Saturday, April 01, 2006

Birchtown

I assume you've seen this stuff about the Black Loyalist village called Birchtown. If not, take a look.[Click here]

2 comments :

Geophile said...

Hadn't read about this before. Boy, they really need to post more and better photos of these piles if they want any informed speculation. I can't get a sense of what they're like at all. I guess to most people a stone pile is a stone pile, but we all know that's not true.

Interesting about the Africans building them, though. I had that thought when I went to Putnam County, NY, and saw the chambers there. (Maybe I can dig out some pictures . . . ) Very impressive, but they looked so new compared to stuff I'd been accustomed to looking at in PA, and in a very different style. Africans were one of the possibilities that came to mind.

Anonymous said...

One way to check this out would be to see if there is any stone building tradition among the Blacks in Africa that is similar to what has been found in Birchtown.

In a somewhat similar vein, an article appeared in the bulletin of the Connecticut Historical Society years ago that claimed that many of the stone features at Gungywamp could have been constructed by freed slaves. Blacks, we know, often intermarried with American Indians, both being persecuted people, and so one should not dismiss this idea outright without doing more research.