To the Editor:

A good historian uses all the facts and resources at his or her disposal to try to get to the bottom of the historical question at hand and approaches that question with an open mind. Figuring out exactly what is our history is not a perfect process.

It works best when those facts and resources are not cherry-picked so as to lean the evidence toward or away from some personal bias or a preconceived version of correctness. Accurate history is the conclusion reached from a preponderance of the unbiased reliable evidence available.

Even good historians don’t always get it right the first time. Some facts or resources may remain undiscovered, available ones might elude us, or they may contain errors. Long-held assumptions can be challenged and updated as new facts come to light or old ones are proven wrong. This is how our evolving historical narrative functions at its best.

Assumptions going back to at least 1845 are being challenged by research reexamining details of the historical narrative of the only battle of the American Revolution fought within today’s Albany County, the Battle of Normanskill. [“New location posited for site of historic battle,” The Altamont Enterprise, May 21, 2025].

These assumptions stem from an account of the battle published by Jeptha Simms in his 1845 “History of Schoharie County and Border Wars of New York.”

Simms’s narrative, based on secondhand information relayed to him about 68 years after the event occurred, says that Continental Army troops of Rhode Island, stationed at Schenectady, were called out to the Normanskill to disperse Tories in August 1777, the engagement we know as the Battle of Normanskill. These troops have been further assumed to be of the First Rhode Island Regiment.

Simms has been assumed to be correct until recently, his version of events even memorialized on a blue and gold roadside marker in 1954. Several documents, contemporaneous to the battle, have been found that place some 9th Massachusetts Regiment troops, led by their Captain Abram Childs, at Schenectady instead of the Rhode Island men.

Military records show the 1st Rhode Island Regiment was a hundred miles to the south of there at that time, being part of the Highlands Department of the Continental Army with a mission of holding the Hudson and Delaware Rivers. Shortly thereafter, they accomplished the stunning defense of Fort Mercer at Redbank, turning the tide of Washington’s Philadelphia Campaign.

The Continentals at the Battle of Normanskill had to be from Massachusetts, not Rhode Island.

Although we would be lost without the breadth of local history that Jeptha Simms immortalized in his pages, this is not the first time a historical marker has touted his words and later been disproven. This update of the historical record does not diminish the importance of the Battle of Normanskill.

I emphatically say, it in no way takes away from the contribution, bravery, and heroism of the men of the 1st Rhode Island Regiment in the Revolutionary War at battles like Redbank, Pines Bridge, Rhode Island, Yorktown, and the winter at Valley Forge.

I encourage the Albany County 250th Commission to embrace this important correction to the historical record, just as they have the other exciting newly discovered information about the actual site of the Battle of Normanskill. These are fascinating times for Albany County history!

Mark Stolzenburg

Gallupville