Lives in Ruins

by Marilyn Johnson

  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.

  ON REVOLUTIONARY WAR Weekend in September 2011, I found Sandy sitting at a folding table in the yard of the Van Wyck Homestead. Boy Scouts, a blacksmith, several women in colonial dress baking apple fritters, and a reenactor in a tricorn hat on
a horse mingled as Sandy talked to curious people stopping by. Three times a day he led a tour to the graveyard that began at the monument. After a few words about its significance, Sandy accompanied anyone with sturdy knees down the shoulder of Route 9. He carried an archaeological measuring rod (with black tape marking every other foot) like Moses’ rod in his hand. Three Boy Scouts positioned themselves at intervals across the side road so we could safely cross at the gas station.

  In the fall woods, with an eager band of several dozen listeners around him, Sandy took a deep breath and began speaking in his Jersey twang, telling the story of the early efforts to locate the graves, the unlucky archaeologists who had missed the bodies, and of his team’s historic find. Sandy hid his emotions behind his full gray beard and wraparound sunglasses, a billed cap pulled low on his shaggy head. He twisted to the side as he talked, using a cupped hand for emphasis, as if he were scooping words out of the air. “We removed about a foot, foot and a half of soil with the backhoe. Took the brown stuff off, saw the yellow soil. Then we started to see these features, each the size and shape of an adult coffin . . .”

  Sandy kept his eyes on the ground, where a depression a few yards long was still visible—the remains of the trench he had excavated. Except for the sound of traffic through the trees, there was no noise in the clearing. His listeners stood rapt in the overgrown grass.

  “Now, archaeologists are skeptics. We don’t believe anything. You can tell me three stories that your grandfather told you and I’d be very interested to hear them, but I’d take them with a grain of salt. We are looking for ground proof. We are looking for proof in the ground that what we say is so.”

  After Sandy and his team obtained ground proof of the burials, they filed their report with Fishkill and the State Historic Preservation Office. The owners had hired a second CRM firm to render another opinion. That firm’s archaeologists, using ground-penetrating radar, not only verified Sandy’s results, but found the signatures of hundreds more graves. This was not just a burial ground, Sandy told us. It was the largest cemetery of Revolutionary War soldiers in the country.

  Sandy had a gift for this kind of folksy talk, powered by the conviction that he was doing something important, speaking for the first veterans of our first war. He testified about the conditions in the Continental Army, not for the generals who were housed and clothed, whose lives were recorded and whose bodies lay in church graveyards, but for the ordinary state militiamen, conscripted for a year or nine months and marched to Fishkill, where they would have slept in shifts and scrounged for food. Wood was scarce in those days; local people complained that the soldiers were tearing down their fences and burning the planks to stay warm. He mentioned the “naked barracks,” a building set aside for men with not enough clothes, and quoted a letter from Major General Israel Putnam to George Washington about a regiment “unfit to be order’d on duty, not one Blanket in the Regiment—very few have either a Shoe or a Shirt . . . several Hundred Men are render’d useless merely for want of necessary apparel—”

  Sandy called the depot the “Gettysburg of the Revolutionary War.” How had we not known about this place? A high school student in the group said that even his teachers didn’t know about it, but he planned to tell them so they could network and spread the word. “That’s how it has to be,” Sandy agreed. “People don’t know. If they knew, we wouldn’t be standing in a clearing on the site of a bunch of unmarked graves for those who died for their country 235 years ago.”

  Before he led our little band along the busy road back to the Van Wyck Homestead and the monument to the Revolutionary War dead, Sandy tried to answer everyone’s questions, but there was one that stumped him: Why had the land the graveyard rested on not yet been protected? The price tag the owners put on it was $6 million. There was no federal money to purchase such a site. The National Park Service’s American Battlefield Protection Program protected battlegrounds of the Civil War, but not those from the Revolutionary War; and, anyway, these were not battlegrounds. Sandy shook his head. “Senator Chuck Schumer has been working for years to change the bill so its budget could double from five to ten million dollars and save important sites from the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812.” But having our first veterans lie in a lot that was still for sale years after the discovery of their bodies, that struck him as wrong. When historical or archaeologically important artifacts are found on private property in most provinces in Canada,* they belong to the public. Here, the private-property owner rules.

  No matter what other project demanded his attention, Sandy was steadfast when it came to Fishkill. Months after the fall tours, he learned about the Wreaths Across America program: every year, on the second Saturday in December, at noon, volunteers place wreaths on veterans’ graves all across the country. Here was yet another opportunity to remind people of their debt to the Revolutionary War soldiers. With the Fishkill Historical Society and the Friends of the Fishkill Supply Depot, Sandy mounted a last-minute memorial in December that drew forty or so hardy souls, including half a dozen reenactors from the Fifth New York Regiment. I joined Sandy and the others at the DAR monument in front of the Van Wyck Homestead, then we marched along the shoulder of Route 9, bearing wreaths.

  We assembled in the clearing in the middle of the lot for brief, pointed speeches from local politicians. “Thank you all for coming,” said one county legislator. “Today is a very solemn day. I hope when we gather next year that the work will have begun to properly attend to our soldiers.” That was her entire speech: perfect and succinct.

  A woman in colonial dress, complete with bonnet and cloak, laid a wreath, and military veterans followed: a total of seven wreaths were placed, one for each of the bodies discovered in 2007. The military reenactors spread themselves along the length of the trench scar, visible in the frozen ground. They wore long-skirted coats of brown and blue, festooned with buttons, and tricorn hats, though one was in shaggy breeches and a red knit cap with the crudely embroidered legend LIBERTY. They rested their muskets on the ground, hands crossed on top, and heads bowed, in a posture called “mourn firelocks”; one soldier on the end stood with his arms akimbo, as if to ward off the motorcycles that roared up and down Route 9, just a few yards away.

  This was not long after the trashing of the remains of Iraq War veterans had come to light: the Air Force admitted that unclaimed and unidentified body parts had been incinerated and dumped in a landfill. Across the centuries, we felt the shameful lack of honor toward the dead.

  The Fifth Regiment’s officer gave the order to load and fire, and the first of a series of salute volleys thundered above us. More muskets failed than fired, a homely touch in the winter woods. The last time I felt this mix of momentousness and sorrow, I was walking behind a casket.

  I CAUGHT UP with Bill Sandy two years later at an organic garlic farm in northern New Jersey, where he was running a summer field school four days a week. He sat on an old tire, sun-damaged hands wrapped around a homemade sandwich. His students at Sussex County Community College, where he is an adjunct instructor, were digging test pits and finding points and flakes from four and five thousand years ago on the hill above us. He was eight years away from Medicare, with diabetes and hypertension, but he had trouble finding time for doctor’s visits; he hadn’t taken a day off in months.

  He was energetic, though, even exuberant, telling me about a young bear that had walked through these fields, right past him and his students—could I believe it? Sandy shared his Tastykake—“the pride of Pennsylvania”—and introduced me to his students, including one in her eighties; she was fulfilling a dream to go back to school and study archaeology.

  What kind of place did he live in, I wondered. “A little house in the country, about forty minutes from here,” he said. “You want to see?” After the students left for the day, we headed for our vehicles. “Wait, what if I lose you?” I said. He laughed. “You’re in the country,” he said. “You can’t lose me.”

  I followed him
for miles through black dirt and rolling green hills, and he was right: on a clear day, I was in no danger of losing sight of an old pickup truck with a load of screens and shovels in its bed. Before we got to his house, we made a detour. He stuck his hand out his window and pointed. I pulled in next to him in a small church parking lot. “You have to see this,” he said, indicating the lovely white church with an unusual octagonal building next door. “During the Civil War, the congregation here was divided, so the Northern sympathizers met in the church and the Southern sympathizers met in the octagonal building.” He stood there, marveling. Then someone shouted, “Bill! Bill!” Across the road, in a neat graveyard, a lean, weathered man on a mowing tractor was waving his cap. “It’s Randy,” Sandy said with pleasure. “Come on, you’ve got to meet Randy. He’s the historian who surface-collects all the land around here. He found me the farm where my students are excavating. That’s his legacy—he doesn’t want the information to get lost.” We strolled across the road and spent time with another man who honors the dead by tending a cemetery.

  We stopped twice more to see historic sites before we made it to his house, a former fruit- and-vegetable stand on a county road in New York. Although Sandy has been in a long-term relationship with a community preservationist from a neighboring town, he lived like a bachelor, papers and books stacked high on every surface. There was a television but no reception. His books include various collections inherited from departed friends. Boxes of postcards—roughly 37,000 of them—filled the corner of the living room, each filed by subject and coded for sale. His childhood doll, a red-haired boy named Max, looked at me from a shelf. The 1936 Oldsmobile convertible that Sandy had inherited from his father, his prize possession, is locked in the barn with what must be a ton of vintage promotional literature and repair manuals from Oldsmobile, which he also sells as a sideline. The ancient cherry-red Olds required a shot of gasoline before it would start. He eased it out past the old pickup, and I hopped in, by the peonies, and we went rolling through the countryside in his antique car. With every breath, he exhaled another bit of local history.