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NYT Syndicate

From 1828-1830, a Gowanus landowner, Adriance Van Brunt, paused several times a week to record in a diary the events of that day he deemed worthy of mention. The diary, in neatly inked handwriting stretching from edge to edge, offers a detailed portrait of farm life near what was then the Village of Brooklyn.
There is a summary of a preacher's Sunday sermon ”"ye are my witness" ” and the dutiful accountings of purchases and sales."Little Albert took some potatoes and pears to market," Van Brunt wrote one day in 1828. On another:"Rained first time since the 4th August."
But other entries in the diary disturb the quaint veneer of a bygone era and remind the modern reader of how tangible and ingrained the legacy of slavery was in New York in the early 19th century.
More urgently, the diary may complicate the city's intent to build a new school on part of what was the Van Brunt farm, with its hint at the possibility that slaves are buried in unmarked graves on the lot.
"Buried old Mr Bennet Aged 80," Van Brunt wrote in September 1828."Also a Black woman." The following month, he wrote:"Buried Oct 1 Nancy (Black girl) aged about 12 years."
The city selected the long-vacant lot, running from Eighth Street to Ninth Street near Third Avenue, as the site of a new prekindergarten in 2015. The state's Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation is reviewing the possibility that artifacts or human remains exist on the site, and hired an environmental consulting firm, AKRF Inc, to dig several feet down in several parts of the lot.
The digging did not produce any remains, but the parks office requested more data from AKRF before making its recommendation to the city School Construction Authority on whether to build there.
The Van Brunt diary has long been available for viewing, in a temperature-controlled room by appointment only, at the New York Public Library Brooke Russell Astor Reading Room for rare books and manuscripts on Fifth Avenue. An assistant US attorney in the Eastern District of New York, Kevan Cleary, recently came across the diary while conducting a title search for the property. Cleary forwarded his findings to The New York Times.
In the 1820s, some 200 years after the first Dutch settlers arrived, Gowanus was mostly farmland, not yet part of Brooklyn. The property containing the lot in question belonged to the Staats family, who sold it to Cornelius Van Brunt in 1786, the environmental consultants investigating the site wrote in a preliminary report last year. The deed of that sale described the 120-acre property as"containing a house, an outhouse, farmland, orchards, gardens, woodlands, meadows, pastures, watercourses, and fishing and fowling easements," AKRF stated in the report.
The Van Brunts were one of the pioneer families of Brooklyn and prominent landowners in the area, and that particular farm was handed down to one of Cornelius Van Brunt's sons, Adriance.
The family, like many in Brooklyn, owned slaves. In 1790, four years after the Van Brunts bought the farm, 30 percent of the population of Brooklyn was of African descent, and most of them were slaves, according to the Brooklyn Historical Society.
"Even after the Revolutionary War, when notions of freedom and liberty permeated the American consciousness, Kings County remained a committed slave society," the historical society wrote in an article related to an exhibition on the papers of the powerful Lefferts family."The area's farmers relied on enslaved labour for their agricultural needs, even while slavery was on the decline in other parts of New York state."
The 1800 census listed the Van Brunt family as owning two slaves, the consultants' report states. Ten years later, that number had risen to five. Adriance Van Brunt freed two slaves in 1821, six years before the practice was abolished, and seven years before the first entry in his diary.
The diary is a starting point in seeking the slaves' burial site, its entries written hours after the deaths occurred.
The speculation that there are unmarked graves of a different sort in the area is as old as the country itself, beginning in the aftermath of the Battle of Brooklyn. During that battle, on August 27, 1776, a group of Colonial fighters from Maryland, later dubbed the"Maryland 400," engaged the British in a suicidal attack that allowed Gen George Washington and his troops to retreat. Local historians have long theorised that the Marylanders were buried in a mass grave that would have included the lot for the proposed school.
A cornerstone of the mass-grave theory is a book about the battle written in 1869 by TW Field, who suggested that soldiers were buried among slaves on the Van Brunt farm, on a"miniature island" within a"remorseless swamp," an area later covered by several feet of fill, and paved for streets.
"Far below the present surface, mingled with the remains of the servile sons of Africa whose burial ground it also was, lies the dust of those brave boys who found death easier than flight, and gave their lives to save their countrymen," Field wrote.
But this account was based on"likely exaggerated newspaper accounts from 1776" and secondhand sources in the 1800s, according to the consultants investigating the site. Scholars believe the Maryland dead likely numbered around 25, with far more captured or wounded. The dead bodies, in the sweltering summer heat, were almost certainly buried quickly where they fell, in the vicinity of the battlefield near what is today Third Street and Fourth Avenue.
This has not discouraged local historians and the Michael A Rawley Jr. American Legion Post, adjacent to the lot, from proposing a memorial to the Maryland 400, and a plaque honouring the dead stands outside.
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09/08/2017
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