How do we know our history?

One way is through stories. We’re aware each week as we assemble our news stories that The Enterprise provides the first take of local history. Historical societies in the Hilltowns and New Scotland and Guilderland rely on Enterprise accounts of over a century ago — our paper will be 140 this year — to piece together their town and village and hamlet histories.

Guilderland’s town historian, our columnist Mary Ellen Johnston, regularly relies on Enterprise stories to tell our readers about everything from long-ago Christmases to the central role played by mills in town.

In recent years, through podcasts, we’ve documented stories in which our listeners can hear the voices of people who have created and lived local history.

Objects, too, are important and have their own stories to tell.

Several of our historical societies, largely through the work of dedicated volunteers, tell the story of local history through items on display. Visitors to the museum at the Saddlemire Homestead, for example, can learn about when Knox was known as the pillbox capital of the world.

Our local history of course predates the European settlers. We’ve been pleased to document local efforts to acknowledge the Indigenous people who first lived on this land.

The New York State Museum has an exhibit running through March, “Each One Inspired: Indigenous Art Across the Homelands” that looks at the sources of inspiration for Indigenous artists across what is now New York. 

One of the works on display is a beaded bag of a buzzard flying under a golden sun created by Karen Ann Hoffman, an Oneida artist who does traditional beadwork. Her original creations are rooted in Haudenosaunee stories and customs.

She describes, in a museum video, how she came to create her “Bernard the Buzzard Bag.” She and her husband, on trips into town, would often admire the beautiful buzzards feasting on raccoons and other roadkill. One September day as they drove to town, a buzzard did not fly away but just stayed on the road.

On their way back home, after shopping in town, the buzzard, which they had moved off the side of the road, was still there. Hoffman suggested to her husband that he “put him out of his misery.” Her husband said the bird looked up at him and flapped his wing and he “couldn’t do the deed.”

So they drove the buzzard, whom they called Bernard, 100 miles to a recovery center where he ultimately died from internal injuries.

Five seasons later, as Hoffman and her husband walked on their 40-acre property, an amazing buzzard flew overhead. “I guess that’s Bernard and he wants me to bead him,” Hoffman said to her husband.

She recalled the story of how birds, with help from the deer, got their feathers. The buzzard flew so close to the sun that it was burned and has a red head to this day.

Hoffman used gold beads to make the sun at the top of her bag — they came from a friend who visited the pyramids in Egypt as he studied the power of place; she kept the beads for years, waiting for the right place to use them.

She used red beads for the buzzard’s head and six different kinds of black beads to capture his body and wings — all outlined in gold — “because the elder brother shines on him.”

Hoffman explained that tradition makes the choices for the colors she uses. “So that, in 200 years when somebody comes to your museum and visits with Bernard,” she said of the buzzard, “I’ve given him everything he needs to convey his tradition to whatever audience comes to have a conversation with him.”

We like that idea — of conversing with objects through the ages.

It reminds us of what Lansing Christman wrote about old barns. 

“Old barns are like old scribes,” wrote Christman, an old scribe himself. He was in his nineties when he wrote a weekly column for The Altamont Enterprise. 

A farm boy from the Hilltowns, the son of a poet, Christman had started writing for our paper when he was 17. He was the editor of The Enterprise during the Great Depression.

He couldn’t afford to go to college but went on to be the news director of one of the country’s first television stations and published poetry in papers like The New York Times and The Washington Post. He died in 2006 at the age of 96.

In his last years, Christman wrote a weekly column for us called “Countryside Gleanings” with prose that read like poetry.

Christman had this to say about barns: “I played in barns as a boy. I worked in them as a man. I rested in them on rainy Summer afternoons with the raindrops on the shingled roof sending me off to sleep while swallows chattered overhead.”

Barns were a constant in his life as they had been for many Americans since the United States was founded.

When the country was built, most Americans were farmers. Barns were necessary structures to house animals and crops but they also became symbols of community spirit as people pitched in to raise them. 

Barns were once more important than the dwellings for people. My home is a case in point. I live in a house in Guilderland built by the Crounses in the late 1700s at the foot of the Helderbergs. The original structure was more barn than house. The sleeping loft over the kitchen with the brick hearth for cooking made up the portion meant for people; it is dwarfed by the attached space built for animals. 

Our property is typical in other ways, too. The land lies fallow, no longer farmed, and the many outbuildings, including a massive barn, its timbers sold to developers looking for hand-hewn beams, have crumbled and fallen.

Historic barns were once considered doomed, obsolete for modern farming needs. But the National Trust for Historic Preservation in 1987 launched a campaign called Barn Again! that is emblematic of changing attitudes.

The program, according to the National Trust, has shown how historic barns can be adapted for new farming uses ranging from dairy, hog, and cattle operations to machinery or grain storage. Barn preservation techniques have proven to be cost-effective alternatives to tearing down old barns and putting up new ones.

Barns can also be adapted for modern nonagricultural uses. A case in point, which we’ve lauded before on this page, is the town of New Scotland’s salvation of a 125-year-old barn. The Hilton Barn was to be torn down for a housing development when forward-looking town leaders arranged to have it moved across the road and are now working to make it a community center.

Lands around it have been conserved and, as New Scotland rapidly becomes developed, the barn will serve as a reminder of the town’s rural heritage.

We are writing about barns this week because Noah Zweifel has a front-page story about two historic barns in the Hilltowns that are being dismantled along with a third Dutch barn in New Jersey. Together, the three barns will be used to build an office complex in Nebraska.

Certainly, it is better to have barns rebuilt elsewhere rather than having them fall into ruin here. And the two brothers doing the deconstruction, Corey and Justin Nellis, have a deep appreciation for Dutch barns, which are part of their own family heritage.

But it would be best to have our historic barns creatively adapted to a new use here so that they could continue to tell the story of our local history in the place where they were built.

In the 1970s, a half-century ago, The Enterprise, through the work of the late John Wolcott, mapped the remaining 18th-Century Dutch barns in Guilderland, which were typically built a half-century before the Dutch barns in the Hilltowns.

“‘Guilderland’ means ‘land of worth or value,’” wrote Wolcott. “If we think of value in terms other than money, then Guilderland’s Dutch barns must be considered its richest historic treasure.”

He further noted that the city of Albany “has only one or two vestiges of urban Dutch architecture as tokens of its origins” but posited that Guilderland “could be famous for its barns and proud of them.”

Wolcott was writing just after the nation’s bicentennial celebration when there was a renewed interest in history. As we approach the 250th anniversary of the founding of our country, now would be a good time to pay attention to the history of these barns, including the one in Guilderland where, in August 1777, a group of Tories were captured.

“It is one thing to eulogize American civilization and local history during the Bicentennial,” Wolcott wrote in 1977, “but we need to do something about preserving the monuments of the area’s agricultural origin, and to promote public spiritedness, and community pride and cooperation.”

We’re sad to report that, since Wolcott wrote those words, many of those historic barns have fallen into ruin or burned or been demolished. Others have been dismantled and rebuilt elsewhere. In 1988, an Eagle Scout, Chip Foster, documented 21 remaining in town; he was thrilled to find the date 1779 carved into one of them.

The timbers that framed Dutch barns can be up to 30 feet long and a foot or two wide, and were cut from virgin forests that no longer exist, often of yellow pine, which is now extinct. The center H frame, with its mortise-and tenon joints, can move with the winds and bear great loads.

A horse-drawn wagon could drive through the center space, which was also used for threshing. Some Dutch barns in the New World were built a century before the American Revolution.

The kinds of barns that were later built by European settlers in America reflect the heritage of their own homelands. Taken together, they tell of the diversity of people who built our country.

Once our oldest barns fall, a link with our past is forever lost. Surviving barns have become landmarks, proud reminders of our history. Unlike the pre-fab buildings that blanket our landscape, our remaining old barns distinguish us.

In 2022, New York state recognized the communal importance of old barns when it enacted a program that offers owners of historic barns a state income tax credit equal to 25-percent of qualified rehabilitation costs.

Some towns in our area have also instituted incentives to encourage the preservation of old barns.

These incentives need to be publicized and used if we are to preserve the important history told by our barns.

In the way Karen Ann Hoffman imagines state museum visitors two centuries from now conversing with the buzzard she so artfully created from beads, we currently can converse with the Dutch barns carefully constructed in our midst more than two centuries ago.

We’d like to see that conversation continue in the centuries ahead.

As Lansing Christman wrote of old barns, “They write their rhythmic lines out in the fields far back from the road. They stand alone, surrounded by the land they once served. Theirs is a script that has lasted well, a chronology of life and time, a journal of the years, a record of harvests from the field ….”