It Happened Here-- Checking Out Stories

My other quest this summer, besides finding and photographing more of New York's Historic Markers has been to find out about the stories that accompany them.  My road trips to Montgomery county have led me to several stories about eighteenth century women living in the Mohawk valley and their remarkable courage.While thinking about them I was reminded of Catherine Schuyler, and a story that allegedly occurred in Saratoga county.  When I was a child my parents took me to see the Saratoga Battlefield and to climb the Saratoga Monument. (Looking back, it seems like my parents always had me climbing--the Saratoga Monument, the Bennington Monument, the Pilgrim's Monument in Provincetown, and half a dozen fire towers on half a dozen Adirondack mountains. Perhaps that was their technique for managing a very active child.)

Bas Relief in the Saratoga Monument

The Saratoga Monument contains sixteen bronze  bas reliefs of events that took place at and around the Battle of Saratoga. The one that I was always taken with was the one of Catherine Schuyler setting fire to her family's wheat fields to deny them to the British. (Maybe I was drawn to it because it was the one tableau that prominently featured children--a little slave boy holding a lantern used to light the fire brand Catherine was using, and a young daughter, holding on to Catherine's skirt.)  Anyway its a compelling story, and one that makes historical sense.

The British were approaching the Saratoga Patent, Phillip Schuyler's lands, in their drive to reach Albany and split the colonies in half.  General Schuyler was busy readying his troops and preparing his defenses just south of his lands at Bemis Heights. According to the story, he sends his wife, Catherine, north to burn his  ripe wheat fields, just ahead of the advancing British forces, risking capture or worse at the hands of forward British units or their screen of Indian allies. The story has a ring of truth because Catharine was very much a hands-on partner in the running of the estate, helping to keep the books and dealing with tenants on a regular basis. (This is very much in the Dutch tradition whereby wives were often co-equal partners in their husbands business affairs--see my previous post "The Tough Wiley Scotsman and his Diligent Vrouw" 6/30/13 )  Also by sending his wife, instead of just servants, Schuyler is sending a message to his tenant farmers how much he is personally involved in the decision to destroy his wheat crop, and how imperative it is for them to destroy theirs as well.

It is a great story, but there is just one problem--I probably didn't happen!

Describing this "event" as probably a "Victorian fiction", the National Park Service guide at the Saratoga Battlefield Monument explained that in all the archaeological digs around the Schuyler property no evidence of charred wheat has ever been found. Though it is possible that all remains of a fire,  nearly 240 years ago could have been destroyed through successive plowing and planting the charring of materials often helps preserve them. (Evidence of campfires and burned dwellings and even burned grain are commonly found in the most ancient neolithic sites. ) How unlikely is it that not one charred kernel, from the millions of heads of wheat that would have charred and burned from their stalks and fell to earth, would not end up in an archeologist's sieve?
 

Later that day, another National Park Service docent, at the Schuyler House, built after the battle, gave me some more evidence of the unlikelihood of the Catherine Schuyler story.

She asserted, that from an historian's perspective, no better army could have invaded the colonies, for the British Army, and to a lesser extent their German allies were an army of journal writers and diarists.  Nearly all the officers and many private soldiers kept daily records of their experiences.  Several of their journals mention marching past the Schuyler home, their out buildings and mills.  And they mention passing fields of ripe (not burned) fields of wheat, ready for harvesting.

In the coming weeks I will be returning to Montgomery County to learn more about the war widow who hides her thirteen children from the Indians, nearly suffocating the littlest to prevent her from crying out; about the widowed tavern keeper and miller who survives when raiders burn her tavern down around her and goes on to rebuild and mill 2200 bushels of wheat for the Continental Army; and the woman who follows the Indians into their winter encampment to reclaim her looted cooking utensils and secure the release of her livestock.  I'll resume regular posts on  Sept. 1st.