Lives in Ruins (21 page)

I stood on the edge of the lot and thought about all the trouble that finding bodies can cause.

The discovery of the graves was not a complete surprise. Although no burial grounds had been marked on Washington's map of the Fishkill Supply Depot, there had to be a graveyard. Disease had been rampant here throughout the war, and in 1777, a smallpox epidemic had raged through the barracks. Sick and wounded Continental soldiers from elsewhere had been shipped by Washington north to Tarrytown and, as he directed, “from thence in boats to Fish Kills Hospitals.” Residents recorded seeing bodies “piled up as high as cord wood” in the streets of the village. And local historians knew that a black marble monument to the war's dead had stood on this lot at the edge of the road for the better part of a century. So many speeding cars had sideswiped the marker that it had finally been relocated to the front yard of the Van Wyck Homestead. I walked along Route 9, cars and motorcycles whizzing past, and a quarter-mile north I found the monument, a large, dark headstone. The Daughters of the American Revolution (Melzingah Chapter) had erected it in 1897. The engraving read:

1776–1783. I
N GRATEFUL REMEMBRANCE OF THE BRAVE
MEN WHO GAVE THEIR LIVES FOR THEIR COUNTRY DURING
THE
A
MERICAN
R
EVOLUTION AND WHOSE REMAINS
REPOSE IN THE ADJOINING FIELD
.

I imagined the phrase
in the adjoining field
, separated from its original context, floating north on gasoline fumes.

Other archaeologists had looked for the bodies in the 1960s and '70s. Although they found no bodies, only the remains of barracks
and numerous artifacts, their efforts led to the depot being placed on the National Register of Historic Places. This was an honor—official recognition that the depot was “archaeologically sensitive”—not an order of protection. So when the owners of the land between the Maya Café and the Van Wyck Homestead decided to develop it as a commercial property, the town of Fishkill and the New York State Historic Preservation Office required them to hire an archaeological team to determine if the proposed construction would disturb any fragile and important history. That survey turned up nothing. “The archaeologist dug a hole every fifty feet, which is what archaeologists did in the nineties, and he didn't find anything,” explained Bill Sandy. The final report found “no evidence of Revolutionary War activities. . . . We can now confidently state that additional testing is not necessary and no further work is recommended.”
^*
The evaluation followed construction of the Hess gas station and permitted a mall on the Crossroads lot; but by the time the owners were ready to move forward with the rest of their plans, a public petition persuaded the town's leadership to make one more effort to see if construction would disturb irreplaceable history.

If the owners had built promptly, Sandy and his crew would not have been in that lot on Halloween in 2007, jittery with thermos coffee. Sandy worked for the same cultural resource management (CRM) company that had dug the test holes in the nineties without finding anything; this time, a backhoe fitted with a special blade would be used: “It's what archaeologists do when we're removing topsoil but we want a nice clean cut.” He figured if there were burials, they'd be lined up to the road, so “when I do a survey like that, I go at a forty-five degree angle to the street.”

Sandy, a tall, shaggy-bearded guy in his fifties, “brilliant and eccentric,” according to my archaeological sources, stared at his hands as he remembered. I knew there were bodies at the end of this story and I pressed him for details. “We were ready to work at eight a.m., which was fine, except the backhoe wouldn't fit unless you cut down a few trees. So we had to wait while a construction guy came and chainsawed the trees.” He remembered someone from Godfather's Pizza coming out and offering them free pie; old slices no doubt, but Sandy was delighted. “They weren't fifty years old, so we fell on them.” Did he remember what was on them? Pineapple, he recalled.

Finally, at about three p.m. that Halloween afternoon, the backhoe was maneuvered through the trees and carefully began cutting a trench fifty or sixty feet long through the top layer of the ground. “Right away, we found two graves, one as clear a grave as I've ever seen,” Sandy said. “Once you've seen a bunch of graves, you know.” Two dark rectangles lay under the backhoe. The anxious owners of the lot leaned over them; a local activist hovered nearby (“I had to ask him to leave,” Sandy recalled. “I cannot discuss the site with anyone when I'm working on a job.”). Then Sandy realized he wasn't through with this trench. “The owners told me no, we can't go backwards, but I had to do what I thought was right. So I took a shovel and I started to dig backwards, to take off an extra inch. The owner and his partner were standing over me on cellphones, telling my boss, and she was yelling, ‘You know that backhoe costs four hundred bucks a day?'” Sandy ignored the pressure. When he is in the field, nothing matters but what he called the
feature
, the thing he needs to identify, the thing that consumes him. “And guess what? I find another grave—there's another, another, another, another, maybe another.” At the end of the day, there were seven, perhaps eight large dark rectangular shapes in the soil, the signature of adult graves.

The owners called it quits until further notice. Sandy and his crew figured the upcoming local election had something to do with the delay; after assessing land for a variety of owners in multiple states and across decades of changing legislation, he has concluded that all real estate is political. He and the other contract archaeologists were “trowels for hire,” as Sandy put it; they packed up and went on to other jobs, until the owner of the lot called them back to finish their evaluation.

CONTRACT ARCHAEOLOGISTS
,
ALSO
known as compliance or salvage archaeologists, have a tricky job. They are hired by owners and developers, but their responsibility is to the site and its archaeological resources. If, in their judgment, a proposed construction project will harm those resources, then the project has to be modified or moved, or the archaeologists must shift into emergency mode and record and rescue what they can—they “mitigate.” In lower Manhattan in 2010, archaeologists were stunned to find an eighteenth-century wooden ship in landfill. While the construction equipment idled, they mitigated, scrambling to get the giant timbers, disintegrating as they were exposed to oxygen, hurried to a laboratory for preservation and study.

Any archaeological find is a mixed blessing when a construction project is looming, and the last thing any archaeologist wants to find, it turns out, are human remains.
^*
As Bill Sandy wrote in his
notes after finding the graves on the Fishkill Supply Depot, “I have some experience with cemetery projects. . . . As often as not, they tend to be controversial. [They] get a lot of publicity and can ruin a successful archaeological company. And they can turn professionals and/or companies against each other.”

Bill Sandy's experience had come alongside his old friend and colleague, Ed Rutsch, a contract archaeologist beloved by coworkers and clients. Sandy remembered Rutsch saying, “‘You love me now, but you are going to hate me when I find a body.'”

In 1991, Rutsch had been chosen by a long-time client, an engineering firm working for a federal agency, to survey a swatch of property for development in lower Manhattan that had appeared on old maps as a “Negroes Burial Ground.” Rutsch suspected that burials would still be found there, and wrote up a plan to test the ground before construction, but he wasn't given time to execute it. When his team, including Bill Sandy, started finding bodies, more bodies than even Rutsch had estimated, he insisted on excavating by hand. He had uncovered the African Burial Ground, where both slaves and freedmen had been interred with dignity in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Rutsch called it “the ‘Plymouth Rock' for Black Americans.” His engineer employer and the General Services Administration pressured him to speed up the mitigation process, then quit honoring his invoices. The archaeologists found themselves at odds with the GSA and with the construction workers, and soon were the focus of daily protests staged by a suspicious public, particularly African Americans, who saw predominantly white men and women digging up black graves. Rutsch and his team were replaced by a larger CRM
firm, in partnership with a team from Howard University, and soon after, a Congressional oversight committee shut down the excavation. “We were vilified,” Sandy said, simply.
^*
He still flares up whenever he reads an article claiming that the bodies from the African Burial Ground were discovered accidentally, by construction workers.

Sandy's specialty, which he employed on that job, is microflora, paleoethnobotany. His eye for the tiniest finds is extraordinarily sharp; one of his colleagues told me that Sandy could walk into a field, reach down in the grass, and pluck out a crinoid bead (a Native American bead made from a marine fossil a fraction of an inch long). Sandy's work at the African Burial Ground required him to assess the smallest artifacts—seeds, fish scales, insect parts, bone fragments—so he took samples of earth from the burials and forced water through the dirt using a set of fine screens. He wrote the preliminary “flotation report” on the African Burial Ground, and still maintains that the official body count of 428 is far too low. He thinks there must have been many more burials. He found too many tiny baby teeth in his screens.

And this was another reason for Sandy's certainty in 2007 that he had located the military cemetery in the Fishkill Supply Depot: family graves of the colonial period are full of infants and children. What were the odds of finding seven adults out of seven burials? “One percent,” he said flatly.

IN NOVEMBER
2007, a week after the local elections, Bill Sandy got the all-clear from the owners of the Crossroads lot to return to the site and excavate one dark rectangle and verify its contents. He alerted the coroner, then gathered his crew at the lot in Fishkill. He knelt in the fallen leaves, an orange watch cap on his head. He focused on the grave that showed most clearly after the initial cut. “Many of them had nails on the surface base of the plow zones, typical of the coffin, maybe a tiny bit of cardboard-like wood adhering to the nail. We went down, and it was typical of a site that old. If a grave is always wet, or always dry, that's good—either of those conditions are good for preservation. But if a grave is [alternately] wet
and
dry, it's shit. And these were shit. The bones were in very bad shape. We exposed the leg and arm bones, part of the cranium, then I made the decision we're not going to go in anymore.

“Archaeologists hate to [pull back], and I've rethought it a thousand times. Respected professionals asked if I shouldn't go back in and look for regimental buttons. I felt if we kept working, we were going to literally destroy this burial. This site screamed ‘significant.' It was seventy-five yards from where the [DAR] monument [had stood]. The button wouldn't make a difference. I said we didn't need any more proof.”

He and his crew reburied the skeleton with American flags, including flags of that era, “although most of those guys probably never even saw one,” Sandy said. “We had our own ceremony before we closed up the site, paid our own respects in private, and we wrote something and put it in a plastic bag. Some of my students might go out there in the future, send a robot in to get DNA samples. What they'll know in ten years will put us to shame. . . .” He sat quietly, a tall, rough-bearded man in flannel and jeans.

“That must have been emotional,” I said finally.

“No, no. In the field, you have no emotions,” he said emphatically. “You're just doing your job. How that all plays out is not
something you're thinking about. Sure, in the African cemetery, we could tell people our opinion,
It's tremendous, worth saving
, but our job is to answer the question,
What is this?
and write it up. It's up to the state historic preservation people to get emotional.” He hesitated. “A little bit later as you thought about it, you'd think, ‘Not even a marker. They didn't even have a marker.'”

THE TENSION BETWEEN
keeping a site secret so it won't get looted and publicizing it so it can be preserved and appreciated is a constant in archaeology. Almost forty years after the Fishkill Supply Depot was added to the National Register of Historic Places, my copy of the nomination from the National Park Service arrived with a cover page that warned: THE LOCATION OF THIS PROPERTY IS RESTRICTED INFORMATION. Inside, directions were redacted for each of the depot's features and the longitude and latitude of the depot was blacked out; never mind that I could read through the black marker. The first thing I learned upon joining online archaeological groups was not to discuss publicly the specific locations of archaeological sites or anything else that might compromise a site's preservation. But how can you save or even appreciate something you don't know about?

Bill Sandy could not discuss the excavation of the graves with outsiders while he was in the employ of the CRM firm; but after he filed the report on the Crossroads lot with the state, he was no longer bound to keep its secrets. “You do your job, you're changed a little by each and every one, and you move on. Unless you get sidetracked,” he said. He himself wasn't a military veteran, but the loss of his uncle at sea, torpedoed off Greenland during World War II, had shadowed his childhood. His freedom and identity were gifts from veterans like those he found in Fishkill. “I owed it to those dead people,” he figured.

The Register of Professional Archaeologists' Code of Conduct committed its members to “actively support conservation of the archaeological
resource base” and “to represent Archaeology and its research results to the public in a responsible manner.” When Sandy got a call from a local organizer whose petition had led to the successful search for the graves,
^*
he described what he had found and agreed to talk to her and her fellow activists. He got permission to take them onto the property. “The owners let you?” I asked, and Sandy said of Domenico Broccoli, one of the owners of Crossroads: “Sure. He loves his country, like everybody.” And so began Sandy's pilgrimages to the lot, sponsored by the newly formed Friends of the Fishkill Supply Depot. “I can't separate it from going to a memorial,” he said. “It's just the next thing I did.” He started showing anyone who was interested where the bodies were buried. He got sidetracked, as he put it, at Fishkill.