Here Is Where: Discovering America's Great Forgotten History (2 page)

Martin and his seven coconspirators had all checked in to hotels
under assumed names. At a prearranged time they would pour the incendiary chemicals on the floors and beds of their suites and disperse once the fires became uncontrollable. The flames would then ignite a firestorm through the densely packed wooden homes and buildings of Manhattan and kill scores of innocent men, women, and children.

This was just one of many schemes to inflict widespread suffering on Northern civilians, and the plots were often sanctioned at the highest levels of the Confederate government. Texas state senator Williamson Simpson Oldham explained to President Jefferson Davis in explicit detail one particular plan to “devastate the country of the enemy, and fill his people with terror.” In mid-October 1864 an American doctor and acquaintance of Oldham’s named Luke Blackburn sailed to Bermuda to care for patients in the final throes of yellow fever. Blackburn’s intentions, however, were far from charitable; the forty-five-year-old Kentuckian was secretly collecting soiled bedsheets and garments to ship back to the States in sealed trunks. He hoped the linens and clothing could then be used to unleash an outbreak of the fatal disease throughout the North. He especially wanted to get a “gift” of fancy—and contaminated—dress shirts into the hands of Abraham Lincoln. (The war would be over by the time Blackburn could start his pandemic, and it wouldn’t have worked anyway. Yellow fever is spread by mosquitoes.)

For die-hard Rebs such as Lieutenant John Headley, Robert Martin’s second-in-command, extreme measures against the North were entirely justified. “Ten days before this attempt of Confederates to burn New York City,” Headley wrote in his journal, “General Sherman had burned the city of Atlanta, Georgia, and the Northern papers and people of the war party were in great glee over the miseries of the Southern people.”

The Confederate attack on Manhattan was started by Headley himself, in Suite 204 of the Astor House hotel, when he lit his room’s carpet and bedsheets on fire and then set out into the night. At the North River Wharf, Headley lobbed bottles of Greek fire at wooden
vessels and hay barges. While passing Phineas T. Barnum’s American Museum, he was delighted to see smoke pouring out of the building and terrified patrons leaping from windows. Headley bumped into fellow conspirator Robert Cobb Kennedy and learned that Kennedy had impulsively tossed a bottle into a museum stairwell because he figured it would be “fun to start a scare.” With bells clamoring in every direction, Headley and Kennedy rushed like giddy pranksters to the rendezvous house in the Bowery, laughing and backslapping the whole way.

Just north of them, John T. Ashbrook was setting fire to Lafarge House at 671 Broadway. Right next door was the Winter Garden Theatre, where a production of Shakespeare’s
Julius Caesar
was under way. Edwin and John Wilkes Booth, along with their older brother, Junius, were the featured performers. Smoke from the Lafarge seeped into the theater, and Edwin, according to a
New York Times
article the next day, calmed the frightened crowd as alarms began ringing.

Order was quickly restored at the Winter Garden and throughout Manhattan. No one died, and the fires failed to ignite a citywide conflagration. There was, however, significant property damage, and some New Yorkers were injured scrambling for their lives, but that was the extent of the crisis. Fear and hysteria turned to outrage as the Confederate plot was revealed in morning newspapers, and a massive hunt for the perpetrators was launched. All of them were able to evade capture except Robert Cobb Kennedy, who was tried and, on March 25, 1865, hanged at Fort Lafayette in New York Harbor.

The November 25, 1864, performance of
Julius Caesar
represented the first and last time the three Booth brothers shared a stage. Edwin starred as the assassin Brutus; Junius played Cassius, who instigated the plot against Caesar; and John was Mark Antony, whose funeral oration deftly stirred the vacillating Roman crowd against Caesar’s killers. In the play’s penultimate lines, however, it is also Antony who concedes that at least Brutus’s motivations were honorable: “All the conspirators save only he / Did that they did in envy of great Caesar.” Antony says of Brutus:

The production was a one-night-only benefit to raise funds for a statue of William Shakespeare in Central Park. The life-sized monument was erected in May 1872 and stands there to this day.

Before heading over to see the Exchange Place for the first time, I decide to pay Will a visit. I have a general idea where his memorial is supposed to be, but foolishly I’ve neglected to bring a map.

“Excuse me,” I ask a middle-aged couple (the man is wearing a Yankees cap, so I assume they’re locals), “do you all know where the Shakespeare statue is? It’s around here somewhere.”

Contrary to stereotype, I’ve always found New Yorkers to be very helpful with directions. They stop and she says, “That sounds
vaguely
familiar,” then looks at him.

He shakes his head. “I didn’t know there was one.”

I get a similar response from almost everyone else I ask (a few, to be expected, are tourists), and several positively know where it is and send me in the absolutely wrong direction. After forty-five disorienting minutes, an obliging soul finally points me to Literary Walk, and sure enough, there’s Shakespeare. A sign a few feet away chronicles the history of the memorial and acknowledges Edwin Booth’s fund-raising efforts. Brother John isn’t mentioned.

After snapping a few pictures I take the bus to lower Manhattan in search of sites related to the November 25, 1864, attack. There’s now a Best Buy electronics store where the Winter Garden Theatre used to be. All the other buildings have been replaced by more formidable structures or paved over completely. By midafternoon I’ve found most of the addresses where the Confederate agents had struck. A majority
of them, it’s hard not to notice, are only a block or two away from where the Twin Towers once stood.

From lower Manhattan I head to the Exchange Place, the first stop outside of New York City on the PATH train route. After I climb the stairs out of the underground station, I see train tracks several hundred feet away. And a waiting platform. I trot over, and all the signs read
EXCHANGE PLACE
.

I circle the small, above-ground station to shoot pictures and search for any sort of historic plaque or marker. Nothing. I set my camera bag on the ground and suddenly stand bolt upright. I take a step back and realize that I’m on top of a giant cast-iron map of the New Jersey and Manhattan waterfronts. I must have walked over it a dozen times since I’ve been here.

Looking closer, I find little boxes of text by their respective points of interest: “Communipaw Massacre 1643—Dutch settlers massacred 80 Indians as they slept”; “July 30, 1916—Ammunition trains and barges exploded at Black Tom Wharf. The shock wave was felt as far away as Philadelphia. Many believed it to be the work of saboteurs”; “1954—
On the Waterfront
filmed with Marlon Brando.” I search for the Exchange Place itself on the map, and the only little box near it says, “You are here.” There’s nothing about Booth and Lincoln.

Over the next twenty minutes or so, not a single soul looks at the map. I start photographing the folks on the platform, all of whom seem (as I was) oblivious to the bounty of historical information directly beneath them. It’s possible that they’re regular commuters well familiar with the map and its inch-long boxes, but I doubt this is true of all of them.

“I hope you don’t mind my asking,” a woman says to me, “but I was just wondering what you were doing.” Far from minding, I’m happy to tell her that we’re standing right on top of a great cartographic treasure trove of historic places, and no one appears to notice. “So I was photographing them not noticing,” I say.

She looks down and reacts exactly as I did, instantly stepping back
as if the ground had vanished and then reappeared before her eyes. “I’ve been commuting from here for almost a month, and I’ve never seen this before.”

I point out a few favorite spots and then repeat the Booth/Lincoln story.

“Right where we’re standing?” she asks.

“I’m not sure if it’s here
exactly
, but somewhere around this place.”

“That’s amazing,” she says. I tell her I think so, too.

By this time I have to race to Penn Station to catch a train for Washington, D.C. As I’m dashing off I glance back and see the woman conversing amiably with two other people as all three look intently at the map under their feet.

My epiphany comes minutes after Amtrak Northeast Regional 137 rolls out of Manhattan: I will search for unmarked sites across America that have been forgotten over time. One trip, all regions of the country. And not only in major metropolitan areas but in small towns and communities from coast to coast. Historic sites aren’t just clustered in Beacon Hill, Greenwich Village, Hyde Park, Fisherman’s Wharf, and other big-city neighborhoods. They are everywhere.

Since I’ve recently lost both the one stable job I’ve ever held and a pretty wonderful girlfriend (no hard feelings), the timing is perfect. My calendar, to say the least, is clear. And if I don’t do this now, I doubt the opportunity will ever arise again.

Back in Washington I pull from my bookshelf a road atlas purchased years ago that has sadly gone unused, and I flip through the pages. My mind begins racing as I contemplate the sheer logistics of such an undertaking, of researching and pinpointing so many little-known sites, finding historians and experts to guide me along the way, and coordinating (even though I’ll probably drive much of the trip) countless airline, train, and bus schedules. Weather will be a factor, too; flight delays and cancellations are all but assured during summer hurricane season in the South and winters in the North and Midwest.
There are those who can toss some underwear and extra pairs of socks into a backpack, leap out the front door, and cast their fortunes to the wind. I’m not that kind of traveler. I’m all for spontaneity and serendipitous discoveries, but with limited funds and time, I’ll have to maintain a tight schedule and know exactly where I’m going from the start. There’ll be no margin for error. Ultimately I estimate that it will require five to six months to plan the trip and then at least as long to visit every site on my itinerary.

This is madness, I begin to think, a whim-driven folly better suited for the young and not a man nearing his forties.

All the more reason to go. It’s decided.

From the outset I need to establish my terms. Words like
forgotten
and
overlooked
are, admittedly, subjective; what might be unfamiliar to one person is another’s area of expertise. Many of the stories I’ve collected in those twenty-four filing cabinets were referenced in obscure magazines and journals or cited in footnotes and parenthetical asides from out-of-print books. They haven’t permeated the popular culture and, at best, only hazily ring a bell to some people. It’s not the most scientific criterion, but part of the reason for visiting the sites—along with confirming that they’re not marked—is to ascertain how well they’re known to those who live nearby. I want even the locals to be surprised.

Every spot must also be nationally significant and represent a larger narrative in American history. Ideally, I plan to cover the full sweep of our nation’s past, from the first Native Americans, Spanish explorers, and Pilgrims who set foot on this land to the pioneers, patriots, inventors, soldiers, artists, and activists who transformed it. Not every story can or will be epic in scope, but the impact of each protagonist should reverberate beyond any one state or region.

Priority one is to plot out where I’m going and what I hope to find, and by that I don’t mean just the actual sites. This journey must be more than a grand sightseeing adventure. Along with searching for the physical places, I want to explore why any of this matters. Ever since a fire gutted our family’s home in Washington, D.C., destroying hundreds
of personal letters, photos, and other irreplaceable memorabilia, I’ve become more conscientious about preserving history. But beyond mere sentimentality, what difference does it honestly make if historic sites are torn down, boarded up, bulldozed, or simply neglected?

And why have so many of them been forgotten in the first place?

LOCATED ABOUT TWENTY-TWO
hundred miles from the continental United States and nicknamed “the Forbidden Island,” Niihau is the westernmost inhabited isle on the Hawaiian chain. The seal-shaped speck of land is also the world’s largest privately owned island, stretching approximately nineteen miles long and six miles across at its widest point. In 1864 a clan of Scottish ranchers, the Sinclairs, purchased Niihau for $10,000 in gold from King Kamehameha V, and their descendants—the Robinsons—still own it to this day. (The king also offered the Sinclair family Waikiki, but they passed.)

No tourists are allowed on Niihau except those who are personally invited by the Robinson family or who fly in from neighboring Kauai (“the Garden Isle”) on Niihau Helicopters Inc., a Robinson-operated
business that offers four-hour tours and daylong safaris. Other companies run sightseeing and snorkeling boat trips that skirt the coast from a mile out. But I need to go ashore; the story I’m pursuing involves a small plane that made an emergency landing near the main village more than seventy years ago, and the ensuing manhunt for the pilot sparked a panic on America’s mainland that had major social and political repercussions. Getting to the island is no easy feat, and its remoteness, I suspect, accounts for why “the Niihau incident” isn’t better known.