It was a simple request, says Matt Kirk of Hartgen Archeological Associates, “All we want you to do is map every military site in Lake George from 1755 to 1783. It will be easy! It will be over in a week, no problem! As you can image,” says Kirk, “that’s a lot.”
The town of Lake George hired Hartgen to inventory, analyze and document historic sites relevant to Lake George battles. After more than a year in the field, Hartgen produced a 1,000-page document made up of 62 Resource Inventory Forms covering hundreds of acres at the Southern end of Lake George. Kirk presented an overview of the report at a workshop held at the Lake George Town Hall yesterday evening.
The project was financed with a $50,000 grant awarded to the Town in July 2016 by the American Battlefield Protection Project, part of the National Parks Service. The Town’s Planning Department, headed by Dan Barusch, partnered with the NYS Department of Environmental Conservation and the Lake George Battlefield/Fort George Alliance to make this study happen. The resulting report is a compilation of information recorded in a series of Resource Inventory Forms.
“We really did go through that entire history that included the French and Indian Wars from the time William Johnson first showed up in 1755 with his army and subsequently had a battle with French through the time when Fort William Henry was built to its subsequent destruction under the siege by the French,” says Kirk. “And then, the return of the English in 1758 and 59 under Ambercromby and Amherst with huge armies at the devastation (the destroyed fort) on the Southern end of Lake George.”
“Lake George becomes important again, and this is kind of lost, I think, in our modern consciousness, Lake George was an important location during the Revolutionary War.” General Schuyler used Lake George as a base when defending against British General Burgoyne as he came South. Burgoyne occupied Lake George for a time in 1777. “There was even a battle in 1777 around Diamond Island,” Kirk notes.
Kirk describes the process of creating a Resource Inventory Form. By overlaying modern maps with historical maps, they can identify significant sites. Although the maps usually don’t line up perfectly, some features, such as the streams feeding into Lake George, remain consistent over the centuries. Once a site has been identified, they look for archeological signatures.
“What is the archeological signature? It could be anything,” says Kirk. “It could be above ground, these large features, like Fort George. It could just be a bunch of nails, a small kind of fortification that was built somewhere; obviously, musket balls, buttons — anything associated with camp life of the soldiers that were living in and around these places in the 1750s, 1760s and 1770s. …We have pictures of what the modern conditions look like. We put them in maps and then we trace on every historical map that these features show up on, then we reproduce those maps and show what the evolution of that resource looked like over time.”
The area covered by this study reaches to the North end of Lake George Village where, during the 1757 siege of Fort William Henry, the French had a guard post on an unnamed mountain west of what is now State Route 9. The most southern site identified is around Bloody Pond, site of the 1755 Bloody Morning Scout along the Old Military Road. Only a small fraction of the sites are on State Land. State holdings include Battlefield Park and the flanks of Prospect and Cobble Mountains where the French may have camped during the siege. Most resources are spread throughout Lake George and are now occupied by hotels, restaurants, shops and private residences.
Hartgen was charged with collecting and documenting. It is up to the community to determine how to use this information, says Kirk. He suggests short-term efforts could include signage, short-term protection strategies and using the Web and social media to create awareness. Long-term, the information could inform preservation initiatives and be made available to the public through museums and other interpretive vehicles.
“This thousand-page report is incredible — it’s jaw-dropping.”
— Lyn Hohmann, Battlefield Park/Fort George Alliance President
A Visitors Interpretive Center may be coming to Battlefield Park. The DEC-owned Ramsey House at 75 Fort George Road, currently the offices of the Lake George Park Commission, has outlived its usefulness. The 140-year-old farmhouse is not energy or space efficient. Plans are in the works to build a new structure to house the Commission. A proposed design includes space for a Visitors Center in the walkout basement.
“Historical tourism is huge,” says Lyn Hohmann, President of the Lake George Battlefield Park/Fort George Alliance. “People are coming all the time to this area trying to figure out what we have here.” Hohmann notes that there is a lot of signage throughout town, a wonderful museum of local history, extensive interpretive markers in Battlefield Park and a newly re-published Colonial Wars self-guided tour map, but an Interpretive Center would pull everything together. “Not a museum, but a visitor center that is going to tell the story of the history of the park.” Hohmann believes such a center would raise awareness of “how important this area was to the birth of our nation with the French and Indian War through the Revolutionary War.”
Additionally, artifacts collected from an artifact-rich site on Birch Avenue and from digs in Battlefield Park are now at the State Museum in Albany. A Visitors Interpretive Center would give them a home in Lake George.
Workshop participants discussed other ways to share this information and mark historically important sites for visitors. Each site has unique attributes that need to be considered by all interested parties. Kirk gives this example of the difference between two sites:
Montcalm’s battery #1 was near the Old Court House, next to Shepard Park and Lake George Village businesses, which gives the site public and commercial interest. The town, the Village and the Chamber of Commerce would have an interest in a commemorative plaque placed on that site, and they would work together to determine exact placement and content of the sign. Battery #2 was on what is now a Montcalm Street residential area. Signage there would have a different agenda.
Kirk suggested that sites may not need physical signs. “I know the way my kids work through the world now…if you map it out in a virtual way and said to my kids, ‘I want you to find every battery that’s in the town of Lake George’ they would spend an entire day on their phone wandering around looking for those sites. They would because it incorporates what they like — their device, walking around and a sense of discovery.”
An app similar to the popular Pokémon Go game would appeal to younger visitors, but app development is expensive. Lake George Planning Director Dan Barusch comments that a web page could serve the same purpose.
Barusch says a draft of the report is now in review with the Battlefield Park Protection project. Once the review is complete, it will be sent back to the town with comments. The town will make revisions deemed necessary and return it for final approval. The final version will be available online at the town’s website. Hard copies will be sent to the Caldwell-Lake George Library and the Lake George Historical Society. Barusch expects the final copy will be available sometime this summer.
Feature photo: Matt Kirk of Hartgen Archeological Associates explains how sites with historic significance may be located by overlaying modern maps with historical maps.
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