Eddie Moran, Ulster County’s first full-time historian, says America’s 250th birthday is an opportunity for Hudson Valley residents to look beyond 1776 to seek a better understanding of the role local officials played in the Revolution and the displacement of the Esopus, whose descendants now live in Ontario, Canada. The 2020 SUNY New Paltz graduate, himself the descendant of Dutch and Huguenot settlers, will speak about the county’s role in the war during an April 2 talk at the Olive Free Library. He plans to travel to Ontario in coming weeks on behalf of the county to help rebuild its relationship with the Esopus.
What exactly does the Ulster County historian do? What does your day-to-day look like?
As the first full-time county historian, my day-to-day job broadly falls into three categories.
One is helping the public with research questions related to Ulster County’s history. That could be anything from someone whose family hasn’t lived here in 300 years but is doing genealogy to someone who lives here now and wants to research their house to an academic researching something like enslavement here in the 17th century.
The second big category is almost serving as a historical consultant here in Ulster County, supporting our local museums and historic sites, supporting our town historians and serving as a resource for our history to county government.
The third broad category is my own research. That varies a lot in topic, but my two primary research areas are Native American history here in the area and, especially, the history of enslavement here during the colonial era. I’m required to do my own primary-source research, and I’m giving lots of presentations around the county right now on the Revolution.
What does America’s 250th anniversary mean for Ulster County?
Here in Ulster County, almost all of the dates I would point to as being the most pivotal ones are not July 4, 1776. We all know who George Washington is. We all know when the Declaration of Independence was signed. And yet I think most people in Ulster County would struggle to know the name of the person from Ulster County who served as a delegate to the First Continental Congress, for example, George Clinton, or might be surprised to know that Kingston was burned down.
There were raids happening up and down the Rondout Valley on the west side of Ulster County. There was really a civil war taking place there between Loyalists, Native people, and Patriot-aligned colonists. There’s a battle close to where West Point is now where hundreds of Ulster County men are either taken captive or die.
Those are pivotal events that reflect the fact that the Hudson Valley was really seen as instrumental to winning the war.
What are you working on during this anniversary period?
One of the things we’re doing is giving talks all around Ulster County at local historic sites and libraries.
Both my talks and the programs we’re supporting emphasize telling not just that more nuanced story, but a story that includes the perspectives of all the people who lived here. Many people who live in Ulster County today might be surprised to know that the Native population of Ulster County was still here 130 years after colonization first began, when the Revolution was taking place.
They might be even more surprised to know that for very nearly as long as there have been people of European descent here there have been people of African descent here. There have been people of the Jewish faith in Ulster County going back to the early 18th century.
Providing a view of the Revolution that accounts for the different perspectives and the decisions that were impactful for all of these different individuals is deeply important.
Another project we’re really pressing right now is building greater relations with the Native people of Ulster County. The people who lived here were speakers of a language called Lenape, an Eastern Algonquian language. They spoke a dialect of Lenape called Munsee, and went by an individual name here during the time of colonization called the Esopus.
The most direct descendants of the Munsee speakers who would have lived on the west side of the Hudson are living in three federally recognized nations in Ontario, Canada.
You’re planning a trip to Ontario. What is the goal?
I was blessed to work at Historic Huguenot Street, where they were really the first museum in our area in Ulster County to begin trying to build a relationship with the sovereign nations. I was able to bring that effort here to the Ulster County government.
In just about two weeks from now, I’m blessed to be going to visit the tribal governments in Ontario, Canada, on behalf of our county government, to meet with their chiefs and tribal councils, and then hopefully continue to build this relationship into the future.
What does that relationship look like in an ideal world?
We actually still have a treaty technically in place with these tribal governments.
There were two wars fought here in Ulster County between the Esopus people and the Dutch colonists who were here in Kingston and eventually in Hurley. They’re called the first and second Esopus Wars. They fought from 1659 to 1660, and the second one was fought in 1663.
The wars took place over land encroachment on Native land, cultural misunderstandings, alcohol, the toll of disease on the Native population and the degradation of the local environment by the colonists that the Native people had depended on and that their spirituality was intertwined with for thousands of years.
In the aftermath of those wars, both sides are weakened. The Dutch technically win, but no one really wins, and the English take over right after. Both sides sign what we call the treaty: the Nicolls treaty. It’s an agreement not only to end this conflict, but an agreement for the two sides to live in peace in perpetuity. They agree not only to live in peace, but to support one another, trade with one another, be friends and allies, and renew that treaty every year.
It’s signed in 1665. It is renewed almost yearly up until 1776. And it’s in 1776, with the outbreak of the American Revolution, that the treaty is broken. The Esopus people eventually come to side with the British, and the Ulster County government is fervently in favor of independence. When that treaty is broken, we have not had another treaty renewal with these tribes since then.
Actually, the American Revolution is the way by which they get forced from here into Canada. So they’re still there as a product of the Revolution today.
So this is the first time that we’re endeavoring to build a relationship with them, and hopefully to renew that treaty and begin meeting our treaty goals. That means education. It means supporting them and having access to their land here again. It means ensuring that the way history is preserved here is done in a way that respects their spirituality, their perspective, and their preferences.
Does that relationship-building have real-world consequences?
It does.
We had to, about a year ago, go through a review of all of our archaeological collections with these tribal governments to make sure we don’t have anything that doesn’t belong to us. Anything that might have come out of a grave, for instance.
But an institution like SUNY New Paltz, for instance, had remains of Native people that should have never left the ground, and they were returned to the tribe and the tribe was able to bury them properly once again.
So it has really real-world consequences.
We still have the original wampum belt here in our archives today, along with the treaty from 1665 and all the renewals in the Ulster County archive. And we’re really able to see in the records, in the archaeology, why it’s so important, the damage that was done by those conflicts.
Noah Eckstein is the editor-in-chief of The Overlook. Send correspondence to noah@theoverlooknews.com.