Night at Walden Pond

Wars, Lovers and Stone

That summer, archeologist Roland Wells Robbins (Discovery at Walden Pond, 1947) had been retained as consultant by the New York State Department of Conservation to oversee an experimental dig in Essex County on Lake Champlain.

For a number of reasons, a sports friend and I were taken on as laborers to assist a team of three Penn State and Youngstown graduate students, and local stonemasons, to hand clear the site of an outlying breastworks near 1759 Fort Crown Point.

In the era of its construction, the major thoroughfare between Quebec and New York was a water route down Lake Champlain, a brief portage at Whitehall, and then down Lake George. This was within easy access of the Hudson River valley between Lake George and what was eventually named Glens Falls where a cataract blocked boat transport north, but not south, as far as New York City.

The Crown Point Peninsula extended far out into Lake Champlain and a military installation effectively controlled military and commercial traffic analogous to the geography at the Strait of Hormuz.

Land travel, due to thickly forested hills and mountains and lack of trails or roads in that era, rendered both Ft. Crown Point (1759) and nearby Ft. Ticonderoga (1755-57) choke points that controlled the Lake Champlain-Lake George-Hudson corridor.

Further south were Ft. William Henry (constructed in 1755 and burned by French troops two years later in 1757) and Ft. George (constructed in 1759 as a British supply depot after the larger fort was destroyed).

As such, these points were vigorously and violently contested both during the French and Indian Wars (1688-1763) and the American Revolution (1776-1781). Where there are armies and battles fought, there lie remains and artifacts left in their wake.

There too remain the personal stories, told and unspoken, of any and all who lived there.

***

Memorial Day 2026 will witness ‘Repose of the Fallen’, the re-internment of the remains of 44 young American soldiers discovered in February 2009 on Courtland Street, Lake George Village during a construction excavation. Nearby, Ft. George was once a clearing station, triage point and smallpox hospital that supported the American Colonial attack on Quebec in 1775-76. It is thought that the remains are those of young smallpox victims who fell ill during the Quebec campaign.

The major historical tourist site in The Village at the southern tip of Lake George, is Ft. William Henry, visited in 1825 by James Fenimore Cooper and popularized in the novel Last of the Mohicans (1826), and in the the 1992 film of the same name starring Daniel Day-Lewis.

Near to Ft. William Henry, Ft. George was a smaller installation to replace the large Ft. William Henry that was burned to the ground in 1757 and not resurrected until modern times as a historical and tourist site to complement the seasonal tourist industry of Lake George Village.

It was the ruins of the fort that inspired Cooper’s Last of the Mohicans, the first great and successful American work of literature.

***
Excavation and possible renovation of the large Ft. Crown Point to the north on Lake Champlain, with its beautifully constructed granite officers quarters, was too expensive and too involved for the late 1960s. As an alternative, a test dig in one of its outlying U-shaped defensive positions was chosen to see what might be accomplished over a single season.

Its shape, and outside the walls, revealed three fortified breastwork log facades filled with dirt, with an unwalled side toward the cannons of the fort, effected a better target should the outposts be overrun during a siege.

It was the dry moat of this hundred-foot fortification, dubbed the Light Infantry Redoubt, that was the focus of the team effort.

***

It was summer work and adventure for a few boys and some older professional historians in training.

Roland Robbins, known familiarly as Robbie, would occasionally drive his large car bearing the vanity license plate HIDDEN, from Concord-Lincoln Massachusetts to the excavation site in Essex County, Upstate New York immediately across silty Lake Champlain, not too far from Burlington, Vermont where Rudyard Kipling had a house before he was run out of town by a jealous husband.

It was not until I read years later that Anne Frank’s origin as a writer, was in letters, that I began to comprehend the results of that summer spent apart from a young woman I was quite fond of.

She had a job in Lake George at an amusement park called Storytown: I was sixty mile to the north. We wrote daily, the usual foolishness people of that age write when they suddenly find themselves faced with surprisingly adult interests.

She would not be old enough to drive until late in the summer.

It was unclear how or why the invitation was made, but Robbie invited the two of us to visit his place near Boston at the summer’s end before school started. Remarkably enough, she prevailed on her parents to loan her the keys and use of their new Oldsmobile for the trip and off we went.

Robbie was an uneducated painter whose academic career was cut short by the Depression. He was determined however to pursue history-archeology as a career in his immediate neighborhood that included Lexington, Concord and Lincoln, and had been home to leading lights of the nineteenth century such as Emerson and Thoreau.

Although he played tennis and competed with the Boston academic historians, they did not accept him as an equal despite his life of work.

Robbie’s earliest big success was to find and excavate the remains of the cabin so carefully described in Henry David Thoreau’s work Walden (1854) which was far more than a carpentry manual it turns out, a fact I would only learn much later.

The accommodations offered in Lincoln that weekend were the guest room under the watchful eyes of Mr. and Mrs. Wells and a home-made cabin situated in Robbie’s back yard.

It was, in fact, a perfect replica of Thoreau’s cabin at Walden Pond, itself just a mile or two from Robbie’s own house, outfitted to Thoreau’s exact specifications according to his book. It being end of summer, there was no need for a fire for warmth or meals and we spent a delightful weekend touring the historical sights of Boston.

***
The Pell Family, who owned Ft. Ticonderoga at the time, had a formal reception and invited those associated with the Crown Point dig with Gen. William Westmoreland as guest of honor. I took the same girl to the reception which she recalled even many years later after we fell apart and went on to our separate lives.

After her death, there were people and places long gone that bid me return to ascertain whether the facts of people and place, corresponded with my memory of them.

It is of these things I will continue to write and reflect.