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Kaatscast: the Catskills Podcast is a biweekly series featuring Catskills culture, history, sustainability, local interviews, literature, and the arts. Shows are hosted by Brett Barry and produced by Silver Hollow Audio, in the heart of the Catskills. Subscribe and experience what reviewers have called “delightfully informative” storytelling with “great production quality.” Voted “Best Regional Podcast” three years in a row. Episode archives, transcripts, and a robust search engine at kaatscast.com. Enjoy!
[00:00:00] Tim Duerden: It's a totally debatable assertion that I make, but I make the bold assertion that there is no more important colony/state than New York in the entire American Revolution.
[00:00:16] Brett Barry: Welcome to "Kaatscast." I'm Brett Barry here at the Delaware County Historical Association in Delhi, New York, with association director and historian Tim Duerden. Tim, welcome to the show.
[00:00:28] Tim Duerden: Thank you, Brett. I'm glad to be here.
[00:00:30] Brett Barry: You've written a new book, "Escape From the Sugar House: Levi Hanford and the American Revolution," which tells the story of a young patriot's life leading up to the Revolutionary War. The book is fiction, but it's based in historical fact, so let's start with Levi Hanford. Who was he?
[00:00:48] Tim Duerden: Levi Hanford was a young boy who grew up in southwestern Connecticut on Long Island Sound, who unfortunately was imprisoned for about fourteen months by the British in the Sugar House Prison in Manhattan. He was, you know, a volunteer militia man for the Connecticut militia, and in the book, as you said, it's fiction, but it's based pretty closely, at least his incarceration, on actual events, and in the book, I detail the atrocious conditions that Levi and his compatriots experience in the Sugar House and a bit of his life afterwards.
[00:01:26] Brett Barry: And there's a Catskills connection, but we'll get to that later. Why fiction? Is this your first piece of fiction? I know that you've written nonfiction before, including a history of Delaware County.
[00:01:37] Tim Duerden: Yes, my first book actually was published under Wray Rominger at Purple Mountain Press, "The History of Delaware County," in 2007. Since then I've written other books, all nonfiction that we've published here at DCHA, and yeah, you're right, this is my first dive into fiction, and you ask why fiction. It was, I guess, on the eve of the COVID pandemic. It must have been early 2020, and our youngest child was then about 13 or 14 and was reading history and getting into history, so I found myself actually reading young adult fiction, people like Ruta Sepetys and, of course, John Green and other people like that, and I kind of revisited Levi Hanford's story. We have some artifacts here in the museum, for instance, and I just thought, "I guess it would be fun to write something different, write something that I don't have to back up with sources and footnotes and do all the stuff that you're supposed to do with straight histories," so I thought I'd write a young adult fiction adventure story, and as I was writing it, sure, yeah, I was writing it somewhat for my son, but I was also writing it for myself as a maybe 14- or 15-year-old boy casting my mind back as to what I would have liked.
[00:02:54] Brett Barry: Yeah, and I'm not a young adult anymore, but I enjoyed it, so it's—I think it has a wide appeal, and it's written very well. How did you make that leap to fiction writing? Was that difficult?
[00:03:05] Tim Duerden: Honestly, I didn't find it that difficult, and I know this sounds a bit like a cliché, and I'm sure your listeners and readers, you know, will have heard and read this before, but I found that large chunks of the book sort of wrote themselves. I'd get lost in time and lost at my keyboard, and I'm not quite sure exactly where some of the scenes and some of the events and some of the people that I conjure up came from, to be frank.
[00:03:31] Brett Barry: I think many people think of the Civil War in terms of a rift in the American population and something that literally pulled families apart based on their beliefs, but your book reminds us, or, in my case, really enlightens me to the fact that the American Revolution caused deep rifts. The colonists didn't just rise up as one cohesive group and decide to fight the British for their freedom.
[00:03:53] Tim Duerden: Yeah, absolutely, so this is another aspect that I wanted to explore in the book, and writing it as a fiction, as a novel, kind of, I think, enabled me to go down these other avenues and explore larger themes, one of which was, yeah, the idea that the American Revolution was a civil war, at least for the first couple of years. Yeah, I mean, maybe it's also because I'm English.
[00:04:15] Brett Barry: Yeah.
[00:04:15] Tim Duerden: So, you know, there were English people fighting English people, and native-born Americans fighting native-born Americans, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah, I wanted to explore that, especially here in New York. It was really a civil war.
[00:04:29] Brett Barry: Levi Hanford grew up in Connecticut in a patriot stronghold, but in your book, there's a family just down the road who are Loyalists. They're perfectly happy to remain subjects of the British Crown. Those families are also friends, and they intermarry.
[00:04:43] Tim Duerden: Yep.
[00:04:44] Brett Barry: That causes, in this case, not really too much of an issue, but there was still a friendliness among them. I'm not sure that was the case for every family. Some were a little bit more entrenched on their own sides.
[00:04:58] Tim Duerden: Yeah, I mean, there's parts of the book where I, you know, write about just what you described. I mean, there's a tar and feathering event that happens in the book, so yeah, not all are happy, but within the Hanford family, a fictional older sister of Levi Hanford marries a family of close neighbors who remain loyal to the crown. Again, it's fictional, so again, it's one of those larger themes that I bring into the book deliberately.
[00:05:25] Brett Barry: I think today, especially in light of some recent debates with gun rights, et cetera, Second Amendment advocates often circle back to our militias, the Minutemen, who were armed and ready to fight for American freedom, but there were also loyalist militias, colonists loyal to the king who took up arms to fight for their cause. We're not talking about the Redcoats or British military. These were groups of citizens who were fighting for England.
[00:05:53] Tim Duerden: Yeah.
[00:05:53] Brett Barry: So there was that battle going on, which maybe I learned in high school, but really a lot of this came as new material for me.
[00:06:01] Tim Duerden: Yeah, again, it's, you know, loyalists and patriot militia units, and then the professional armies on both sides, and it kind of plays into this theme again of allegiances and loyalties and who's fighting for whom. I mean, there's a couple of characters, again, fictional, unfortunately, I guess, who hail from Scotland, and one of the Scots is a professional soldier in the Continental Army fighting for the British, but there's a few scenes where I have Private Soutar tell Levi and his family that he really didn't care for the English for a variety of reasons. Their colonizing ways didn't really like George III, but he was fighting because it was a job and a living. Yeah, so, you know, I also teach at a New York State history class at SUNY Oneonta, and I often tell my students that here in New York State, you often read that the population was split into thirds in terms of their allegiances. There was a third who remained loyal to Britain, a third were active patriots, you know, fighting or resisting in some way against the English colonial forces, and then a full third here in New York State remained neutral or tried to steer middle ground, and, you know, and I, again, I've read that in an awful lot of places, so, and again, that's something that I want to explore in the book.
[00:07:23] Brett Barry: And you do, so Connecticut seems in the book to be a stronghold for patriots, or at least the southern part of Connecticut where these families were, and then Long Island or parts of Long Island were a loyalist stronghold?
[00:07:37] Tim Duerden: Yeah, yep, and New York City was mostly loyalist, yep.
[00:07:41] Brett Barry: Why was that? What were their interests?
[00:07:43] Tim Duerden: I think at least on Western Long Island and in and around New York City and its harbor because of overseas trade and commerce, there were close ties among many people in New York City to the mother country, to England, and they relied pretty heavily on the Royal Navy, whereas further east on Long Island and out in New England, they, you know, didn't have such close commercial and economic ties.
[00:08:11] Brett Barry: Do you know what the makeup was generally speaking in the interior of the state, specifically the Catskill region, or what would become known as the Catskill region?
[00:08:22] Tim Duerden: Yeah, I don't know, but I would imagine that, well, I mean, we're sitting in Delhi. We're in Delaware County. In the 1770s and 1780s, this was frontier land, so it was contested between, you know, European Americans, Native Americans, and I've always imagined this, and I tell my students this sometimes, that frontiers people around here along the rivers of the Catskills, not all of them, of course, but I think most of them kind of wanted to be left alone, so I would categorize them as mostly neutrals.
[00:08:53] Brett Barry: So Levi Hanford was captured. He was sent to a British prison in New York City, which had been the Livingston family's sugar house. What were sugar houses, and why were they so well-suited as makeshift prisons?
[00:09:09] Tim Duerden: Sugar houses were these, or at least the Crown Street Sugar House [now it's Liberty Street]. The Livingston Sugar House on Crown Street was this enormous, hugely thick stone-walled building, six stories high, with very low ceilings, designed essentially as a warehouse for sugar. Again, it kind of harkens back to New York's connections to overseas trade, in this case the Caribbean, so the British take over New York at the end of the summer of 1776, and they're going to incarcerate up to maybe 25,000 American patriot prisoners over the course of the rest of the Revolutionary War, and they needed big buildings and buildings like the sugar houses. I think there were three others that they used as prisons. I believe the British also had prisoners in some of the churches, just large buildings that they could use.
[00:10:00] Brett Barry: And ships, prison ships.
[00:10:02] Tim Duerden: Oh, yeah, yeah, prison ships. Yeah, rotting kind of half-sinking prison ships in the East River and the North River, which was the Hudson.
[00:10:10] Brett Barry: And in the book, Levi spends time in a few of these prisons, the Sugar House plus a couple of prison ships. Is that all factual?
[00:10:17] Tim Duerden: Almost.
[00:10:18] Brett Barry: Mm-hmm.
[00:10:19] Tim Duerden: So, in reality, Levi is imprisoned for 14 months, from 1777 into May of 1778, and he does spend about a month or two on a prison ship in the Hudson River by the name of the Good Intent, you know, an ironic name, but in my book I have him spending time on two prison ships. I do have him on the Good Intent, but then I have him also over on the Brooklyn side on another prison ship.
[00:10:47] Brett Barry: And he was young. He started in the militia, I guess, at age 16. Was that normal?
[00:10:51] Tim Duerden: Yeah, yeah, it was very normal. You know, he turned 16 in September of 1775, so the Revolution's just broken out, and a couple of days later he joins a militia unit in Connecticut. When he's captured and incarcerated, he's only 17 years old, so yeah, he was one of the younger, one of the younger prisoners, but it's not particularly unusual that age.
[00:11:14] Brett Barry: Prison conditions were dire. I mean, prisoners were scrambling for bits of moldy bread and dirty water. There was a raft of diseases sweeping through the population, both prisoners and guards, and the conditions that Levi Hanford faced were exceptionally harsh. Can you give a sense of what the prisons were like during the Revolutionary War on either side?
[00:11:36] Tim Duerden: Well, I can try. Much of what I write in the book is actually from Levi Hanford's own recollections. In about 1850, when Levi Hanford was about 90 years old, he lived a long time. He sat down with his son William in Franklin, New York, my adopted hometown, and William wrote down his recollections of his father, and a lot of those recollections focus, of course, on conditions in the Sugar House and on the Good Intent and, yeah, terribly harsh conditions. I mean, there was no real regular food provided by the British. Smallpox: there's no windows or, you know, no central heat or anything like that. I mean, they're just lying around on these stone floors with a little bit of hay—freezing cold in winter, horribly hot in the summer—couldn't stand upright because the ceilings were so low. Levi Hanford, in fact, when he's captured, he was captured with 13 other militia members from Connecticut, and he and another were the only two to survive, so only two survived, and again, disease, starvation, despair...
[00:12:41] Brett Barry: And you hope to come back to Mary. Is Mary real?
[00:12:47] Tim Duerden: Mary is real, yeah. He, Levi Hanford, marries a woman by the name of Mary Mead in 1782 just before the end of the American Revolution, and she does appear fairly frequently in the book. Brett, I just recently learned of a new word, or a new term, "kisstory," and I wasn't thinking of that word when I was writing the book, so, you know, it's a young adult novel. It's a coming-of-age story. I knew that Levi was going to marry Mary Mead, a friend of the family, but I played all that up in the book. I guess it's kind of a bit of a romance, and as I said, this new term, "kisstory" plays a part in the book, yeah.
[00:13:27] Brett Barry: Yeah, there were some nice little scenes of trotting off.
[00:13:30] Tim Duerden: Yeah, and I guess I was thinking back to my own years when I was 15 and 16 and my own thoughts and fantasies. I don't know, but Mary Mead was a real person, yes, and they did marry.
[00:13:48] Brett Barry: It's no surprise that Levi eventually escaped from the Sugar House. I'm not spoiling anything here. It's in the title of the book. We won't reveal how he did that or the life that he was waiting for or what that was like back in Connecticut, but then, at some point, he made his way up to the Catskills. What brought him here and other people like him at that time?
[00:14:09] Tim Duerden: I mean, I don't know specifically, but that's the story of at least this part of the northwestern Catskills. It's a story of America really, isn't it? But it's the story of the Catskills: people moving from the East Coast west, so after the American Revolution, there was an influx of people in Delaware County and surrounding counties from the New England states, from Long Island, and from New York City. You know, my coworker Samantha is doing this project trying to identify Revolutionary War veterans buried here in Delaware County. I'm not sure that she's come up with any who were actually born here. You know, they all came from Connecticut or Long Island or, you know, someplace else, Massachusetts.
[00:14:52] Brett Barry: And speaking of New York, you say in, I think, maybe the endnotes of the book, you describe how, you know, when a lot of people think about the Revolutionary War, we think about Lexington and Concord in Massachusetts as the epicenter, but New York was home to the most casualties. Is that a fact?
[00:15:10] Tim Duerden: Yeah, it's a totally debatable assertion that I make, but I make the bold assertion that there is no more important colony/state than New York in the entire American Revolution. I think it was John Adams who said that the control of the Hudson Valley was the key to the continent, so, in a strategic sense, New York and, of course, its harbor and its river were terribly strategic. Not to bore your listeners and sound too teachery, but the largest battle of the war in terms of troops on either side was fought, the Battle of Brooklyn, or the Battle of Long Island, in August of 1776. Arguably, one of the bloodiest days of the war was at Oriskany in August of 1777. Then, of course, we have Saratoga, which was, most historians say, that's a major turning point in the war in the fall of 1777, but back to New York City specifically, yeah, I feel that it's underrepresented really in many histories of the American Revolution. Partly, I think, because the British controlled New York City for most of the war, so it's not—from the American perspective, it's not a heroic story, I don't think, but it's been estimated that about 25,000 Americans were held at some time by the British in New York City during the whole course of the war, and roughly 17,000 or maybe 18,000 of those died, so far more Americans died in New York City than I think in all battles combined all over and during the American Revolution.
[00:16:44] Brett Barry: Yeah, from squalid conditions, disease...
[00:16:47] Tim Duerden: Yeah, yep.
[00:16:48] Brett Barry: ...and starvation.
[00:16:49] Tim Duerden: Brutality, starvation—yeah, all the things that I detailed before, yeah.
[00:16:52] Brett Barry: So many years later, Levi Hanford was gifted a memento of sorts from the old Sugar House Prison. Tell me about David Barker and his inclination to salvage some oak from the Crown Street Sugar House in Lower Manhattan.
[00:17:09] Tim Duerden: Excuse the terrible pun, but the Sugar House Cane is really the root of my story and how I got involved in this. I know it's a terrible pun.
[00:17:18] Brett Barry: You could go with Sugar Cane, too.
[00:17:18] Tim Duerden: Sugar Cane, yeah, so in our collections here at the Historical Association, we have this cane, as I just said, which was fashioned on a lathe from a huge oak beam that was salvaged from the old Sugar House Prison. The building itself was demolished in New York City in 1846. Thankfully, a New York City businessman by the name of David Barker salvaged at least one of these beams and had many canes turned on a lathe. We're fortunate to have this one, and then at the end of 1851, David Barker was left with one remaining cane. He'd given all the others away, and he was wondering what to do with it. Apparently, he saw the obituary of a former Revolutionary War soldier in a New York City newspaper. Remember, this is 1851, so it's decades since the end of the war, and David Barker realizes that soon there will be nobody alive with an actual experience and memory of the war. Kind of the light goes off in his head, and he goes, "I know I can give this cane away to an old soldier who specifically maybe was incarcerated in the Sugar House, the Livingston Sugar House," so that's what he did. He put an ad or two in New York City newspapers, and William Hanford, Levi Hanford's son here in Delaware County, was an attorney in Franklin, where I now live. He wrote back to David Barker, telling him of his father, Levi Hanford's experiences. Apparently, there were four or five other letters that David Barker received telling him of other former inmates who were still alive in 1851 and 1852, and I believe David Barker just decided to pull names out of a hat, and Levi Hanford's name was pulled out of the hat, and David Barker sent him the cane with a brass plaque attached to the top of the cane. It says, "The Old Sugar House Prison, D.B. to L.H.," and apparently, Levi Hanford, again, as a 90- or 91-year-old man, was overcome with emotion and used the cane for the final two or three years of his life, but it's a great artifact. It really is, yeah.
[00:19:28] Brett Barry: And it made its way into this collection from the Delaware County Historical Association and Museum.
[00:19:33] Tim Duerden: Yep, it came down through relatives of Levi, I think, and then it went to William Hanford. William Hanford showed the cane at the 1876 Centennial Exposition, you know, the 100th anniversary of the Revolution, which was in Philadelphia, but eventually, again, it went down through descendants of Levi Hanford, and then it was gifted to DCHA in 1980. In and of itself, the actual—it's a piece of wood. It's about three feet, two inches long and not particularly exciting, but it's just this cool, tangible, tactile thing that's connected to this story.
[00:20:11] Brett Barry: And I would imagine for you, it was the spark for the book.
[00:20:14] Tim Duerden: Yeah, or root, I prefer to. Yeah, "spark" is a better word. Yeah, no, it was. It definitely got me going and thinking about the story, yeah.
[00:20:22] Brett Barry: And then what else do you have in the collection that you were able to tap into? The cane is one thing, but you have to tell a whole story. Was his story here?
[00:20:31] Tim Duerden: We have some letters that William Hanford wrote back and forth to David Barker and to other people in the 1850s, and then we have a chair that also was gifted to us by the same person that gifted the cane that came from the old Federal Hall, where the Stamp Act Congress was and a lot of other important meetings in the late 18th century. We call it the George Washington chair because we imagine that, you know, George Washington and some of the other founding fathers sat on this chair, but that's about it in terms of artifacts related to Levi Hanford.
[00:21:04] Brett Barry: So how did you go about researching the story? Are there other primary sources somewhere else?
[00:21:09] Tim Duerden: Yeah, well, I'm a historian by training, so some of it I guess I just kind of know, but Levi Hanford's story that he related to his son in 1850 to William Hanford was published in 1863, a guy by the name of Charles Bushnell, "Life and Adventures of Levi Hanford," or something like that. I forget the exact name, but it's easily accessible online. It's about 40 or 50 pages, and you can read quite a lot of it there, yeah.
[00:21:37] Brett Barry: The Sugar House Cane is just one of what I expect are many artifacts in this museum. What can you say about the importance of preserving historical objects and their ability to spark interest in larger stories?
[00:21:49] Tim Duerden: Yeah, it's hard to understate the importance of actual archive 3D objects like canes and chairs and uniforms, and we're sitting here in the library here at the Historical Association, surrounded by photographs and, you know, 1D flat archival stuff like photos and letters and books. You know, again, as a historian, I lead two lives here at the museum, more involved with objects like this in many ways, and some of our old buildings out on the site, and then I go off to teach to lecture kids over at, you know, young adults over at SUNY Oneonta, which is more straight academic book reading kind of history. I mean, they complement each other.
[00:22:31] Brett Barry: How can people find out more about this organization? Maybe someone wants to see the cane or any of the other many things that you're able to provide here, both in terms of seeing things or learning...
[00:22:43] Tim Duerden: Probably the best way is to visit us. Much of our operation is open year-round. We're here in Delhi, New York, on Route 10, just north of the village of Delhi. We have the usual, you know, website, Facebook page, telephone, address...
[00:22:58] Brett Barry: Great. Tim Duerden's new book is called "Escape From the Sugar House: Levi Hanford and the American Revolution." Tim, thank you so much for joining me.
[00:23:07] Tim Duerden: Oh, thank you, Brett. It was a pleasure.
[00:23:10] Brett Barry: "Escape From the Sugar House" is available at purplemountainpress.com, where you can get free shipping for a limited time with the code: KAATSCAST. This episode was edited by our production intern, Elana Healy. Transcription by Jerome Kazlauskas. Many thanks to our listener supporters like Kevin, Christie, Nick, and Tim. You can sign on, too, at kaatscast.com/support. Reviews are also a great way to keep this podcast going. If you have a minute, please leave a five-star review on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you subscribe. "Kaatscast" is a production of Silver Hollow Audio. I'm Brett Barry. Thanks for tuning in, and we'll see you next time.