Researchers Drink In Findings From 18th Century Well

It was rumored that the old well at Ft. William Henry held remains of women scalped by North American Indians. Or maybe, locals said, there was a British Army payroll box down there, tossed in a last, desperate attempt to keep it out of enemy hands.

The stories hearkened to the 1700s, when a massacre left hundreds dead and the fort was razed.

Now rebuilt, the fort is a tourist attraction. And this year, 37 years after the first attempt, an archeologist named David Starbuck got to the bottom of the well and its mysteries.

Starbuck found no human skeletons or big treasure. But he found answers to lingering questions, a trove of musket balls, French gunflints, pottery shards--and piles of sunglasses.

The early artifacts were buried under layers of late 20th century Americana: coins, keys, chewed gum, flashbulbs, a 6-inch Batman figurine. Except for the sunglasses of unlucky browsers, all were probably deposited by people yielding to the human urge to toss things into wells.

After digging through those several layers of modern life, Starbuck reached the bottom of the 30-foot well in September. It wasn’t easy.

The dry, stone-lined well built with the fort in 1755 is just 3 feet across. An excavation in 1960 was halted by rising water and shifting sands. Starbuck encountered similar problems, though he had the benefit of electric hoists, pumps and video cameras. At points, he needed steel inserts to bolster the well’s fragile sidewall.

Starbuck’s excavations at the fort in this mountain village 60 miles north of Albany were part of a summer project sponsored by nearby Adirondack Community College. The artifacts he found with his team of history hunters are to be displayed when the fort reopens for visitors next spring.

Their efforts did more than satisfy an archeologist’s curiosity. The diggers enlivened interest at the fort this summer, said fort curator Jerry Bradfield. Some visitors returned two or three times. “They’d be anxious to see if they found anything after they left.”

Bradfield added, “For a lot of people, it’s really their first sense of history, literally lying underfoot.”

Starbuck is a tall, slim, sandy-haired man in his 40s who teaches at Plymouth College in New Hampshire. His expertise is 18th century military sites. His taste is for risk-taking.

“As a digger, you’re always looking for something new and a little bit more challenging,” Starbuck said. “Something like a well is a technical challenge, and it is a bit more dangerous. . . . It’s not more of the same.”

Although the well failed to yield bones or booty, Starbuck filled holes in the history surrounding one of pre-Revolutionary America’s more infamous massacres.

How was the well constructed? Was it trashed at the time of the massacre? Starbuck hoped that his dig would supply the answers. It did.

He found the original wooden staves driven vertically into the well’s bottom, forming a barrel-like tub.

And, Starbuck said, “It shows no signs of being trashed or polluted deliberately. They preserved that water supply even as they burned the fort down.”

“They” were the French, who with their Indian allies in the French and Indian War forced the British to surrender Ft. William Henry in August 1757 after a six-day siege. The war begun in 1755 was the North American theater of what Europeans called the Seven Years War, when England and France fought for control of this continent.

The British won. Early on, it didn’t look that way. The bloodshed at Ft. William Henry was one in a string of debacles.

The episode gained infamy, however, when Indians--some of them from what is now Canada--attacked the defeated British and their families, killing scores of men, women and children about a mile south of the fort.

Later atrocities committed by Europeans and Indians relegated the Lake George massacre to a historic footnote. But well into the 19th century, the event was seared into the American psyche and inspired James Fenimore Cooper’s 1826 novel, “The Last of the Mohicans.”

This summer, that footnote came alive when Starbuck led students and adult volunteers on a monthlong archeological dig.

The site was turned into a tourist attraction 45 years ago. Each summer now, Ft. William Henry is overrun by camera-toting tourists. But from 1755 to 1757, it bristled with cannons and the rifles of Britain’s colonial army.

As was customary then, many soldiers were accompanied by their wives, children and camp followers.

The fort on the south shore of Lake George was Britain’s northernmost fortification in the war and blocked French efforts to capture Albany and control the Hudson River Valley.

But in August 1757, a French, Canadian and Indian force of about 10,000 men assaulted the fort and its 2,500 officers and troops.

After a week of intense bombardment, George Munroe, the British commander, surrendered to the French general, the Marquis de Montcalm. Terms of the surrender allowed the British forces and their families to keep their weapons but not their ammunition. They were also guaranteed safe passage to Ft. Edward, a British stronghold 15 miles to the south.

But some never made it. The guarantee was violated.

After the surrender, contemporary diaries and other accounts say, Montcalm’s Indian allies found that the abandoned fort held little of the plunder the French had promised as payment. Angered, the Indians attacked and slaughtered the retreating soldiers, women and children before Montcalm intervened.

Then Montcalm ordered the fort dismantled and burned.

Accounts at the time said the deaths numbered about 1,000. But historians today say the death toll was no more than 200. Still, in an era when killing civilians was common in war, the violence of that broken agreement made the massacre notorious.

The story continues to fascinate. Hollywood depicted it in films, the latest a 1992 rendering of Cooper’s “Last of the Mohicans” starring Daniel Day Lewis.

Back in the early 1950s, a group of Albany investors saw a lucrative tourist attraction in the razed fort overgrown with weeds. The reconstruction used original drawings and plans from American, Canadian and British archives. Attraction was immediate.

Crowds soon lined the trenches where archeologists unearthed items as banal as pipestems and as horrific as an unexploded mortar shell embedded with a piece of human skull.

It was only after the fort opened for visitors in 1955 that attention turned to the well. It didn’t last. The 1960 dig was halted when water seeped into the well’s bottom.

This year, David Starbuck gave it a try.

And while the teacher climbed into the well each day, his crew of learners and old hands excavated other parts of the fort. Only feet from the well, they found a British coin dating around 1730 bearing the likeness of King George II. They also found gunflints, exploded mortar fragments, Spanish currency, a pair of French officer’s cuff links, and pieces of charred timber.

Many of the volunteers are veterans of Starbuck projects: summer digs at Rogers Island in the Hudson River and at nearby Ft. Edward.

One was schoolteacher Dottie Osterhout from nearby Riparius. An interest in archeology and history led her to one of Starbuck’s earlier digs.

“Then I got hooked,” she said as she stood waist-deep in a trench.