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A Place Called Home: Dispossession and Remembrance of a Central NY Landscape

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A Place Called Home: Dispossession and Remembrance of a Central NY Landscape A Place Called Home: Dispossession and Remembrance of a Central NY Landscape By L. Dean Bruno Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Vanderbilt University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in History August 31, 2018 Nashville, Tennessee Approved: Daniel H. Usner, Jr., Ph.D. Jane G. Landers, Ph.D. Michael Bess, Ph.D. Matthew Morse Booker, Ph.D. COPYRIGHT © 2018 by L. Dean Bruno All Rights Reserved ii Dedication To my parents, Louis and Donna Bruno, for encouraging me to lean into the wind and trod my own path. To my loving wife, Liz, with whom I gratefully share the journey. And to the people of Kendaia – past, present, and future. iii Acknowledgement With gratitude to my committee members, Michael Bess, Matthew Booker, Jane Landers, and especially to my advisor, Daniel Usner, Jr., for their guidance, questions, and encouragement. My deepest appreciation to Phyllis Button, Kenneth Dean, Aletha Hicks and Ed Montford, for sharing their thoughts and memories, and to Walt Gable, Seneca County Historian, for his generosity and support. My thanks to Vanderbilt University for research support from the Herbert and Blanche Henry Weaver Summer Research Fellowship, and the William Campbell Binkley Graduate Education Research Award. This dissertation greatly benefited from the opportunity to interact with faculty and fellow graduate students at the Newberry Library Consortium in American Indian Studies, Graduate Workshop: Cartography and Spatial Analysis in American Indian Studies, and the Newberry Library Consortium in American Indian Studies, Summer Institute: Territory, Commemoration, and Monument - Indigenous & Settler Histories of Place and Power. Finally, a salute to the professional staff members and volunteers that patiently answered my countless queries and were invaluable in locating archival records at the following institutions: Tioga County Historical Society and Museum, Chemung Valley History Museum (especially Rachel Dworkin), Romulus Historical Society (especially Yvonne Greule), Seneca Falls Historical Society, Ontario County Historical Society, Geneva Historical Society, Brown University Library, New York State Historical Association and Research Library, The History Center in Tompkins County, Cornell University Library - Rare and Manuscript Collections, Jean and Alexander Heard Libraries at Vanderbilt University, and the D.H. Hill Library at North Carolina State University. iv Table of Contents Dedication ....................................................................................................................................... ii Acknowledgement ......................................................................................................................... iii List of Figures ..................................................................................................................................v Introduction ......................................................................................................................................1 Chapter One: “That the Country May Not Be Merely Overrun, But Destroyed” .........................16 Chapter Two: “Came to Kendaia, Destroyed It” ...........................................................................37 Chapter Three: “Barbarians in 1779, Civilization in 1879” ..........................................................78 Chapter Four: “They Have Treated Us Like a Lot of Okies” ......................................................118 Epilogue: White Deer and the Contested Landscape of the Former Depot ................................152 Bibliography: ...............................................................................................................................163 v List of Figures Figure 1. Map of Seneca Army Depot .........................................................................................2 Figure 2. Haudenosaunee homelands ..........................................................................................5 Figure 3. Seneca Army Depot, Base Entrance .............................................................................8 Figure 4. Seneca Army Depot, Aerial Photograph of Munitions Bunkers ................................10 Figure 5. White Deer at the Seneca Army Depot ......................................................................11 Figure 6. Sign along Route 96, near the Seneca Army Depot ...................................................12 Figure 7. Major General John Sullivan ......................................................................................25 Figure 8. Sullivan Campaign Trail.............................................................................................37 Figure 9. Areas of Fruit Production in New York .....................................................................45 Figure 10. Indian Apple Tree Still Standing Near Geneva, NY, in 1904 ...................................47 Figure 11. The Military Tract Map by Simeon DeWitt, Surveyor General ...............................65 Figure 12. The 28 Townships of the New Military Tract ..........................................................66 Figure 13. New York First Regiment Bounty List ....................................................................67 Figure 14. Township of Romulus Lot List.................................................................................69 Figure 15. Township of Romulus Map (Township #11 .............................................................71 Figure 16. On The Way To The (Newtown) Battle-Field .........................................................78 Figure 17. American Progress, John Gast, 1872 ........................................................................82 Figure 18. Men Standing on Pile of Buffalo Skulls, Michigan Carbon Works .........................84 Figure 19. Battle of Newtown Monument .................................................................................93 Figure 20. Lower Yellowstone Falls, Hayden Expedition to Yellowstone ...............................98 Figure 21. Elmira Prison Camp ...............................................................................................103 Figure 22. Sullivan Centennial Grand Stand ...........................................................................104 Figure 23. “Tom Torlino, Navajo, before and after” ...............................................................111 vi Figure 24. “The Road Ahead” .................................................................................................121 Figure 25. John Taber ..............................................................................................................123 Figure 26. Letter to Ed Montford from the War Department ..................................................131 Figure 27. Home of the Montford family, summer 1941 ........................................................132 Figure 28. Workers at the Seneca Army Depot construction site ............................................134 Figure 29. Map of Romulus and Varick townships prior to the Seneca Army Depot .............135 Figure 30. Map of Romulus and Varick townships after the Seneca Army Depot .................136 Figure 31. “Folks at Kendaia see their home taken for the Seneca Army Depot” ..................139 Figure 32. Kendaia Baptist Church ..........................................................................................140 Figure 33. Model T Ford and other cars parked outside the Kendaia Church .........................142 Figure 34. Residents enter the Kendaia Church as Seneca Depot Police look on ...................143 Figure 35. Reverend Wagner preparing for the final service ...................................................143 Figure 36. Kendaia Baptist Church final service .....................................................................144 Figure 37. Munitions Igloo Construction at the Seneca Army Depot……………………….147 Figure 38. Kendaia Historic Marker along NYS Route 96A………………………………...150 Figure 39. White Does at Seneca Army Depot………………………………………………152 Figure 40. Seneca Army Depot, unofficial logo …………..………………………………...155 Figure 41. At Home, Seneca Army Depot………….……...………………………………...161 vii Introduction D. W. Meinig, the noted historical geographer, wrote “Life must be lived amidst that which has been made before. Every landscape is an accumulation. The past endures.”1 However, whoever controls the land not only determines how it is used, but also influences how its past is remembered or forgotten. Utilizing the grounds of the former Seneca Army Depot (Figure 1) in upstate New York as a lens, this dissertation investigates the diverse claims on this historic landscape, transformed by cycles of dispossession, and considers the significance of these conflicting accounts for those who once called this region home. In making claims of belonging, inhabitants constructed narratives about this physical place and cultural space that recounted how the land was gained, used, and remembered. These stories, which contained gaps and silences, were often more about how the people wanted to see themselves, than the actual terrain. As the ancestral territory of the Seneca and Cayuga people of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy (People of the Longhouse, Iroquois), this former colonial borderland, Revolutionary War battleground, farming community, World War II munitions depot, and Cold War nuclear weapons storage facility, is a militarized landscape that
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