Photo Hunters: Balanced

Pardon me while I whine: this theme is another hard one! wah! Why can’t we have something like “Victorian” or “urban” or “history”? I’d have loads of stuff for those.

Alas, balanced is this week’s theme. Ah well, it’s probably a good thing to be challenged; keeps you sharp! OK, so here’s what I scrambled to provide!

This is the world’s smallest church. It’s in the middle of a pond, in Oneida, NY. It can hold three people! You can read more about our trip here. I’d say the little thing is well balanced– enough for it to float on the water like that.

Here’s my son and daughter, on the moon, balanced despite the obvious lack of gravity. Photo taken at Syracuse’s Museum of Science and Technology.

Another photo at the MOST. You are supposed to be able to lift that ring and create a large bubble around you. We tried and Read more

Photo Hunters: Support

A person could do so much with this week’s Photo Hunt! I decided to use “support” as a verb. Here’s a photo of the Hiawatha Belt. This is not the real belt, it’s a replica of one, and we saw it at the Children’s Museum in Utica, NY. You can read about our visit to the Museum here.

Why do I have a wampum belt for Photo Hunt? The original Hiawatha Belt was made of wampum, which were beads made from clam shells, found in the Atlantic Ocean. These beads were extremely precious to the Indians of Upstate New York. They used the beads to make wampum belts, which were binding contracts or treaties. Nowadays people use hidden spy cameras to enforce treaties, but back then, people kept their word with a binding contract!

This wampum belt is the contract– the covenant– that the five individual Iroquois tribal Nations (Seneca, Cayuga, Onondaga, Oneida, Mohawk) agreed to. They agreed to support each other and to have peace with each other. This peace lasted for about 500 years, until the American Revolution. Only the Oneida Indian tribes joined the American patriots and they gave us their support. They suffered horrible losses, but they believed in our cause.

How did your Photo Hunt go today?

People of the Standing Stone: The Skenandoah Boulder in Oneida

We’ve been by it countless times. Every time we zip by it, we grab a fleeting glimpse and wonder aloud to each other what is etched on it, what is it’s significance, and why it is there. Today I finally got to get up very close and snap a photo of the words written on the plaque!

I’m talking about the Skenandoah Boulder, on Route 5 outside of Oneida Castle village limits. There is a stone resting on the side of the road, by a very busy four corners area, with an old historical marker punctured in the lawn next to it. “Skenandoah Boulder” is all the historical marker says.

I’d finally stopped a few months ago (in December) to get a photo of it, but the snow had been too high and too slushy for me to read what the plaque says. That photo is all I could get from my quick exploit.

The stone was tantalizingly near, but I couldn’t get closer than that!

The stone (about the size of a small couch, or loveseat) has an old copper plaque affixed on it (it’s now green). The print is small– too small for any passer-by to read even one word. Stopping the car on the side of this busy road is done at one’s own risk. I’ve always either been in a hurry or haven’t felt brave enough to stop the car and get a closer look.

Now that it is spring, I could park my car more safely, meander the very busy highway, and step onto the green grass.

This is what the plaque reads:

This marks the site of the last home of SKENANDOAH Chief of the Oneidas, “The White Man’s Friend.” Here he entertained Governor DeWitt Clinton 1810, and many other distinguished guests, and here he died in 1816 aged 110. He was carried on the shoulders of his faithful Indians to his burial in the cemetery of Hamilton College, Clinton, NY, and laid to rest beside his beloved friend and faithful teacher Rev. Samuel Kirkland.

“I am an aged hemlock; the winds of an hundred winters have whistled through my branches . I am dead at the top. The generation to which I belonged have run away and left me.” Skenandoah.

Erected 1912 by Skenandoah Chapter, N.S.D.A.R. Oneida, NY

We’d visited Rev. Kirkland’s and Skenandoah’s gravesite are Hamilton College; you can see photos and my post about it here.

I had done some research on this boulder and the Oneidas a few months ago. It only made the stone more intriguing. It is fitting to have a large boulder here, as it’s related to the Haudenosaunee and the meaning of their name: Oneida, People of the Standing Stone.

Oneida legend says that the Oneida were led to these lands by following a moving stone; where it stopped, they settled. There is another ice-age linkage here because glaciers move staggering amounts of loose stone and boulders (glaciers are made up of about one-third stone and two-thirds ice) and deposit these stones as erratics. Erratics are non-native stones and boulders which can be found all over New York. Syenite is one type of erratic and is frequently found in Oneida territories. The Skenandoah Boulder is perhaps the largest syenite erratic. It is named for a very famous Oneida Chief Skenandoah… As you pass through village of Oneida Castle, on NY 5, note that this was once the site of the principal Oneida village, known as Kanonwalohale.

We know about the great Oneida Chief Skenandoah– that close friend of Samuel Kirkland (founder of Hamilton College). Under Kirkland, Skenandoah became a Christian who influenced his tribesmen to join the Americans in the Revolutionary War.

His history– and the history of that stone– and his history in relation to that stone– is absorbing. This page taken from The History of Chenango and Madison Counties, 1880, by James H. Smith tells of the little-known history of the Oneidas and the first white settlers to the region.

Thus they were known as the people of the stone set in the fork of a tree. Tradition ascribes their origin to a stone, which, says Schoolcraft, “is a large, but not enormous, boulder of syenite, of the erratic block group, and consequently geologically foreign to the location,” there being “no rocks like this till we reach the Adirondacks.” “This stone,” says the same author, “became the national altar,” and “when it was necessary to light their pipes and assemble to discuss national matters, they had only to ascend the hill through its richly wooded groves to its extreme summit,” an eminence in the town of Stockbridge, where, he says, this stone, and the first castle of the Oneidas was located.

And who is “Schoolcraft”? I could find no reference to him on the website. Is this a reference to a relation of James Schoolcraft Sherman of Utica, vice-president during the Taft administration?

Another source I found says that this largest boulder of syenite rested at Forest Hill Cemetery in Utica, New York. Does it remain there, somewhere? Or was this stone removed to the four corners at Route 5, that same stone in the photo above? (Incidentally, Forest Hill in Utica is where James Schoolcraft Sherman is buried).

Before the door of an old chief, resting upright on the ground, stood the palladium of the clan, a stone of some size, declared by Mr. Kirkland to have been an object of idolatrous worship to many of the people. It was “a cylindrical stone of more than two hundred pounds weight, and unlike any other stone in that region.” From the earliest records, the Oneidas were spoken of as the “People of the Stone.” Onia is their word for a stone, and Oniota-aug means the people of the stone. The French called them Oneséionts; with the Dutch and English they were Oneidas.

Tradition declared that wherever the tribe moved, this cylindrical stone of mystery followed them. A strong man could carry it forty or fifty rods without resting; in this way, as the missionary says, it may certainly have followed them in their wanderings. It would seem to have been an essential of this ancient stone of the Oneidas that it could be lifted by the sinews of their warriors into “the crotch of a tree.” and when placed in that position, it rendered their braves invincible. Such is the tradition given by Mr. Kirkland, who was thoroughly familiar with the language and habits of the Oneidas.

There was another stone of much greater size, in the Oneida country, about which mysterious traditions hover. It was of considerable size and weight, and lay on the summits of a commanding height, overlooking the country on the Oneida Creek, as far as the lake, which on a bright day can be seen in the distance.

At one period the principal Oneida village lay near a fine spring in a valley beneath the height. There are vague rumors connected with this boulder of syenite, shadows of the uncertain past, which claim for it the dignity of a tribal altar. Of this larger stone Mr. Kirkland makes no mention.

It was removed in 1850, from the height on which it lay, to Forest Hill Cemetery in Utica. It is said that there is no stone of the same geological character nearer than the Adirondack Mountains. Its weight has been variously stated at from one to three tons.

We’ve been to the Munnsville Museum in the Stockbridge/Munnsville area. I was researching genealogy information on my ancestor Nathan Edson (a survivor of the Battle of Lexington) and learned that he had been granted the area of Stockbridge for his war services. The Indians of that area had moved to Oneida Castle, NY, in 1784. I am surprised and mystified about all the historical connections, and now there is a personal connection. If I ever had to explain why history is such a fascinating subject, then this is why!

Hamilton, Smith, and the Turning Stone Casino

My daughter The Historian and I had the pleasure of attending the inaugural dinner of the Alexander Hamilton Institute at the Turning Stone Casino, as guests of the gracious Robert Paquette and Douglas Ambrose, professors at Hamilton College and co-founders of the Institute. What an exhilarating experience! It was also my first time seeing the famed Oneida Indian casino. Over the years, I’ve read much about the development of the Oneida Nation from a small poor group into a burgeoning community of entrepreneurs. I get more satisfaction from the Nation’s good gas station service than the presence of a gambling business in my area, however. I’ve never liked the idea of a casino in my backyard…

More than finally seeing the casino up close was the utter pleasure of meeting the members of the Alexander Hamilton Institute. For many years, we’ve studied the history of Alexander Hamilton, Hamilton College, it’s founder, Samuel Kirkland, and Baron von Steuben. We have visited the campus several times and enjoyed its extensive library (see here and here). My daughter has attended a few of their meetings at their headquarters in Clinton, NY; this was my first time meeting them and I enjoyed it thoroughly.

The Alexander Hamilton Institute is, in their own words:

The Alexander Hamilton Institute for the Study of Western Civilization (AHI) promotes rigorous scholarship and vigorous debate in the study of freedom, democracy, and capitalism. Three Hamilton College professors, Douglas Ambrose, James Bradfield, and Robert Paquette, inspired by the contributions of Alexander Hamilton to the founding and survival of the Republic, established the AHI as an independent entity, unaffiliated with Hamilton College, during the summer of 2007.

This from their charter:

Inspired by Alexander Hamilton’s life and work, the AHI promotes excellence in scholarship through the study of freedom, democracy, and capitalism as these ideas were developed and institutionalized in the United States and within the larger tradition of Western culture. The word freedom, it should be recalled, had no equivalent in the vocabularies of non-Western civilizations until imported from the West. Democracy first flourished in the poleis or city-states of ancient Greece. While the propensity to truck, barter, and exchange seems to have been inscribed in humanity’s genes, a full-blown capitalist system, one based on the private ownership of the non-personal means of production, originated in England. Since to a great extent modernity implies the momentous extension and elaboration of these ideas around the world, the AHI will necessarily range widely across geographic, cultural, and disciplinary boundaries in pursuit of its mission and to implement plans of rediscovery.

I have had a personal affinity for studying the history of our American republic. To see such a group of distinguished people gather together for the same purpose– that of promoting a return to our federalist roots of liberty– is the answer to my prayers. It was so thrilling to talk to people familiar with the Great Awakening, Samuel Kirkland, Charles G. Finney, and Gerrit Smith!

This meeting was the first annual colloquium for the newly established Institute. You can read about the schedule and topics of discussion here. The dinner was sumptuous, the conversation more so. We met other professors and students from Hamilton College, Harvard, and Colgate, who had assembled together to celebrate the Institute and discuss Gerrit Smith. I have been interested in the life and work of Gerrit Smith for many years. I did a short piece on him when I blogged about the Utica Lunatic Asylum here. The children and I hope to go on New York’s “Freedom Trail” from Utica to Auburn. There is just too much to say about Smith, Finney, the abolition movement of New York State that exploded across our country in the mid 1800s, and of the Freedom Trail. It will take me all summer long to write about it!

This is something very dear to my heart, as I am a student of New York state history, and, more importantly, a person consumed with a desire to see our nation return to its fundamental roots of liberty and religious revival. My daughter has so often stated that before any great movement of freedom, there was always a Great Awakening preceding.

“The Revolution was effected before the War commenced. The Revolution was in the minds and hearts of the people; a change in their religious sentiments of their duties and obligations … This radical change in the principles, opinions, sentiments, and affections of the people, was the real American Revolution.” John Adams

Bob Paquette began the colloquium by noting the utter irony of discussing the life and work of the famed abolitionist and perfectionist Gerrit Smith in a casino. He wryly remarked that if Smith could possibly know what we were doing, he’d be rolling in his grave. This elicited chuckles, and it is true! But we didn’t attend the meeting to gamble. On the contrary, this meeting was only the beginning of a new thing happening all over again!

After the heartening speeches of a handful of AHI founders and fellows, John Stauffer of Harvard University (and acclaimed expert on the life of Gerrit Smith) delivered his dissertation. There is just too much to write about it all! It was wonderful. I assume the AHI will post the highlights of the colloquium on their website; I’ll link to it when they do.

After the event, my daughter and I got the chance to wander the Turning Stone briefly. I snapped a few photos.

The Turning Stone is a popular meeting place for large conferences. I don’t think there exists any other building for such large events in the area. All the conferences that I’ve ever heard of are held here. Here’s a photo of the building. I’m a poor photographer. The colored “TS” in lights at the top changes colors.

This is the luminous Tree of Peace crafted by Dale Chihuly.

I’m a “ceilings” person:

I loved the glass of the lobby as the sun shone in. I took this photo before the meeting.

And this I took after.

We wandered the halls. There are many “natural” looking displays in various places. Besides the glass “tree,” there are walls made from cut stone, waterfalls, and earth-tone patterned carpets.

This is a the cafe just outside the gambling rooms.

And this is where people enter to lose their money:

The Turning Stone Casino began as a Bingo Hall, if I remember correctly. Gambling in New York State is prohibited by our constitution, but through governor-sponsored enactment (Governor Cuomo, in the early 90s), the casino was allowed to open. It has met with vehement opposition, most notably by the Upstate Citizens for Equality. The Oneida Indian land settlement/casino/resort issues are still in litigation, with some issues going as high as the Supreme Court. The Turning Stone is popular with area residents, however. It is a place where the poor people get to lose all their money. The Turning Stone is Oneida County’s biggest employer, after government jobs. So my guess is that, despite reams of litigation, the casino is here to stay.

We visited the Shako:wi Oneida Indian Cultural Center in Oneida, NY. See here for our trip.

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