Donna Dixon recalls the moment when a bill of sale document was not just a transaction. It was about the reality of two people’s lives. The November 23, 1764 bill of sale from one enslaver, James MacLister, to another enslaver, Jaremiah Smith, conveyed — as property — a 27-year-old woman named Page and her 11-month-old child. Dixon looked at how the bill of sale, inscribed neatly using a quill and pot of ink, stated that Page and her child were sold by MacLister and bought by Smith as “Slaves for life sound and well as far as anything yet discovered.” The three words “Slaves for life” especially stood out, as Dixon, the Digital Librarian at Historic Huguenot Street (HHS), remembers. It’s one of those moments when one understands even more deeply just how important it is to conserve such documents, digitize and describe them, and put them online so that many more people will see, learn about and understand them and the history they convey.
Thanks to a major three-year grant of $349,999 from the National Endowment for the Humanities, this is work that Historic Huguenot Street is conducting, with its archival collection, and with portions of those at four partnering entities — the Haviland-Heidgerd Historical Collection at Elting Memorial Library, the Town of New Paltz and the Reformed Church of New Paltz. The New Paltz Historic Documents project to digitize these archival collections encompasses approximately 8,000 documents (or about 24,000 pages), according to HHS.
“We’ve known for a long time how important these documents are,” says Josephine Bloodgood, Director of Curatorial and Preservation Affairs at HHS, who is leading the project and coordinating with the three partner organizations. The grant, to put it simply, is allowing a comprehensive approach to conserving a priceless trove of early American documents centered in New Paltz and making them far more accessible. This is happening through digitizing the documents, describing, categorizing, annotating the data sets using metadata, and putting the documents online, where the collection will be available for varied audiences and uses. Under the NEH grant, HHS has engaged an Advisory Committee of scholars from universities and other entities to ensure that the highest educational standards are met.
The documents are being uploaded online at New York Heritage Digital Collections, as a collection under the project’s title: New Paltz Historic Documents (https://nyheritage.org/collections/new-paltz-historic-documents). The collection is searchable.
As the project proceeds through its second year, HHS has been periodically sharing behind-the-scenes highlights on social media and explaining to the public the painstaking processes of conservation.
Thankfully, the collections are in remarkable condition overall, according to HHS. Still, about 20-30 percent have some type of damage, ranging from mold, discoloration, and brittleness to poor-quality mending or taping, tears, and dirt. As Bloodgood describes the effect of damage, “how do you deal with something that would fall apart if I turned the page?”
Very delicately, to be sure. With grant money, HHS has hired professional consultants from the Conservation Center for Art and Historic Artifacts (CCAHA), in Philadelphia. During an earlier planning grant from the NEH, CCAHA paper conservators examined selected items to assess the collections’ conditions. Now, the professional conservators are doing document treatments, such as cleaning surfaces with a HEPA vacuum and specialized brushes and sponges, mending tears, and removing tape mechanically or with heat and/or solvents.
The word document hardly does justice to the wide array of archival materials from New Paltz’s earliest two-plus centuries of European settlement and growth. The Haviland-Heidgerd Collection portion for the project’s years, for instance, includes deeds, account ledgers, wills, inventories, church records, fire department records, maps, and other materials, according to Carol Johnson, Collections Coordinator, who has some 40 years of work and expertise in New Paltz history.
“In New Paltz, it’s incredible that we have so much in terms of documents,” Johnson says. The original families of the Huguenot settlement kept very complete records of varied facets of their lives and subsequent generations kept up this practice.“I think of them as semi-hoarders,” she says with a smile, adding, “They collected and kept so much of their documents.”
To grasp the richness of these archival collections, it’s important to understand the crosscurrents of history from the town’s earliest days of European settlement. As the digital collection’s intro notes, “The story of New Paltz is a nationally significant one, comprising the experiences and stories of Native American, French, Dutch, and African peoples.” The Town of New Paltz was established in 1677, when 12 French Huguenot men and their families, seeking religious freedom and economic opportunity, signed an agreement with sachems of the Esopus-Munsee tribe to live on nearly 40,000 acres of the tribal land.
This introduction to the collection further explains the context: New Paltz’s first European settlers are understood to have been a combination of Huguenots (French-speaking Protestants from France) and Walloons (French-speaking Walloons from present-day Belgium). These French-speaking settlers lived among Dutch-speaking settlers in Hurley for nearly a decade before New Paltz’s establishment. Members of each group did business with each other. Ultimately, they intermarried. Slavery was being practiced under Dutch colonial role and expanded under British rule, and documented evidence shows that New Paltz’s founding settlers became enslavers from the point of the town’s beginning.
“HHS’s New Paltz project illustrates the fascinating ways in which a small, astonishingly complex Hudson River town perhaps unexpectedly exemplified major features of America’s story, with distinctive and captivating local features,” namely “social life, economy, race, ethnic relations, and religion,” Jon Butler, historian, Yale University professor emeritus, and author of Becoming America: The Revolution Before 1776, has observed.
Making these New Paltz historical collections more accessible is sure to help expand the knowledge of the day-to-day lives, relationships, and other important facets about women, African descendants who were enslaved in New Paltz, and indigenous people. HHS has done much in recent years to add to the understanding of these long-neglected portions of American history. One example is an exhibit that HHS created about Jane Deyo Wynkoop, one of the first African Americans to purchase land in New Paltz. (It can be accessed at: https://omeka.hrvh.org/exhibits/show/jane-deyo-wynkoop/introduction.) In this exhibit, Dixon cites how a single receipt gave evidence of a man named Daniel Van Wagenen requesting “the corn of your negro James,” referring to the corn that an enslaved young man, James, grew, providing some evidence that his product was known as high-quality.
Yet, as those at HHS and Elting talk about the New Paltz Historic Documents project, it is evident that their passion is for how the public will have increased access to so much more. While the Haviland-Heidgerd Historical Collection has some parts of its collection online, as does HHS, the number of documents will increase exponentially. “It’s going from somewhat inaccessible to totally accessible,” says Margaret Stanne, Collections Manager at Haviland-Heidgerd.
As the collections are digitized and placed online, a key challenge will be spreading the word so that people know about and make use of the New Paltz Historic Documents collection, in the myriad ways that are possible, according to Bloodgood. People already seek help at these institutions for genealogical research, and that is likely to increase even more. Also, Johnson says that more new homeowners in New Paltz are seeking to research the histories of their homes. She laments one unhelpful development: The teaching of local history in schools has become less of a priority than it was before. Still, the digital collection is likely to draw many types of users, such as historians, scholars in other fields, authors, religious groups, and representatives of various communities, and students.
For those involved in the project, it has allowed new discoveries as the documents are digitized. Johnson cites the finding of the earliest large New Paltz map that shows the names of households on it, from 1774. The map was found in a box of deeds. It has also engendered a feeling that a large swath of New Paltz’s collections of documents — the items that were found in old closets, attics, office drawers, and such, then categorized carefully, and boxed — are going to be of immense use to a wider audience for many years to come. As Stanne sees it, the digitizing of so much of the town’s historic documents will create a “bigger tapestry, a bigger story” of New Paltz.
In Johnson’s view, the accessibility is fitting. As she says, “The collection really is the public’s. It’s not ours.”
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