William Shannon

<h1>LAKE GEORGE, N.Y. — It was not the first time the archaeologist had received this type of call.</h1>

“There have been some human bones unearthed,” Chris Hatin, an investigator with the Warren County sheriff’s office, said in a voicemail message to David Starbuck in early February.

“I’ve been told you have some experience with this. If you can give me a call back, I’d certainly appreciate it.”

Starbuck did call back. The bones, centuries old and fragile, offered clues that eventually led to the skeletal remains of at least 18 humans — and with them a Revolutionary War-era mystery.

Over the next week, Starbuck and about 20 other archaeologists gently extracted the bones from 11 graves discovered in a pit that was being dug to pour the foundation for a new three-family home in Lake George.

Three Revolutionary War coat buttons with an insignia that Starbuck said matches those worn by the 1st Battalion of Pennsylvania were among the artifacts pulled from the frozen earth.

The buttons, Starbuck said, hint at the likelihood the site may have been a burial ground for Revolutionary War solders who had been housed in crude smallpox hospitals nearby. Both are mentioned in war records, but their exact locations in Lake George had never been discovered.

“The common goal was to rescue these human remains,” Starbuck said of the dig that was complicated by a snowstorm, “and also maybe to try to learn something about them.”

A Lake George official said the town is looking at ways to acquire the Courtland Street site, with an eye toward preserving it.

“This find in this community adds just one more layer of context,” said Michael Borgos, a lawyer for the property owners.

“To stand here and look out at the lake and think of the bateaux heading north for attack, and the lake covered with war machinery and the men who fought and died out here at the edge of the wilderness — it gives you a real sense of place.”

Lake George, a summertime magnet for tourists about 200 miles north of New York City, is better known in history books for its battles in the 1750s during the French and Indian War than for its link to the Revolutionary War. History buffs know of its recreated Fort William Henry, the site of a siege depicted at the climax of James Fenimore Cooper’s “The Last of the Mohicans.”

But the village was also an important location during the Revolutionary War. It saw little fighting, but the land at the southern end of the lake became a repository for soldiers who had been stationed at nearby Fort Ticonderoga and points north who had fallen ill, primarily from smallpox, said Starbuck, an archaeology professor at New Hampshire’s Plymouth State University who has written several books on the history of the region.

The village had the largest concentration of smallpox patients in America — between 2,000 and 3,000 — in 1776, according to Starbuck.

Historians believe hundreds and possibly thousands of soldiers from the Revolutionary War and the French and Indian War are buried in the village of Lake George.

Eighteen years ago, Starbuck helped analyze a skeleton unearthed not far from the recent discovery. Those remains — determined to be that of a young man whose skull showed evidence of being scalped — were eventually reinterred at the Fort William Henry cemetery.

The archaeologists who descended on the 0.61-acre Courtland Street plot came from three separate New York state agencies, and were led by Lisa Anderson, a bioarchaeologist with the New York State Museum.

In addition to a few skulls, arm bones, numerous pelvises and femurs, along with the coat buttons, the investigators found fragments of coffin wood and coffin nails. Everything was delivered to the New York State Museum in Albany for analysis.

On Tuesday, Anderson said testing had identified remains from 13 individuals in 11 graves. The remains of at least five other people were discovered nearby.

Seven of the skeletons found are believed to have been adults older than 20, according to a preliminary skeletal analysis of the fusing of bones that occurs in adulthood. Six are thought to have been younger than 20 when they died, and the age of the other five people is unclear, Anderson said.

Of the numerous coffin nails uncovered, the ones not corroded beyond recognition appear to have been hand wrought, Anderson said. Finding machine-cut nails would have suggested they were from after 1790, according to Starbuck, though he cautioned that hand-wrought nails were used into the 1800s.

Anderson said the full analysis, to radiocarbon date the wood and the bones, to piece together as many of the skeletons as possible and to study the health of those buried could take as long as two years.

The parcel of land, owned by developers Danna and Ruben Ellsworth, sits about 400 yards from Fort William Henry, which was replicated in the 1950s mostly on its original footprint. The Courtland Street land is uphill from the fort and has views of the southern end of the lake. When the Ellsworths bought the land, it held a handful of small vacation cabins that were set on blocks, not dug foundations, according to Borgos, the Ellsworths’ lawyer.

The discovery of the remains has not completely upended construction plans. The Ellsworths plan to go ahead with the construction of one home on a recently poured foundation, but will hold off on building the second three-family home that was slated to go next to it, Borgos said.

One common sentiment among Lake George residents is a desire to reinter the remains within the village. And if there are additional indications that the skeletons were soldiers, residents said, they will be given the full ceremonial honors they likely did not get at the time of their deaths.

“We like ceremonies around here,” said Margy Mannix, Lake George’s municipal historian, adding that she hopes a more complete story of who they were and how they died can eventually be told. “They will definitely get one.”

This article originally appeared in <a id="dafe773e-c88d-4718-86e2-275578695922" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/26/nyregion/lake-george-bones-found.html">The New York Times</a>.

18 Skeletons, 3 Buttons and a Revolutionary War Mystery

“There have been some human bones unearthed,” Chris Hatin, an investigator with the Warren County sheriff’s office, said in a voicemail message to David Starbuck in early February.

18 skeletons, 3 buttons and a revolutionary war mystery

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William Shannon

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18 skeletons, 3 buttons and a revolutionary war mystery