The Big Oyster Read Free Page B

until many years after it was named for a midden. The Dutch found another midden at what is now the intersection of Canal Street and the Bowery and called it
Kalch-Hook,
Shell-Point.
    Another pile was found alongside a forty-foot-deep inland pond, a favorite fishing spot of the Lenape and later the English, in the marshlands of lower Manhattan. The Dutch named the pond after the pile of oyster shells, calling it
Kalck,
which is Dutch for “lime,” the principal component of oyster shells. Later in the seventeenth century, when the British replaced the Dutch as the administrators of Manhattan, they, too, were struck by these shell piles. In 1692, Charles Lodwick wrote a letter back to England in which he reported, “Many shells of oysters and other shellfish are found up on high hills as well as valleys and sometimes two or three foot within the earth, but are supposed to have been brought there by the natives and fishing having served them for food, and the shell rotting serve for dung which is common in these parts now coming the Christians.”
    Actually, shells don’t rot even for Christians, and some of them are thousands of years old. But the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century European settlers sometimes took these shells and placed them in fields, where the lime would neutralize acid soil, a technique known at the time as “sweetening” the soil. They also burned shells to render lime paste to be used in colonial construction.
    The middens were simply piles of shells. No one thought to seriously study these piles until the late nineteenth century. But they had always been something of a fascination on the landscape for some New Yorkers. Daniel Tredwell, a Brooklyn writer and journalist who lived from 1826 until 1921, wrote in his diary how he and his father enjoyed exploring middens in the 1830s. He wrote in 1839: “On the way out we pass many Indian shell heaps bleached as white as snow, which they much resemble at a distance. Some of them on the banks of the creek extend from fifteen to thirty feet upon the bank, and under water, in many instances entirely across the creek. These shell heaps, long ere this, has excited our curiosity and we had proposed all manner of questioning concerning their authors. These questions my father did not and could not satisfactorily answer, and we were consequently unsatisfied, and hence there was a constantly recurring inquiry.”
    Many shell middens have survived. Up until the end of the nineteenth century, there were a number of them on the Rockaway Peninsula area—in the marshes of Woodmere Bay, Inwood, Hog (or Barnum’s) Island, and Far Rockaway. A particularly large one was a familiar sight in the Bayswater section of Far Rockaway. The middens even survived after Rockaway was developed as a beach resort in the late nineteenth century with the help of a fifty-cent train fare from Manhattan. But in the early twentieth century, when roads were being built for new automobiles, thousands of tons of shells were hauled away to use for road fill.
    Most of the middens in Manhattan, Staten Island, and western Long Island are now gone. Numerous known sites lie beneath railroad tracks, city streets, dredged landfill, highways that hug the coastline, and docks. The Hudson railroad line was built along the eastern bank of the Hudson, tearing through numerous middens in the area just north of the city without regard for their archaeological value. What little remains of the midden near the Kalck Pond is covered by federal and state courthouses and the shops and restaurants of Chinatown. Archaeologists have found shells under some of the courthouses. In the twenty-first century, archaeologists and preservationists have been battling developers along the eastern Hudson bank to save some of the oldest middens of North America. In Dobbs Ferry, locals fought to stop a forty-four-acre condominium project that threatened to obliterate the oldest midden ever