On the frigid, snowy night of February 8, 1690, a band of French marauders and their Native American allies stormed the stockaded frontier village at what is now Schenectady, NY. Sixty people were slaughtered during the raid, including 10 women and 12 children, and 11 Black enslaved people, and dozens of others captured. About 60 residents were spared, including 20 Mohawk people. The raiders set fire to most of the homes and barns in the community, leaving the settlement in ruins.
What came to be known as the Schenectady Massacre was one of the first skirmishes of King William’s War (1689-1697), an attempt to conquer New York during the first clash between England and France for control of North America.
A box sat relatively undisturbed on a shelf along the back wall in the Union College archive’s south stacks. Placed in the artifact collection, which includes sweaters, medals and other historic College mementoes, the small, archival box contains a rare archeological find - a partial human skull believed by some to belong to a victim of the massacre.
Unearthed during an excavation in a downtown Schenectady area in the 19th century, the skull was gifted to Union College in 1877. Now, the remains that rest delicately on tissue paper are finally getting a proper burial.
Working with representatives of nearby Vale Cemetery, which already contains some victims of the massacre, and First Reformed Church, the College will release the remains for a public internment in the spring. A plot and a small casket have been donated anonymously.
“I am happy we can finally lay her to rest,” said Sarah Schmidt, director of Special Collections and Archives at Schaffer Library. “She’s a human being and deserves to be treated with dignity and respect.”
The Schenectady Massacre has been the subject of books, plays, paintings and even a poem. Yet outside city, it remains a relatively obscure event in colonial American history.
The coordinated attack was part of a three-pronged invasion orchestrated by the governor of New France, Louis de Buade de Frontenac (1622-1698), on the English American colonial frontier after England had entered the war. It was also in retaliation for English-backed Iroquois attacks in Canada – the Lachine Massacre – that disrupted the lucrative fur trade.
In 1842 workers digging at the head of Maiden Lane (now Broadway), near State Street, uncovered several human skulls and bones, including the entire skeleton of a female with the face down. “On the back part and entirely through the skull, was a cut, made apparently with a hatchet,” according to an account August 19, 1942, in the Schenectady Reflector.
From there, the skull presumably ended up with Alexander Marselis Vedder, an 1833 graduate of Union and later a professor of anatomy and physiology at the college. It is not uncommon for human remains to have been given to colleges and universities for anatomical education, or simply curiosity or collecting purposes.
Vedder gave the skull to his alma mater in 1877, a year before his death. A handwritten paper label that stubbornly adhered to the skull hints at some of the provenance, though it’s not clear who wrote the note or when it became attached.
The College exhibited the skull to its students over the years, and eventually secured it in an alarmed, climate-controlled space.
It wasn’t until 2013 that College Librarian Frances Maloy sought to learn more about the skull and prepare for a proper burial. She says she was also guided by a recommendation of the American Museum of Natural History, which states that the return of human remains is an “integral part of stewardship.”
The effort was decades overdue according to The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) however, which was passed in 1990. That law required institutions receiving federal funding (museums, universities, agencies) to return Native American human remains, funerary objects, sacred objects, and items of cultural patrimony to lineal descendants, Indian tribes, or Native Hawaiian organizations.
To obey the spirit of the law, the College should have made an assessment whether the skull was indigenous or not. Instead it wasn’t until ten years ago that the skull was loaned to the New York State Museum, where experts conducted an osteological analysis.
Their report concluded the skull likely belonged to a younger adult woman who suffered cranial trauma during a violent encounter. The woman sustained several sharp injuries, the report states, first being struck with a heavy-bladed instrument that penetrated the top of her skull and would have led her to collapse.
Then while lying face down, she was struck in the back of the head multiple times with the same or a similar weapon, according to the report.
“The type of injuries exhibited in the skull are consistent with a brutal attack such as the one that occurred in Schenectady in 1690,” the report concludes. The College and local media have taken that as proof the skull was from a victim of the Schenectady Massacre.
It wasn’t until 2019 – some 30 years after the passage of NAGPRA – that a DNA analysis at the University of Binghamton determined the skull was of European descent.
Research by a project archivist for Union College’s Schaffer Library was unable to determine the identity of the skull from among the list of 10 women killed in the massacre.
Plans call for a public ceremony in the spring to reinter the remains. The event will include the placement in the cemetery of the original headstone of a six-year-old boy killed in the massacre that has also been preserved in the college’s archives for at least a century.
“To actually be able to reinter even small remains from this era is both exciting and very moving as it is a very rare tangible remnant of that time,” said Paula Lemire, office administrator for Vale Cemetery. “We are looking forward to giving a dignified burial and final resting place to the skull of a young woman who must have experienced a terrible death over three centuries ago.”
Read more about King William’s War.
Illustrations, from above: The partial human skull believed to belong to a victim of the Schenectady Massacre (courtesy Union College); and “Schenectady Massacre” by Samuel Sexton ca. 1833 inaccurately portraying only Native warriors attacking the village (Schenectady County Historical Society).
Source link
