Protections sought for old burial sites around New York
“We need to be sure that these people are respectfully reburied”
On a bitter February day in 2019, the Warren County Sheriff ’s Office received a call from a construction crew digging a foundation in Lake George. They had found human bones.
Terry Comeau, the undersheriff, was coroner at the time. He and an investigator drove to the site where the former Whispering Pines cottage rentals used to stand. What they saw did not look like any modernday crime scene.
Comeau and his colleagues called David Starbuck, a local archaeologist and professor. Starbuck was in New Hampshire, where he taught at Plymouth State University, but he agreed to take a look. The construction site was bustling with people — law enforcement, local officials, journalists. They were there to see the 60-by-60 foot crater with bone fragments sticking out of the dirt.
At the far end of the excavated hole was a row of what appeared to be a dozen grave shafts, sliced through by construction equipment. Centuriesold bones were popping out of the dirt wall.
“It was a burial ground,” Comeau said. “You could tell by the way everything was the same depth. It was uniform.”
Finding human remains was no surprise to Comeau, Starbuck or others who know the history of the region well. Native Americans used Lake George, the Hudson River and Lake Champlain as their highways. So, too, did the thousands of soldiers who fought in the French and Indian War, the Revolutionary War and War of 1812.
Burials were different then,
Starbuck said, and most graves were unmarked. For developers and preservationists, finding them is a mix of respecting the past and continuing to build the future these soldiers helped secure. With little legal protections for unmarked graves, local officials and community members are searching for ways to protect the remains, along with any yet to be unearthed.
“There isn’t much on the books to safeguard these things,” said Dan Barusch, director of planning and zoning for the town of Lake George. “Half of the things that are found are swept under the rug.”
Property owners Danna and Ruben Ellsworth didn’t sweep the Courtland Street bones under the rug, much to the relief of state and local officials. Contractors, however, dug an entire foundation before calling the sheriff.
Charles Vandrei, an archaeologist with the state Department of Environmental Conservation, said the skeletons were so beat up that they had to count right tibias to figure out how many people were buried at the site. So far, about 30 have been unearthed.
Who were these people?
A handful of buttons showed an important clue. They were marked, “1BP,” Vandrei said, short for the First Pennsylvania Battalion in the Revolutionary War.
“I don’t think we could have found a unit that told us more about what we had than this one,” Vandrei said, of the buttons’ label.
The battalion participated in the late-1775 invasion of Quebec, before the United States was officially born. They were poorly equipped for the journey to Canada, and many did not make it home.
Buttons with one skeleton showed the young soldier had been buried in his uniform, Vandrei said. Vandrei suspects the others were victims of disease, possibly smallpox. They were likely buried in their long night shirts. Their uniforms would have been removed and laundered or burned.
The work to recover individuals began in February 2019. It stalled during the particularly cold days, picked back up when the ground thawed, then stalled again with the coronavirus pandemic. Vandrei and Lisa Anderson, the state’s bioarchaeologist, along with more than 100 volunteers, finished sifting the excavated dirt on Courtland Street in mid- September.
The DEC said Vandrei and others completed a ground-penetrating radar survey of the area. He, Barusch and others suspect there are more graves unexcavated on the site.
It was the Ellsworths’ fortune, good or bad, to purchase 90 Courtland St. and find a whole cemetery. Their attorney, Michael Borgos, said they did not wish to speak to the media about the discovery, but as their attorney he discovered that there were “so many questions about the legality of what to do.”
“They’re dedicated to doing the right thing,” Borgos said.
When village and town officials realized how significant the burial ground was, Barusch said, they organized the Courtland Street Reinternment Committee. Besides local government representatives, members include DEC and state Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation staff, as well as members of local historical organizations. Borgos is also a committee member.
The committee’s purpose is to recover and preserve the remains on site and reinter the bones, Barsuch said.
While still navigating the pandemic and waiting for Anderson’s studies to be finished, the committee is tentatively planning to rebury the remains in the Lake George Battlefield Park in 2022. Barusch said members hope to hold a ceremony and invite various branches of the military and veterans’ organizations to take part.
“We need to be sure that these people are respectfully reburied,” Karig Hohmann, president of the Lake George Battlefield Park Alliance, said. “These are our patriots.”