten year old qualified me.
Paul recalls, “When your mother contacted me, I am not sure how she located me or knew about me. Your mother either wrote or ‘phoned me when I was a graduate student in the Department of American Civilization at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. That would have been early in 1966, if not late 1965. She told me about Heldeberg Workshop. I had previously taught a similar summer workshop class in East Greenbush.
“I remember discussing with her the possibilities for including archaeology in the Heldeberg Workshop, and then she said ‘You’re hired!’ I can still remember and hear those words. So much happened from so little. It was God’s plan.”
For someone of Paul’s stature, I remember he was very easy to be around, and humble. Paul struck me as quite handsome but in a-boy-next-door sort of way. My family hosted him for extended lengths of time while he was in grad school and working on these projects. They put him up in an unheated bedroom upstairs, where he often worked cleaning artifacts with water and a toothbrush. They were shelved next to his bed, and I believe remained there until my parents passed away, or maybe later, when my brother passed away.
As with Del Logan, I kept thinking when I talked with Paul how it would be wonderful if someone wrote down his stories or if he did. And he has. Not only has he written the two-volume 700 page thesis, Aspects of Continuity and Change in Colonial Dutch Material Culture At Fort Orange, 1624 -1664, Part One and Two, he says, “I have written and published numerous articles and co-authored a book on Revolutionary War maps. I am now co-authoring a book on archaeology for Cornell University Press. Separately I am writing a book on the excavations at the Schuyler Flatts site, which you may remember, and SUNY Press has expressed interest. As you say, my 700-page dissertation on Fort Orange is available on-line at university libraries. Meanwhile, my sister and I have compiled a year-by-year summary of the diaries of our grandfather, who was a Presbyterian minister in North Dakota from 1907 to 1963. It is also 700 pages, and we plan to try to self-publish it for all our cousins and for libraries.”
Paul became a close family friend. On weekends, we’d explore the region trying to identify houses that showed up on the early maps. I assume that’s how we found the foundation hole by the Normans Kill because it showed up on a map of Van Baal’s patent. Or it’s possible I found it while riding my pony through those fields. My mother obtained permission from our neighbor Tony Genovesi to dig there, and the class of Heldeberg students hiked to the site everyday for three weeks in August to see what we could find.
One winter’s day, Paul, my brother and I went looking for where the road that passed between our barn and house and crossed the Normans Kill, during the winter because snow can reveal depressions and roads, you might not see during other times. We were walking one day as snow fell on the iced over Normans Kill, when my brother fell in and bounced right out. I gingerly shuffled over to the bank. Clayton ran on ahead of us to stay warm. The snow ticked in the woods as Paul and I walked back.
The Fort Orange Story
When Paul discovered Fort Orange on the old maps in a different place than where the State Education department claimed it was, he laid out a map in our living room. He said that the Fort Orange Hotel might be a good indication of where the actual fort was. My mother wrote a proposal to Mayor Erastus Corning to ask about verifying the location of the site based on further research and archeological testing. But since the area was on state land and Paul’s research contradicted the state education department’s theory, it was dropped. In his footnotes Paul noted the proposal my mother wrote to Corning was dated 1966.
https://www.nysm.nysed.gov/education/videos/paul-huey-locating-fort-orange
Paul reported in his thesis, “Research, however, indicated a surprising amount of documentary material which could help locate the site exactly. Because the ruins had been visible to Montresor and others for many years and had not been obliterated at an early date, it became obvious that it would be possible to locate the site precisely from accurate records made at different times” (169). But by March of 1970 the New York Transportation Department planned to build Route 540 and an exit ramp over the suspected site of Fort Orange. By then Paul worked for New York State Historic trust and was able to work with the transportation department to allow him to salvage what remained of Fort Orange.
The other day when I was flipping through my old journal, I came across the entry. October 20, 1970: “Paul found Fort Orange today! This may be nationwide. Paul was helping me on a school project. He knows his subject.”
Here’s what Paul says in his thesis, Aspects of Continuity and Change in Colonial Dutch Material Culture at Fort Orange, 1624 – 1664, “Early in the chilly morning of October 20, 1970, a diesel-driven power shovel began the first digging through the surface of the blacktop paving of the parking lot in the shadow of the concrete railroad abutment, at the point marked out the previous day.” The power shovel uncovered nothing of note with regards to the fort until it punched through the cellar wall of the Fort Orange Hotel. Paul writes, “Suddenly one of the searchers on the spoil dirt pile stood up and called out above the noise of machinery, ‘fleur de lis pipe stem!’ They had indeed found the first evidence of 17th century Dutch Occupation at the site of Fort Orange. All excavation work by machine immediately stopped, and the exact source of the last bucket full of earth was carefully determined. Associated with the pipe stem in the same bucket full was a small round blue glass bead, a small red tubular bead, a brass Jew’s harp, thick sherds of tin-glazed pottery, and several fragments of small Dutch yellow brick” (177).
There was some question whether these artifacts came from the Fort. The power shovel worked carefully to uncover layers to get down to the layers where the fort might be. He set up a grid of ten foot squares to see what he could find. Paul saved every artifact to record the historical sequence of life in that area.
In my journal the next day: “Fort Orange is quite a discovery. It was in the paper and Times Union. Clayton was on it.”
October 22: “I dug at Fort Orange today. That was fun. Paul is very wise and he was comforting. Pat called and disagreed. And that made it tough. In the barn I thought I’d blow my mind. The Lord pulled me out of that clay and stood me on granite.”
As a writer looking back, I wish I’d written down his insights.
At the same time our health teacher started Sensitivity Training. Looking back I don’t know what she was thinking but even then, health teachers were mucking around in our heads. The year before sensitivity training, where my classmates said I was too focused on horses, sent me into a depression that lasted awhile. My classmates weren’t unkind in that observation either. I suspect I am on the spectrum but when I asked a therapist twenty years ago if I could be tested, she asked what does it matter? Well, it might help me understand why it’s so very hard to make friends. I have been asked why do I need a diagnosis? Well because maybe it would give me ground to stand on. I don’t have ground to stand on for why Bruce and I are so alone as far as family and friends go. I plan to look at folk tales and stories of the saints to find where the spiritual strength might be considering humans are a social species and isolation can be a literal killer.
During Mrs. D’s sensitivity session, I do remember how I announced I wanted to wait until marriage. The teacher said my husband would be lucky and how riding horses would make me nice and tight. As innocent as I was, I knew what she meant. Maybe teachers have been saying bold things to their students for years. I recorded my classmates’ kindness.
Many days after school and on weekends I dug at Fort Orange, sometimes commenting that I didn’t have a very interesting square. I’d complain friends from school had a better square and I was left by myself. On Halloween that year, I wrote: “We went to Fort Orange to dig today. Paul put me in a very good square and I found quite a bit. The outstanding things were a raspberry prunt, a bone, and a piece of pottery with some guy’s face on it.” Paul remarked about how finding the raspberry prunt was clear evidence they had found Fort Orange proper. The dirt had a unique smell like muted oil, rust and sand. When winter came the transportation department covered the site and supplied propane heaters. We dug through the winter until March, 1971. On Saint Patrick’s day, the Transportation Department began “the extensive task of backfilling the entire excavated area using clean, brown sand.” A few years later I thought about that giant hole as I drove over the expressway to my job working in the cafeteria at the South Mall between college and grad school.
Paul summarized what he found in the introduction to his thesis, “Isolated 150 miles from New Amsterdam (New York City), far up a tidal river which froze solid in the winter, the Dutch at Fort Orange by 1664 nevertheless had established a highly Europeanized material culture comparable in its completeness to that of the father land in the 17th Century Dutch ‘Golden Age.’ When the English took New Netherland, they acquired a colony that was no mere frontier outpost but which embodied a material culture almost as fully sophisticated as that of the villages and farms of the mid-17th century Netherlands” (iv).
Paul also credited the volunteers from Heldeberg Workshop for our help, “By November 1, 1970 Heldeberg Workshop students had provided 257 man hours of work as experienced volunteers” (192). For me that experience came from the archeology class I took as a ten year old and it paid off with summer jobs digging for the state of New York.
Paul says, “I have an immense debt of gratitude to your parents, for all that they did for me. It was a wonderful time.” As for the artifacts and compilation of what was learned, Paul says, “The State Museum in Albany now has all the Fort Orange and Schuyler Flatts artifacts. There is a small, special public exhibit in the Museum on Fort Orange. The audiovisual specialists in the State Museum took the Fort Orange color film your mother had made and digitized it. Now the film plays constantly in the exhibit, over and over. There are many pictures of both you and Clayton excavating at Fort Orange.” Here’s the film footage of the excavation. I’m the girl with the long blond hair. https://www.nysm.nysed.gov/education/videos/fort-orange-excavation-film-footage-w-hartigan
Well, I have an immense debt of gratitude for Paul Huey’s joining my family and showing me how meticulous scientific study can be, but also how there is a thrill of research, revealing new insights into the world. He introduced a methodology I used in my senior independent study exploring missionaries to China. And if I recall correctly, he met his wife, Lois, through a program my mother set up for teachers.
Thank you for coming along as I remembered one of my childhood adventures and why I call my Substack, Katie’s Ground.