In search of Timbucto

LAKE PLACID — They were just about to give up. Seventy miles away from their classrooms, SUNY Potsdam archaeology students had spent three weeks in July canvassing every step of several acres of forest, looking for the exact location of one of the most unusual social experiments in this country's history.

The 18 students and two graduate assistants dug in the stony soil. They painstakingly picked through a decades-old trash heap. Most of the time, they worked in the rain and mud. And all they had to show for their search were a few cut nails and what looked like a rusted piece of horse harness.

With one day left before the students' summer session was to end, it was becoming apparent that the secrets of Timbucto, the long-deserted settlement of free blacks established before the Civil War, would continue to remain hidden.

But there was still one day left to dig.

So one group trekked into the woods. Wordlessly, the students took positions around the spot they had flagged earlier. They scanned the area with metal detectors. Two students took turns driving a shovel into the ground. With sweat glistening on their foreheads, they lifted the soil and debris and dumped it into a bucket. Other students sifted and sieved the dirt.

There in the middle of a young forest, under a deep layer of dead leaves, they found an agricultural artifact. It may be hard to imagine now, but 160 years ago, this wooded hillside — covered in snow five months of the year — was once cleared for cattle and crops by families of black Americans, all of whom previously had lived nonagrarian lives in Northern cities.

A reminder came when the students unearthed a rusted horseshoe with 19th-century cut nails still in it. Significant? After weeks of finding little else, it was momentous.

"That's our big hit! I'm going to call my mom when I get home and tell her," said Scott D. Miller, a senior archaeological studies major from Park Ridge, N.J. "Maybe that will be our lucky horseshoe."

They wondered how their other classmates were doing. Acting on little more than a hunch, Professor Hadley A. Kruczek-Aaron had taken them to a spot that — at least according to old survey maps — was not a part of the village of Timbucto.

Mr. Millers' two-way radio suddenly came alive. Come quickly, they were told.

Mr. Miller carefully bagged and tagged the horseshoe and, with the other students, trekked out of the forest to a sun-dappled clearing, just a short walk away from where they had all been unsuccessfully scouring for Timbucto for weeks.

As they got closer to the rest of the group they came upon an uncommon sound.

Beep, beep, vroom. Beep, beep, vroom. Beep, beep, vroom.

Metal detectors were going off everywhere.

A century and a half ago, Lyman Epps bushwhacked his way to a remote corner of the Adirondack Mountains in hopes of carving out a new life for his family.

Mr. Epps and his wife, Amelia, came to North Elba from Troy, along with two children, in 1846. They were one of 200 African-American families from downstate cities who had been given free plots of land as part of an agrarian experiment started by abolitionist Gerritt Smith.

Mr. Smith, a wealthy activist from Peterboro, wanted to give away 3,000 40-acre parcels of his family's vast holdings of land around the state to free black American men. The requirements? Grantees had to be between the ages of 21 and 60, temperate and landless.

"They were willing to leave their community, church, family, friends. It speaks to what options they had," said Ms. Kruczek-Aaron, an assistant professor of archaeology at SUNY Potsdam. "They were optimists; they had to be. I mean, that's a huge sacrifice."

The Adirondack settlement was dubbed "Timbucto" after the legendary capital of Mali in Africa. (There are multiple spellings of the name, but the one most commonly used is Timbucto — pronounced Tim-buck-too.)

"The idea was to prove to people that if given the opportunity, there was nothing about African-Americans that they couldn't succeed like anyone else," Ms. Kruczek-Aaron said.

The Eppses, like most other Timbucto settlers, arrived in the wilderness with no livestock, no seeds for crops and little money. They had to clear and farm the land quickly — before the snow began to fall — to pay back the property taxes the next year.

"It really makes you admire the determination people had," said Stefanie Kowalczyk, a 2008 graduate of SUNY Potsdam who worked as an assistant for the field school. "I think if someone said, 'Here's a 40-acre lot in the mountains; go move there with your family,' I'd say no, especially being African-American in an all-white rural community. You don't know if they're going to accept you."

Mr. Smith's generosity was also political. State law dictated that black men had to own $250 worth of property in order to vote. There was no property requirement for white men if they had paid taxes or served in a militia, as most had.

By enfranchising its residents, Timbucto had the potential to give Mr. Smith, a frequent political candidate, a larger base of voters and more political sway.

Mr. Smith, who gave away $8 million of his wealth during his lifetime, was one of the state's most prominent public figures in the mid-1800s. He eventually was elected to the House of Representatives in 1853 as a member of the Free-Soiler Party. He also ran for president three times on an anti-slavery platform.

Many of the Underground Railroad sites in New York state were on land owned by Mr. Smith.

As one of the wealthiest and most well-known abolitionists of his time, he befriended Frederick Douglass and John Brown, both of whom are better known today than he is.

Mr. Douglass, whose autobiography influenced many Northern whites' opinions about the cruelty of slavery, called for blacks to inhabit Mr. Smith's land.

In his abolitionist newspaper, the North Star, Mr. Douglass wrote about Timbucto:

"Hundreds there are who wish to go and settle upon these lands; they only need the means of living there for one season — of making one harvest, and all will be well after that."

As for John Brown, he was so impressed with Timbucto that he bought a farm from Mr. Smith and moved to Lake Placid with his family in 1849. There he met Mr. Epps, who helped him build his house and carved his name in a beam there. The two men even worked together to harbor fugitive slaves who moved through North Elba on their way to Canada.

But the concept of Timbucto was doomed practically from the start.

"Gerritt Smith had his ideas of what the rural lifestyle should be, but he was from Madison County, a farming community," Ms. Kruczek-Aaron said. "This is the Adirondack High Peaks. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to see that it was going to be challenging for these people to succeed."

According to a report by the Adirondack Museum at Blue Mountain Lake, "Many of these settlers ... had never been farmers. The lack of experience made the difficult land of the Adirondacks all the more challenging for these families. Very few of those endowed with land were actually able to stay."

"Timbucto was declared a failure by 1855," Ms. Kruczek-Aaron said. "The inclination was to blame the grantees for not trying hard enough. But one of them froze to death in their home, so people made a go of it."

After the demise of Timbucto, Mr. Smith and Mr. Brown began to contemplate a violent end to slavery.

"It is, perhaps, too late to bring slavery to an end by peaceable means — too late to vote it down," Mr. Smith wrote in an 1859 letter. "For many years I have feared, and published my fears, that it would go out in blood. These fears have grown into a belief."

Mr. Brown began plotting an attack to spur a slave revolt, a raid financed in part by Mr. Smith.

On Oct. 16, 1859, he and his followers assaulted the U.S. Arsenal at Harpers Ferry, (now West) Va., in a plan to use the captured weapons in a campaign to liberate slaves. Mr. Brown was caught, convicted of treason and hanged on Dec. 8, 1859.

At the funeral days later at Mr. Brown's Lake Placid home, Mr. Epps and his family stood on a small platform and sang a hymn called "The Year of Jubilee."

An account written in 1921 says this of Mr. Epps's singing that day: "Above the rich blend of the quartet floated the pure, sweet tenor of the old man Epps, in tones which might have come from the adolescent throat of a choir-boy. With closed eyes and uplifted head he sang as one inspired, and poured forth a swan-song of unearthly beauty."

The family also sang the same hymn in 1896, when Mr. Brown's farm was turned over to the state to become a museum and park.

Lyman Epps died in March 1897 and was buried in North Elba. His family held its original Timbucto plot of land until Mr. Epps's death.

The New York Times noted his passing, incorrectly calling him "one of the Negroes brought from the South by John Brown, the abolitionist, before the (Civil) war." The paper said he was a talented music teacher, and a "close friend and confidant" of Mr. Brown.

His last remaining survivor, Lyman Epps Jr., remained in Lake Placid and continued to sing and play the trumpet in honor of John Brown at ceremonies each year until his death in 1947.

The Epps family homestead is still delineated as the "Epps lot" on state Department of Environmental Conservation maps, but besides its approximate location, not much is known about it.

That's where Ms. Kruczek-Aaron and her students came in. Their goal was to understand the Timbucto settlers and their way of life — starting with the Eppses. This summer, they wanted to find what was left of the family's log cabin home.

"We want to shift the narrative of failure to a narrative of how these settlers made a go of it with all these obstacles before them. We want to honor their efforts, to see how they coped," Ms. Kruczek-Aaron said. "People know John Brown's part of the story, but they don't know the back story of Timbucto."

The students traveled to Lake Placid in July before taking a jostling 15-minute ride up a rocky dirt road called Bear Cub Lane, which ended at a site with a little log cabin and an outhouse. Their dig sites were a short hike away.

The students swept the Epps lot for clues while taking turns doing research at the Essex County clerk's office and historical society.

But the big break may have come from a photo. As her students were digging, Ms. Kruczek-Aaron received a call from a man whose grandparents used to own the Epps lot at the turn of the 20th century. He produced a photo of three log cabins in the woods.

She looked at the photo and compared it with a 1900 DEC map, which showed three little squares marking structures just outside the area delineated as the Epps property.

Something was different.

She began to wonder whether there was a reason the students were finding so few items. What if a bad survey years ago led the Eppses to settle on the wrong piece of land? What if current maps were simply off?

The professor obtained permission at the last minute from DEC to sweep with metal detectors the nearby plot where she thought the three cabins might have been.

And on the last day of searching, the digital "beep beep vroom" sound of metal detectors was filling the still silence of the summer afternoon. There were so many hits for metal in the area that the crew ran out of little pink flags to mark them all.

"This is great," Ms. Kruczek-Aaron said. "Students get a chance to see how many metal detector hits happen in a living area. Think of every nail, every tin can. It's a sign someone was living here, but we're not sure if it was the Epps. Clearly, there's something here."

The combination of metal hits and visible signs of life, like rotting beams of wood, deliberate-looking stone piles and 1950s-era glass bottles, indicated that at the very least, someone had resided there in the past half century.

Ms. Kruczek-Aaron surveyed the scene, smiling. Students called out GPS coordinates for each flag; others picked items up off to ground to show her.

"You have to look at the landscape in a whole new way when you have to be attuned to it," she said. "It's neat to see it all come together in the spot where we think it is. It's a shame it's the last day."

The question on everyone's mind was: What if those three cabins they had heard about were actually on the site of the former Epps homestead?

If, over the course of 150 years, the maps or the surveying had been wrong, it's possible that the Eppses had lived right there. Later, when other people bought the land to use for a camp, they may have simply used the Epps homestead as one of their cabins or built anew in the already cleared site, Ms. Kruczek-Aaron said.

What remains of the most emblematic Timbucto home could lie just a few feet below ground, about a quarter-mile from the area still marked on maps as the Epps lot.

The professor said she was glad her students saw that their search may not have been in vain, but she was also disappointed. Students couldn't pick up a shovel and dig in.

Obtaining permission to search the site was one thing. Receiving DEC permission to dig on state Forest Preserve land is another. Ms. Kruczek-Aaron would have to seek permission for a full excavation later.

Now that they're well into the fall semester on campus, the students are evaluating what they unearthed and speculating about what they didn't.

Their "find" gave the professor and students hope that they eventually will find the Epps homestead, but still left Ms. Kruczek-Aaron with more questions than answers.

"I've been reflecting a lot. Maybe this was a landscape of poverty. Maybe they just had such a meager existence that they didn't create a lot of refuse or they took care of what they had."

She plans to ask DEC to allow students to dig test pits to see if there are 19th century materials on the land adjacent to the Epps lot. If they receive permission, Ms. Kruczek-Aaron said she hopes to bring another field crew to conduct a dig there in 2011, when she is next scheduled to lead a field school with student help.

Students are examining each of their artifacts and creating a database.

"I like having my students learn more about the state, the community and the region, so they have a sense of place," Ms. Kruczek-Aaron said. "This is what archaeology really is; it's really tedious work. It's not just about finding treasure."

This year marks the 150th anniversary of John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry. That occasion has been marked with speeches, re-enactments, exhibitions and tours. Much less is known, however — let alone commemorated — about Mr.Brown's fellow farmer and friend, Lyman Epps.

Though the wilderness has reclaimed Timbucto, there may be a chance to memorialize its inhabitants yet. The college has not given up its search.

The archaeologists say they will once again follow the trail to Timbucto, searching for remnants of a remarkable moment in time — a moment that for now remains hidden in the bosom of the High Peaks.