The story of who we are is woven into the structures we build.

For years on this page, we’ve called for the towns we cover to catalog the structures that are important to them. We are thrilled that the town of New Scotland, working with the village of Voorheesville, has set up a committee that is doing just that.

It would be both cost prohibitive and foolhardy for a municipality to buy and preserve all of its historic buildings. But recognizing them as significant — researching and recording their history — is a start to raising consciousness of their worth. 

We were saddened last week to receive a letter from the treasurer of the Friends of the Schoolcraft Cultural Center, saying that group has disbanded. Under the leadership of the late Alice Begley, long-time Guilderland town historian, the Gothic Revival mansion on Western Avenue built for Congressman John L. Schoolcraft was saved from demolition and nearly restored to its former glory.

Alice Begley died on July 20 at the age of 95 and we had worried that, without her, the Schoolcraft House may fall into neglect. So we were relieved last week to hear from both Guilderland’s supervisor, Peter Barber, and the current town historian, Ann Wemple-Person, that they see the worth of preserving the Schoolcraft House to use for library lectures and other cultural events.

For our podcast last week, we spoke with Timothy Rau who builds post-and-beam buildings. He told us he was inspired by the words of John Ruskin, the Victorian English art critic and philosopher.

He read to us Ruskin’s words: “When we build, let us think that we build forever. Let it not be for present delight nor for present use alone. Let it be such work as our descendants will thank us for; and let us think, as we lay stone on stone, that a time is to come when those stones will be held sacred because our hands have touched them, and that men will say, as they look upon the labor and wrought substance of them, ‘See! This our fathers did for us.’”

How sad that, for many, old buildings are seen not as sacred but as something to be torn down in the name of progress.

Uses change, of course, as society changes. The massive Hilton Barn that was built in New Scotland a century ago to store hay is no longer needed for that. But town leaders with foresight saved it from demolition — making way for a new housing development — by moving it across the street. Now there is a vision that it can become a centerpiece for a new town park and the space inside can be used for everything from warming ice skaters to performing plays.

If we don’t respect what those before us built, we know less about our past and we look more like everywhere else in a massed-produced America.

In Altamont, decades ago, an historic home on the village square was torn down to make way for a modern bank. Now that so much banking has moved online, the bland brick-and-mortar building sits vacant; no one has shown interest in buying it since the bank closed.

On the other side of the village square is a magnificent emblem of Altamont’s history — a Victorian train station. It, too, was on the verge of being demolished, when a group of citizens intervened to save it.

Years later, it serves once again as a community center — the Altamont Free Library.

We need only glance at Altamont’s Museum in the Streets to see how the use of old buildings can adapt with time. What is now a spa on Maple Avenue was built as a harness shop and later housed the library and an insurance business. Across the street, a building that was constructed as a firehouse also served as village hall, and now is a shop where people are fitted with prosthetics.

The new Stewart’s Shop in Altamont opened this week. The village board made a zoning change, from residential to commercial, that led to demolishing an Edwardian two-family house so the new shop could be built. We wonder, if the state’s energy plan comes to fruition and cars fueled by gasoline are no longer driven in 30 years, what will become of the cookie-cutter building that replaced the Edwardian home. Will it stand empty like the bank building?

Timothy Rau, with his reverence for structures built by hand, offered us one last, tenuous hope for the 1833 Frederick Crounse House, where Altamont’s first doctor lived and practiced medicine. Dr. Crounse helped the Helderberg tenant farmers during the Anti-Rent Wars when they rebelled against the feudal patroon system.

And, rare in the Northeast, the Doctor Crounse House stands as a testament to Civil War history. During the war, the 134th regiment camped in front of Dr. Crounse’s house as he stayed up all night, helping the regiment doctor with the sick and wounded soldiers.

The town of Guilderland and the village of Altamont together purchased the historic house for $40,000 in back taxes in 2006 — and then let it languish. Other people had been interested in purchasing the house in which case it could have been restored and lived in today.

Once the municipalities purchased the house, they had a responsibility to take care of it. They used a grant that could have protected it with a new roof for something else. Now, the municipalities have each set aside $50,000 to demolish it.

Had that $100,000 been spent on the house, it might well have fulfilled the vision of then-Mayor James Gaughan who pictured a village museum there, or of the citizens’ group that thought an internationally-known timberwright could make it a showplace for that kind of construction.

Rau would like to work with the demolition crew to save at least the post-and-beam frame of the Crounse House with the idea it could be rebuilt elsewhere, perhaps at the Altamont fairgrounds where the public could appreciate it and learn from it. “There’s nothing more honest than a timber frame,” he says. “Everything is there for you to see — the marvel and the awe.”

We hope he is given that chance.

We were gripped this week with the idea of understanding history through buildings, even as their uses change, when we received a letter from Rosemary Christoff Dolan. She detailed the procedure she went through to get an historic marker for the Daniel Webster Jenkins House in Central Bridge, which she owns.

The grand Queen Anne Revival home was built by an important person in Central Bridge. Jenkins was a stationmaster at a time when the railroad transformed the community into a center of commerce. He was also an entrepreneur, dealing in coal, lumber, hay, and straw, and a community leader, serving as Schoharie’s supervisor, and helping to bring public water and a fire district to Central Bridge.

Few people in Central Bridge today could afford the lifestyle of the Jenkinses. The home is now inhabited by three households, living rooms carefully restored by Christoff Dolan.

Historic markers give us a way to put words with places, to understand history even if we are just passing by.

Christoff Dolan wrote to us because she read a letter in last week’s Enterprise, suggesting that, as our editorial called for a shared consciousness of slavery in our community, we should have an historic marker to note where Nan — the only name given on the 1813 bill of sale — was auctioned off.

Mary Ellen Johnson, who wrote the stunning column on slavery in Guilderland that inspired the editorial, is working on that now. She says it will be a long process to ferret out the original sources needed to qualify for an historic marker.

 In the meantime, we embrace her suggestion of having a marker that would denote as many of the enslaved people who helped to build the town as we can find and document.

If any of our readers have knowledge of these often unnamed people and their work, we would appreciate your stepping forward.

Enslaved people lived and worked in many of the historic houses that still stand in our town but the markers in front of these houses tell only the stories of the people who owned the slaves.

Now is the time to tell the rest of the story.