Colonial New York

Fort Stanwix, New York, just east of Syracuse was the most western fort on the frontier in 1777

Saturday, August 13, 2011.  KABOOM! (re-enactor) Loyalists and British soldiers shot off their canons against those pesky, rebel, tax-evading Colonists at Fort Stanwix. Luckily for the Colonists, those puny iron canon balls  bounced off the fort walls, inflicting no damage at all.  Our commanding officer, British Brigadier-General Barrimore St. Leger, guzzled local rum while he waited for reinforcements, ammunition, and heavier canons with bigger canon balls to blow up the fortifications.  Sadly for him, they never arrived.

                                                  Re-enactors exhibiting big bang, little impact.

See the fort in the background

The British side was more rag-tag than we imagined:  Scots and Welsh from Canada mixed with Loyalist settlers who all let themselves be bossed around by the King's men.

The dashing officer (re-enactor) Dan Umstead explained that his soldiers slept 4 to 5 men in a modest wedge tent, spooning on the ground. If one man turned, everybody turned. If one man had lice, everyone caught it.  War was stinky and itchy.


After a few hours of bombardment, we were hot, hungry, tired, and our British side was clearly losing, so we quit.  It seemed  a good idea to change sides and join the Colonists inside the fort.

Inside the fort, the Big Man on Campus is the Sutler. (Think "Private Benjamin" with a profit motive). His job involves buying a lot of stuff and selling it to the soldiers. Big on vices, he sells rum, playing cards, pipes, and tobacco. He also sells good, warm animal skins, which he procures from the Indians by paying  them with Dutch or Venetian glass beads. 

A Polish immigrant who followed General George Washington into war.

Officer's quarters. If a soldier was poor, his wife and children might have to be "camp followers", living just outside the fort walls in a tent pitched in the trenches. 

Samantha, a Native American basket weaver

the Cooper's Workshop

Once the 13 Colonies declared victory, many wonderful restaurants opened.  We ate an extraordinary lunch at CIRCA, 40 minutes away from Fort Stanwix, in the charming village of Cazenovia. Chef-owner  Alicyn Hart is a conscientious  practitioner of the slow food movement, i.e., locally sourced purveyors featured in a superb seasonal menu. She also sells some of the farmer's products in the her restaurant: fresh butter, peaches, apricots, locally raised and butchered pork, freshly pressed juices. You can find Circa at 76 Albany St., Cazenovia, New York, www.circarestaurant.net, tues-sat 11-10.  Check with Circa for special Hog roast Sunday nights.   

We loved this delicate house-cured gravlax sandwich on home made wheat bread with freshly made potato chips.

Tabbouleh intermingled with carrots, string beans, tomatoes, pea tendrils

cheese plate made with a perfectly chosen local New England cheeses

After lunch, we drove to Chittenango Falls Park just east of Cazenovia, still in Madison County.

Vital information: these glorious Falls are home to the endangered hermaphrodite Chittenango snail. He/she feeds on the algae in the spray zone of the waterfall and the species has been here a lot longer than any of us. 

After experiencing so much great history, natural beauty and good food, I am sad to say the film has been shut down and we are all heading home!

Cooperstown, New York

A great way to beat the summer heat in upstate New York is to slather yourself in mud and refrain from strenuous exercise.

  

In Cooperstown, we passed up the dense throng of tourists at the Baseball Hall of Fame, the plethora of scary, cheap souvenir shops and sad eateries on the main drag. Instead, we opted for the Farmer's Museum, a restored historical town where the first building originated in 1796 (the Pub, of course) and the last construction was a fancy house dating from 1845.

 Enter through the impressive exhibition space where you can chart the evolution of the plow,  should you need to know it.

Exit out the other side, and you have drifted back 200 years.  Authentic historical buildings painstakingly restored include a church, a general store, a school, a pharmacist, and assorted shops.

the Weaver lady

her hand dyed wools 

Steven J. Kellogg, Blacksmith makes handmade square nails used to restore the historic buildings in the village

18th century hand tooled weapon

early printing shop in the village

Really cool artist's studio if you don't mind sharing it with turkeys. Don't worry, they'll be gone by Thanksgiving.

 too beautiful to eat

The village cheese maker looked like she walked out of a Vermeer painting

fresh milk from the village cows

When I asked the girl with the pearl earring what kind of cheese she was making, she answered "hard cheese". Oh, okay.

Across the street from the Farmer's Museum is the lovely, stately Fenimore Art Museum. It houses a folk art collection, a Native American collection and revolving shows the Edward Hopper show on now.

  This is not James Fenimore Cooper's ancestral home. That burned down in the 19th century.

"Song of Victory" 1907-1916 by John Scholl - some of the unusual folk art at the Museum

My husband, Waldemar, with former President "Abraham Lincoln" 1940-45 by Frank Moran. Abe's hands were weirdly shiny as though people had been fondling them!

Octagonal Barn on the road from Verona to Cooperstown, New York

the farm stand where we bought corn, ate it raw, and threw the cobs into the compost pile

the locals 

 Lake Otsego seen from Cooperstown - sublime, except for  the heavy metal music blasting across the lake from the local yacht club.



photography by Waldemar Kalinowski

War Party: The Mohawk Valley

ROME, NEW YORK

Attack, counter attack, fever carrying mosquitoes in summer, bitter, death defying cold in winter - that was the rebellion raging in the Mohawk Valley in 1776.  We're here with the film, "First Allies", telling the story of  Native Americans who were forced to choose between the British and the Colonists during the American Revolutionary war.

 Looking for locations and researching the story, "re-enactors" explain it all.   Every historic house seems to have someone in authentic dress who knows how to make candles out of beaver fat, operate a wood cheese press or carve a pair of big chunky wooden clogs out of a log - watch out for splinters when you try them on.

General Nicolas Herkimer's  (1728-1777) perfect Georgian house.  Like a lot of Revolutionary War freedom fighters, he kept slaves.

  his rather grave monument

Herkimer died in his bed after a botched amputation!

Here's where he got the doomed idea to march out and save Fort Stanwix from British invasion, but his troops were ambushed in the Battle of Oriskany.  

the  Klock House was fortified with 4' thick walls and loop holes to shoot at the enemy

The Klock barn would make a cool loft

Old Palatine Church 1770

We hope you believe the old Syracuse Hotel looks like Whitehall banqueting hall where Mad King George III meets the great Indian Chief/British officer, Joseph Brant 

Sainte-Marie among the Iroquois is a an old Catholic Mission from the 1600's with rather lean accommodations

don't try putting these leather mugs in your dishwasher

imagine the scent of dried fish and bear jerky hanging off the rafters all winter

 poor little dried beaver pelts

Wood communal bed - duvet is stuffed with straw. Can't wait to get my next  Bed Bath & Beyond 20% off coupon and remedy this.

this is the only part of the world where Rome is next door to Poland

SIDE BAR: My journey  from Los Angeles to New York City to Syracuse was not without drama.  At LAX, my rolling carry-on bag caught on that annoying 3 inch gap between the accordion hallway and the door to the plane.  Clunk! Clunk! My tote bag flipped over  and spewed out my in-case-of-hijacking-emergency-supplies  in front of 47 passengers.  My IPOD catapulted into the air and disappeared down into the gap, clattering sickeningly onto the tarmac 15 feet below the plane.   A steward rushed over worried I might be stoned by the impatient mob crowding the gangway. She hauled me away and a half hour later my IPOD (with 85 downloaded audio books) and I were reunited. Miraculously, it still worked.