Lives in Ruins (22 page)

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.

JUDY WOLF WORE
colonial dress, apron, and bonnet in all seasons—I don't think I ever saw her in modern clothes. She is a dogged historical researcher who helped identify some of the soldiers buried at Fishkill. Every month, she and Lance Ashworth, the president of the Friends of the Fishkill Supply Depot, comb through the Revolutionary War muster rolls. Then Wolf tries to verify the soldiers' deaths through archives, electronic databases, pension rolls, and doctors' journals. Valley Forge's military archives have been consolidated, but Fishkill remains an orphan; Wolf has had to range widely to find records about its troops. She was stunned when the archivist at the U.S. Army Quartermaster Museum, which specializes in supplies and logistics, and should be a central source for information about all the supply depots, admitted he had never heard of the one at Fishkill.

Knowledge of the Fishkill Supply Depot and its ghostly inhabitants has given Wolf a claim. “By the time I verify that someone died at Fishkill, I've spent so much time with them, these guys have turned into family. I feel very motherly and protective toward the soldiers,” she said. “There are times, honestly, I think they are helping me. They want to be found.”

By early 2014, Judy Wolf had identified an astonishing eighty-four Revolutionary War soldiers who had died in Fishkill and were, presumably, buried in that graveyard, among them a Canadian nurse and Captain Abraham Godwin, wounded in action and buried near his son, Captain Henry Godwin. The phrase “sick at Fishkill until he died” appeared with haunting regularity on the “rescued” roll call on the Friends of the Fishkill Supply Depot's
website.
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The pages memorializing the dead by name appear in black and white, “and will remain colorless until the day that we can announce the soldiers' burial ground has been acquired and preserved, once and for all.”

While the Friends' group continued to research individual soldiers and conduct respectful ceremonies to honor them, the graveyard was trapped in a parallel universe of tawdry commercial real estate. County records evidenced petitions and suits involving GLD3, LLC, the owner of record of the Crossroads lot. Between 1998 and 2012, there were liens and judgments, leases and mortgages, ambitious plans and delinquent taxes involving a property reduced in price to $5 million and assessed by the county at $400,000. After the second CRM firm confirmed the presence of graves, the New York State Historic Preservation Office had recommended no construction on the lot without a major reconfiguration that skirted the burials. A stream and wetlands on the property already limited its building potential. Like millions of Americans, Broccoli owned a piece of real estate whose value was far less than what he had hoped. Now he wanted to sell it. And who else but a preservation group would want this land?

A FEW WEEKS
before Memorial Day of 2013, heavy equipment appeared in the clearing, and bright-orange polyethylene warning fences ringed the grave site. Every few feet, the orange fence was broken up with signs:
PRIVATE PROPERTY
,
NO TRESPASSING
. A press release
^†
announced that yet another CRM firm—the third—was completing a survey to determine the boundary of the burial grounds. The press release included this provocative paragraph: