Home Delivery

The Promise of Corchaug

Archaeologists hope a buried fort will reveal new secrets of Indian civilization

By Steve Wick | Staff Writer

Article tools

E-mail

Share
- Digg
- Del.icio.us
- Facebook
- Fark
- Google
- Newsvine
- Reddit
- Yahoo

Deep in the woods alongside a salt creek on the North Fork, history is buried under a carpet of top soil and decayed leaves.

The history alongside a creek in Cutchogue is unlike anything that exists in the Northeast. It is more than 350 years old, and is mostly untrampled. There were others like it at one time on other creeks and woodsy hills nearby, but they are all gone now.

What once sat in these verdant woods was a log fort built by the Indians who lived on the North Fork at the time of contact with English colonists who arrived in the late 1630s. When they poked into the woods alongside the creek, the English found a fort made of logs, roughly rectangular in shape, and enclosing an area of less than three acres. All around it were the corn and bean fields that fed the Indians.

Today, 3 1/2 centuries later, the secrets of Fort , as the site is called, are hidden away underground.

``It is the rarest of rare,'' said Ralph Solecki, a Texas-based archaeologist who grew up a quarter-mile from the site in a house in Cutchogue. ``There is nothing else like it anywhere in the region because the other 17th-Century Indian forts have been lost. It is a wonder.''

As a child, Solecki began finding arrowheads in farm fields around his house. As a teenager, he read an article that said a log fort had been built by the Indians in the late 1630s alongside a Cutchogue creek, was later abandoned and lost to time. In the summer of 1935, Solecki went looking on a nearby creek, but found nothing promising. Then an amateur archaeologist told him to look on the west side of Downs Creek.

``The site was right where he said it was,'' Solecki said. ``The farm it had once sat on was then owned by the Downs family. They'd had it since the early 1800s, and when I talked to the family they said stories about the fort had been passed down through the generations. It's clear now that the site was abandoned after the English came to the area. The logs would have fallen down and rotted away. Luckily, the family had cattle on the site, which had probably never been plowed. It was a miracle it had not been destroyed by farming practices.''

Standing by the creek that day, Solecki could make out a low, rounded berm that protruded from the ground and ran perpendicular to the creek. The berm, he thought, probably anchored one wall of the fort. Just south of the fort was the remains of an ancient well, which he knew held potential as an archaeological site. But it was the flat land where the fort once sat that intrigued him. In the stillness alongside the creek, Solecki could vividly imagine the distant past -- the four walls of the fort built as a refuge for the Indians, the salt creek on one side, farm fields on the other side. ``It seemed incredible to me on that day, and it still holds true today, that this site was untrampled.''

Solecki came back in the late 1940s to write his master's thesis on the site. What he found then, he said, convinced him that the fort was built with the help of Europeans as a defense against attack from Indians from New England, who traveled to eastern Long Island to collect shells. During a summer of digging, Solecki found Dutch trade goods on the site, which, he said, suggested that the fort may have been connected to a vast trading system that channeled wampum from the Peconic Bay to the Dutch in New Amsterdam. Near the ancient Indian well, Solecki found arrowheads more than 1,000 years old.

Today, the site and 105 acres around it -- an area called Fort Neck in old Southold Town records -- will be preserved under an accord signed last July. According to a plan submitted in June, the Peconic Land Trust, a nonprofit conservation group, bought the site from William Baxter of Stamford, Conn., for $1.2 million. A Georgia businessman, Russell McCall, agreed to buy back part of the tract from the Land Trust for $800,000. Plans for the fort site include an interpretive center, and a study center for archaeologists and students. When the site is acquired, archaeologists have said they would like to begin serious work. They have excavated little more than 10 percent of the 105-acre tract. There may be a burial ground and the site of an ancient village in the woods and fields alongside Downs Creek. But just as it is, the historical importance of the fort is clear.

``There weren't that many forts along the eastern seaboard that can be documented as having been built by Native Americans in the Seventeenth Century,'' said Lorraine Williams, curator of archaeology at the New Jersey State Museum in Trenton. She excavated part of the site in the 1960s.

Work at the site could fill in missing chapters in Long Island's extraordinary Indian history.

``To me, it's not a matter of arrowheads,'' said Elizabeth Hale, a member of the Shinnecock community in Southampton. ``It's a matter of a social system that survived for thousands of years before people came and discovered us.''