Dig sites reveal life of African Americans
Open house at Myers House in Albany offers look at historical finds
Editor’s note: During Black History Month, the Times Union is sharing stories from its archive highlighting significant people, places and events that are part of the Capital Region’s Black cultural heritage. This story was first published July 26, 2017.
Archaeologists love trash. From the garbage heaps of centuries past comes evidence of lives lived, meals eaten, heirlooms cracked and lost.
And when the lives lived hold historic significance — when they’re 19th-century Albany abolitionists who sheltered runaway slaves on the Underground Railroad — refuse can assume a weighty importance. Any tiny find pulled up and dusted off by archaeologists can illuminate workaday habits of the rescuers and the rescued both.
“With archaeology, you can understand things that you can’t get from a history book,” said Michael Lucas, curator of historical archaeology at the State Museum, one in a team of diggers and sifters on a midweek afternoon in the shade behind the Stephen and Harriet Myers Residence. “Especially with people who are not in power — people who, you know, generally history hasn’t written about. You can really use the archaeological record to understand parts of the history that were left out of the history books.”
Among the artifacts unearthed in this patch of Arbor Hill: shards of china. Chunks of ceramics. A rusty steel disc. A little white stem from a clay pipe manufactured by Peter Dorney. A swamp-root kidney cure produced by a doctor in Binghamton. Such morsels of history were exhumed from a freshly dug series of pits in a rear lot on Livingston Avenue, where instructors and students in the University at Albany Archaeology Field School worked a summer course focusing on African-american history and Albany’s role in the abolitionist movement.
Besides the Myers residence, the class has focused on the Ten Broeck Mansion and the home of Thomas Elkins — both east along Livingston.
“All those people lived in this neighborhood — and that’s one of the things that is oftentimes missed,” said Paul Stewart, a co-founder of the Underground Railroad History Project, which is restoring the Myers residence.
Also missed is the narrative behind all the slavery-era routes and safe houses: “Really great history, and really great stories” that bring to life a critical era in the history of the nation, the city and Arbor Hill, he said. Stephen and Harriet Myers lived at 194 Livingston Ave. for just a few years in the 1850s — back then, it was 198 Lumber St. — but the fourstory brick town house hosted significant abolitionist gatherings, and it’s the only former Myers home still standing.