Addendum Dated 7/00

It is almost fifty years ago now that I discovered the IF Site.  The regional name for the area alone had first suggested to me there might be remains here.  The then-curator of the small local natural history Bruce Museum, Dr. Paul Howes, greatly encouraged me in this undertaking.  Howes had on exhibit in his museum a number of artifacts he had obtained many years earlier from a house driveway excavation further north along Indian Field Road.  Once I had gained permission from the owner of the large estate to survey upon his land, it soon became apparent that this had been the locus for a large Indian settlement.  (He was as I recall himself an Ornithologist with the AMNH in NYC and quite supportive of archeological survey.  He was one of the few land-owners I was ever to deal with subsequently who never demanded a cut up front for all the “gold” I would find on their lands, and the real reason behind why anyone would have an interest in “archeology and old bones!” anyhow, as most laymen readily assert!)  The estate at that time was at least partly self-sustaining, and had a large dairy herd for which they kept many acres of corn under cultivation.  It was by patiently searching these plowed corn rows that I was able - working mostly alone then – to delineate the rather very large area (see map) in which remains occurred.

Eventually I concentrated my efforts in the northern end as most productive.

This was my first formally studied site and site report – perhaps “dated” some now I suppose, but this was the level of research back then and where American Archeology largely stood.  There was still a lot of terra incognito.

The report was published about six years later, in 1958.  A very interesting thing – perhaps illustrative of pitfalls that sometimes hamper archeological endeavor - happened maybe about 10 or 15 years later.  (I cannot recall the exact date).  What I do clearly recall is that somehow I “heard” that there was a newly active “Greenwich Archeology Club” in the area (by that time I was living in nearby Stamford).  Someone told me this “Club” was having a “Field Day” on one of its newly-found sites and invited me to attend a morning workshop and lecture one weekend  - I believe it was at the famous old “Put’s Tavern” on Put’s Hill in Greenwich (site of a famous Revolutionary War event concerning old Gen. Israel Putnam).

We were later shepherded into buses and I seem to recall a bag lunch was handed out to each attendee as part of the registration fee, etc.   Then we were off – to visit the “exciting new dig” this group had just opened somewhere “down near the water” in the Town of Greenwich, but whose whereabouts were being kept as a surprise….

The buses headed back east toward Indian Field Road and then turned south….  Soon we pulled into the upper meadow area of my old IF Site!  I said nothing – my traveling companion for the day was the late Louis Brennan, the talented newspaperman and avocational archeologist from over around Croton-on-Hudson, NY – and onetime author of a Book-of-the-Month Club selection on popular archeology.  Brennan knew his bones.

Following our leaders – who included several degreed archeologists from city (NYC) universities – our little group was led through the brush to stand at last on the very spot where I had done my work a decade or more ago!  It was now no longer a cornfield having been allowed to run again to meadow.  Some of the familiar old trees were now taller, thicker…

Still I said nothing.  I was greatly bemused.  There was actually a 5x5 unit open at our feet – side walls nicely shaved down – the old midden band sharply reliefed in profile along one side.  One of the lecturers was standing down in the Unit and holding aloft a cord-marked rim sherd… the group surged forward with ooohs and ahhhhs!  He was telling them that it was a portion of a ceramic pot rim – that no one of course could know where the rest of the pot was – but perhaps its remains lay just beyond the bounds of the Unit yet and further digging would find it!

I could contain myself no longer!  I stepped forth and said, “I know where the matching parts are!”

All heads swiveled in my direction.

“Actually the adjoining portion of that pot rim is safely filed away in a desk drawer, and a report on its finding - and in fact on this entire “site” you have “discovered” here was published long since in the Bulletin of the State Society.”

 It grew so quiet you could hear the crickets chirp in the grass.

“And the report has been freely available - and apparently gathering dust - on the shelves at Greenwich Library for years and years,” I added.

What a turmoil then ensued!  “Who is this guy?”  “What is he saying?”  “What does he mean “the report?” etc. etc.

I explained the situation as best I could.

 “You have rediscovered an earlier excavated site,” I said.  “This entire site was studied in detail long ago and written up by me.”

The three professionals were really taken aback.  They readily confessed to a cardinal sin: they had not “searched the literature” before they had surveyed the region for sites…  I recall there was a funny little blustery guy – the president of this “Club” who huffed and puffed and stamped around about it all – accusing me of ruining his group’s Field Day and being a general spoilsport I guess for pointing out their rather serious dereliction here…  Louis Brennan, whom all there knew and liked, got up, and brushed the dirt from his seat, and said that while avocational archeology had its ups and downs in neighboring New York state, as he knew well from experience, from what he could see it was elemental chaos in Connecticut.

At his invitation, he and I then left together.  This was long ago.

*****

An even more curious thing is connected in my memory with IF.   The site has long been destroyed now: the great Federal Highway I-95 came through ultimately right over top of it (just east of the “Indian Field Exit” if you ever up that way).  The estate was “broken up” by one of the family inheritors and several homes were built on and over the old cornfields and meadows.  A private school was expanded on the western edge …  As with so many sites, IF is no more.  The marshes have been partly filled, the stands of pines cut.  The vistas down to distant Long Island sparkling across the blue waters of the Sound are blocked.  Even the great Cos Cob Power Plant whose infamous stacks once wafted coal smoke over the entire region is gone…

In later years here in what is euphemistically called “retirement”, I have taken up watercolors.  A couple years back I chanced to get a book on art out of our local North Miami library.  A work by no less an authority than Vincent Price, the late Hollywood movie star, who was a well-known collector and afficianado of Art.  I was thumbing idly through his section on American landscape painters when suddenly a chill ran down my back: before me reproduced in gorgeous detail was a true-to-life oil of the very Indian Field where I had labored so many summers!  What could this all mean?  How could this be?  The mystery deepened when I read on to learn the original now hangs in a gallery in distant Los Angeles, of all places, where it is an acclaimed treasure of our nation’s major painting trove – and that moreover it was painted a full century before ever I stumbled upon the site!

If you have come this far in this rambling addendum, and your curiosity is at all piqued by this latter anomaly, then maybe you would enjoy reading on to the end here, where I have just lifted a document containing the only “explanation” for this oddity I can come up with, out of my own Art folders I keep on my own paintings.

Indian Field Redux

THE ORIGINAL  (on top) was painted by John Frederick Kensett (1818-1872). who was born in Cheshire, CT.  It is titled An Inlet of Long Island Sound and was painted about 1865.  It now hangs in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.  (I have cropped a great deal of the “sky” in both these pictures to enable putting them together here).
That this is an inlet on "LIS" is obvious to anyone who has known these inlets both from the land and the water side - as have I. The uncanny thing is that this bears an almost perfect 1: 1 likeness to the first prehistoric Indian site of several I discovered and excavated along the Sound more than 40 years ago, specifically the "Indian Field Site" at Cos Cob, CT on the grounds of the former Greenway Estate.  The eerie correspondence is not to be believed: here is a scene that I hiked through repeatedly - the same plowed fields up on the right, the harbor (Mianus Harbor) off to the left, the salt-grass Spartina marsh in the middle foreground, the distant purple line of Long Island, even to placement of remembered transient bushes and short-lived trees!  A real time warp!

Yet Kensett painted this scene (wherever along the Sound it actually was) almost 100 years before I arrived (mid-1950’s)!  But that tree-covered knoll in the middle distance, the large clumped bushes at right, overrun with clinging Cat's Claw and other wild vines - even the soggy edge of the marsh across which I had to wade to reach the fields... all are shown just as when I was there ...  a century later! (Of course, the physiography of the whole circum-Sound area is similar, so many coves and harbors might be thought to resemble one another).  Still this is most striking, (to me).  I find no explanation (if any required!) for how the same transient growths are depicted in the same places!

When I did my work here, it was a large landed estate.  It might have been such a hundred years earlier: I do not know.  And it may have been so laid out and cultivated in a similar manner.  But that it would be done in such an exact likeness is uncanny!  Surely there could not have been the same low clumps of transient growth and bushes in all the same places!  I remember that clump in the right foreground very well: it was right to the right of it that I used to enter the fields: there was a cyclone fence that ended right here at the marsh edge, and I would squeeze around it…

There is more than just a passing likeness here - and I knew the topology and layout of this land like the back of my hand, having practically crawled over every inch of it on my hands and knees for many years, searching for archeological clues to what lay beneath the soil.

Adding to the mystery this all presents (K's picture itself having been "discovered" by chance by me now here in Florida,  40 years after the fact of my investigation of the spot) is that Kensett's picture shows just one glaring detail that is not right: he shows a bar or spit of land across the harbor mouth at left - and this emphatically is not the case at Mianus Harbor!  (In my own watercolor copy at bottom,  I have omitted this enclosing spit…)

Now it is true that artists roam around and sketch in the field and all, and Kensett might have visited here once or twice and sketched - and then latter combined his sketches from here with sketches from elsewhere up the Sound… but to me, there will always be a "shock" of seeing a place  "now"  (in a famed painting hung for view a continent away), of a place I knew forty years ago - and learning that it was in fact actually painted nearly 100 years prior to that!…  "Beam me up, Scotty!"

Now, I started out (bottom) to pretty much duplicate Kensett’s painting, but soon found there was no way at all that I could match his handling of "light".  Kensett, in fact, was a member of what is called the American School of Luminists (see quoted art authority material appended) and was a master at rendering the ineffable quality of light.  So I had to deviate in significant ways: not only opening up his harbor, but putting some clouds in the sky due to my inability to paint the light which suffuses an empty summer sky!  I therefore "added" a few more touches of my own, and made my painting a memento (to me) of my "dig" at long ago "Indian Field".  (The name derives from a local name for the area, which is part of the town of Greenwich).

There was a large marine-shell, sheet-midden beneath the trees of the knoll, and many isolated marine-shell pits up in the field to the right.  Barely visible at this reduction, but visible in my full-scale painting is an edge of this sheet-midden where it outcropped on the shore just above the most distant tip of the tall-grass Spartina marsh…I have also indicated the occurrence of discrete shell pits in the plowed fields by the tiny white spots of the bleaching bivalve shells among the furrows.  These were essentially subterranean storage and garbage pits used by the Indians, and likely in or near the sites of their lodges.  Plowing in cultivated fields tends to disclose them today, as you can appreciate - and is in fact, one way the archeologist finds clues to former habitation..  The plow often rips into the upper level of these pits (which may run as deep as six or eight feet), and drags out a "smear" of shells along the furrows downstream of the pit.  I have tried to indicate this and it is more nearly visible at larger scale.

 These pits were where I concentrated my effort (working solo in those days).  The fields were in annual corn crops for silage for a dairy herd still kept at that time by the Greenways.  I used to watch for Spring plowing in these fields and by concentrated surface hunting learned to locate the subterranean pits.  I ultimately demonstrated (to my satisfaction) occupation components of both the pre-Columbian East River and (earlier) Windsor Aspects of the North American Woodland Period as present here, and published my findings in a 1958 issue of the Bulletin of the Archaeological Society of Connecticut (“Preliminary Report on a Southwestern Connecticut Site”).

The view here is looking South, and how the scene looked up to maybe 20 years ago, from the edge of the onetime NYNH&H RR Station parking lot at Cos Cob.  I used to park my car there, shoulder my dig paraphernalia, and hike in and enter the fields at the extreme far right of the picture.  Most Saturdays and Sundays found me there all day - weather notwithstanding.  Lauder Greenway, who was a naturalist himself and an authority on birds I believe with the American Museum of Natural History in NYC, was very interested in my work at that time, and gave me carte blanche to conduct my investigations on the family land.

All is gone now: the estate was broken up by developers years ago, and several houses now stand in the field. The New England Thruway (I-95) also crosses overhead, just about where the viewer stands in the picture... (As an aside, the State Highway Engineers actually held up operations for me on several occasions so that I might recover material they were unearthing with their bulldozers).  When my studies were done, they entertained me at dinner one night upstate, and even published an account of my work in their bulletin, Cuts and Fills.  Now the marsh is filled, the (locally famous) old RR power station has been demolished, and all vestiges of the once natural beauty along the Sound here have been obliterated by development.  If one were to pivot about 120-degrees to the left in the picture, one would be looking back directly at the I-95 bridge where it crosses the Mianus - maybe a half mile away to the Northeast, and directly at the ill-fated section which without warning shortly after midnight some years back, suddenly dropped in entirety completely out of the highway into the river far below - sending several hapless motorists to their deaths, and tying up this vital north-south highway link  (one of the most critical roadways in our nation) for more than a year while it was replaced!  The event was national news for some months…

Sic transit gloria mundi

Of Kensett, Vincent Price, an authority (the same VP who was movie actor!) has written the following about his painting…

"That Kensett caught the “feel” of this place is testimony to his skill as an artist.  He was a member of the “Luminists” - a school ultimately going back to the Hudson River School which so dominated the inception of art in America. The Luminists were noted for their ability to paint light - and this is what Kensett has so superbly done".

And also why I failed so miserably in my attempt to copy him. I have reworked this whole thing to a mush - and the sky is a total flop.  See Kensett’s original however, for how he created a (rose madder?) tinted sky reminiscent of summer heat on the Sound, and how he caught certain golden, hot summer radiance to the land.  I could not duplicate these colors or their transparent application in any way, shape, or form such as he did...

I sailed many years on LIS when young.  I kept my sloop in this harbor further to the left!  Would I could return -  now memory and this painting are all that remain.
 
 

John Frederick Kensett (1816-1872).

An Inlet of Long Island Sound, ca. 1865, 14.5 x 24 in., oil.

  Los Angeles County Museum of Art, gift of Colonel and Mrs. Wm.  Keighley.

“John Frederick Kensett is one of our most enchanting and enchanted landscape painters.  At a time when landscape painting was dominant, and thousands of beautiful ones were being turned out by very accomplished artists, Kensett’s work was different.  Essentially what makes the difference is his ability to portray superbly the great conflicting dramas of nature, violence and absolute peace.  One could say nature at peace and war is ostensibly the aim of all landscapists, but few achieve the contrast of her moods with such simplicity of design and technique as Kensett.  Once he established his style, he was completely consistent in this.

This style was born out of the knowledge he gained as apprentice to the engraver, Peter Maverick, the same man who hired the young Asher B. Durand (p. 90).  This exacting craft shows through whatever atmosphere Kensett laid over his mature work.  There is a precision, a clarity that comes from this early training.  Later, in 1840, when he and Durand were in their twenties, they went to Europe where they both came under the influence of English and American painters, especially the elderly American John Vanderlyn (p. 52), who advised Kensett to make copies in the Louvre.  He then traveled to England where he wrote, ‘My real life commenced there, in the study of the stately woods of Windsor, and the famous beeches of Burnham, and the lovely and fascinating landscape that surrounds them.’ John Howat, a curator of American art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, says that ‘….in England (Kensett) discovered an attitude and a technique rather than a style.’ The style was developed during his stay in Rome and his wanderings in its beautiful Campagna.

"But it was only when he returned home after eight years in Europe that Kensett set the style that made him, fortunately, distinctive from his contemporaries Durand, Sanford, Gifford (p. 120) and Thomas Worthington Whittredge (p. 134).  All his pictures have that rare quality of inner light we associate with the men of the Italian Renaissance and the Flemish masters like the elder Brueghel (I 520-1569) and Jacob Patinir (1475/80-1524).  They are haunted by light, whether it be the sinister light of a stormy day by the sea or the most idylic glow of early morning sunlight.  Clarity of light is his forte, an ability highly appreciated by critics and collectors.

"Before he came into his particular and popular style, he often included genre scenes to ‘liven up his landscapes’, but his mature works are almost devoid of humanity.  The honesty of his lake and shore scenes is what intrigues modem viewers who are often bored with the sentimentality of other painters of this period.  He had abhorrence for ‘a bright sky and a hot sun’ and yet he achieved a brightness that lets us see every nuance of the scene he was painting.  Though not as ambitious as some, An Inlet of Long Island Sound is a perfect example of his work.  Its very directness attracts us: The wonderful way he leads us from the low grass foreground into the reedy middle distance and thence out to sea and almost to infinity.  There is such peace here, the kind of view that makes the weary world walker stop to understand better the serene possibilities of the world we too seldom visit.  In contrast is the more dramatic view of Conway Valley, New Hampshire.  The rough textures of the rocky foreground are used to contrast the pastoral valley and mountains again in the infinite distance.  We see here why some critics were reminded of J.B.Corot (1796-1875), but, as James T. Flexner suggests, Kensett’s silvery grey (for which both men were famous) had ‘less body and temperament, shone more virginally.’

(from The Vincent Price Treasury of American Art, Country Beautiful Corp., Waukesha, WI. 1972. pp. 122-23).

End