Dan's Papers - August 3, 2007 - Battle of the Revolutionary War Sign in Sagaponack is Over

This article is about character. My character. And so I have decided to confess.

Two years ago, somebody told me that a beautiful, bronze historical plaque that sits on a metal pole on a street corner in the center of downtown Sagaponack was inaccurate. It described an incident that took place during the Revolutionary War where a British Major was involved in a vicious whipping with some American patriots at the Spider Leg Mill, which once existed on the spot.

The plaque had the whipper and whippee mixed up. It was really the other way around. I went down and took a picture of this sign at the time and I published it in the paper and I wrote an article about the mix-up. The reason it was mixed up, I was told, was that an earlier sign that had been there had been stolen. And now, ten years after that happened, there was money available to replace it, but nobody could remember what it said and the people up in Albany could not find the folder that had the information about what it said.

Eventually, they had found somebody in Sagaponack who said that they remembered it. He told them, they wrote it down and that’s what they put on the replacement sign. But that person had remembered it wrong. And so the description on the plaque was exactly the opposite of what had happened.

This new, wrong plaque that I wrote about was a very expensive and handsome bronze plaque indeed, painted black, with yellow raised lettering on it and the seal of the New York Historical Society. And I figured that if it took ten years to replace the one that got stolen, it would probably take another ten years to make a new, correct one.

In any case, three months ago, a motorist drove into the war memorial monument at the crossroads in the center of downtown Bridgehampton a few miles away from that plaque. The monument was knocked askew, but the town felt it important to repair it right away. Many of the memorials on this monument were bronze plaques — the monument concerns itself with about eight wars since the Revolution — and when the town hired repair people to do this job, they asked them to polish up the bronze plaques on it and to also polish up the bronze plaques on all of the historic markers nearby. Of course, that included the inaccurate one in Sagaponack.

And so, I wrote the story again, noting they still hadn’t fixed it and it was still wrong. There it was, all shined up, but still wrong. And I took another picture of it and published it.

It read, “Site of the Spider Legged Mill to Which Major Cochrane Tied William Russell During the Revolution and Ordered Him Whipped Until Bloodied.”

After I wrote this second article, which was really written in the hopes of nudging along the powers that be to replace the errant plaque faster, I got a friendly letter to the editor from someone named Joseph R. Sahid of New York City, letting me know that the truth was that the evil Major DID whip the American patriot and by publishing the inaccurate information that it was really the other way around, I was perpetuating a myth. As I was pretty sure of my position on this, I thought that if I published this letter to the editor, it would only confuse people further. Now I would truly be perpetuating the myth. We get a lot of mail and we don’t have room to publish all of it anyway. But one week later, there was Mr. Sahid with a letter again, this time as part of a big packet that included several pages from a respected history book written in 1890 that proceeded to describe the whole incident from old newspaper records and the testimonies of the descendants of those who were there who said, essentially, the Major DID whip William Russell and would whip anybody and his whipping of William Russell was especially brutal and everybody was afraid of the Major and kept clear of him, including some of the other Redcoats, who sometimes said they wished he would just go away, which eventually, of course, he did.

At this time, I had a decision to make. Do I publish this? Or do I not publish this? This historical material seemed very plausible. On the other hand, I would look like a fool if I published it. What I did when I got this was, frankly, put it in a pile of stuff on my desk to be decided upon later. It’s a good-sized pile. Usually if something sits there undecided upon for six months, I throw it out. So, time would tell.

But the writer, Mr. Sahid, was not giving up. He wrote still a third letter. And this time, there was nothing friendly about it.

“I have now brought you the historical proof that your account in the paper is wrong. And you still do not publish it. I spoke to Justin DeMarco in your editorial department. He said he personally put the packet that contained all the proof on your desk. Why do you continue to perpetuate a historic inaccuracy like this?”

I think it is fair to say, at this juncture, that what I am apologizing about is what happened next. I decided not to publish this chastising letter with all the historical data. There would be no room to publish the “proof” in the paper anyway. Besides, what sort of “proof” was this? I had heard what I had heard. And now, the so called proof sent was an account written in 1890, nearly one-hundred-and-twenty years after the event. Yes, it is possible that it was right and I was wrong. But, who really knew? Isn’t history revised all the time? Quite often, it seems, new information is discovered to reverse a finding from years before. And that’s the truth.

For a few days, I left this chastising letter on my desk NEXT to the pile of stuff to be decided upon later. And then I relented, sort of.

I rummaged through the pile and found the SECOND letter — one of the nicer ones — and I ordered THAT published. It appeared in the July 20 issue of this paper. I wrote a comment after it that read, “I have heard it both ways. Your documents sent were in a history book written 100 years after the incident. Perhaps they are right. — DR.”

Then I threw out the backup data from the second letter and the chastising third letter. I didn’t need to keep them around anymore.

Earlier today, I was cleaning out my shoulder bag — I carry it around almost everywhere — and, down in the bottom, wrinkled and torn and stuck in a fold, I found a little piece of a news clipping that I had apparently put there two years ago.

It was one of the original reports of the fact that the writing on this new sign was wrong. It had appeared in either the Press or the Star, there was no indication of which, and I had at the time ripped it out and put it in my bag, where it got carried around all this time. Here, two years later, it had turned up.

“Where History Went Wrong in Sagaponack,” was the headline. And it proceeded on with the same original information, including a quote from local historian Richard Baron, to the effect that indeed, the wording on this sign was wrong.

Just at the end of where this scrap was torn away, there was the description of what had been on this sign.

“On this site stood the spider legged mill, where during the Revolutionary War, Major John Andre, the British spy, was tied to a post and whipped.”

“He wasn’t,” Mr. Baron concluded. And that was the end of this scrap.

Major Andre? Who was he? I thought he was the British spy who got hung for offering money to Benedict Arnold. I went back in our archives and found the photo of the sign I had taken two years ago. It said Major Andre, not Major Cochran. The idiot who told the New York State historians he remembered what had been on that sign not only had it wrong but also remembered it as Andre rather than Cochran. Oh my god, is what I thought. This sign had been FIXED! And though I photographed both, I hadn’t notice because I truly believed the State of New York would never have gotten around to it yet.

So, to all, I offer apologies. But I think the length of this apology offers something else. It offers a look into the thinking of a newspaper editor, well, this newspaper editor, which leads to the conclusion that sometimes people do things that are not brave, or in which they might appear to be ridiculous or, well, just WRONG, and they find lame reasons to behave that way.

But you know, who knew? Maybe Major Andre WAS the person who got whipped? Maybe that happened sometime AFTER he did all that whipping when the tables were turned and the patriots got the upper hand, say, in 1783, and then Andre went up to West Point where he was hung as a spy. I’m talking either Andre or Cochran.

The whole thing puts me in mind of something I read a few days ago on AOL News. NASA is worried about its Mars Rover. Actually there are two of them on the surface of Mars, scurrying around, scooping up material and taking pictures and transmitting them back to earth. The worry is that a big sandstorm has come up on Mars right where they are and the sand is coating the solar panels and preventing the batteries from recharging. One of the two has already gone silent. The other is now flickering, transmitting on an intermittent basis. On the other hand, they were put up there in 2004, and it was only expected that they’d be able to stay active and run around for a few months, and now it’s been three years. So, really, even if they do shut down now, they’ve been a big success.

Then there were these two sentences. “NASA scientists said that a powerful dust storm on Mars, here in 2001, has blocked around 85 to 90 percent of all sunlight to the planet’s surface. Scientists said the storm has been brewing for nearly a month.”

And I thought, this must be because of the speed of light or something. And so then I thought if we knew it happened in 2001, here, then why did we send up the Rovers in 2004 when we knew it would hit in 2007 Earth time? Why not just wait out the storm? That’s really stupid.

Then I thought, if the storm happened in 2001, and the rovers are stuck trying to run around in it, then how, if we launched them in 2004, did they get back in 2001? And if they did, how are we able to see that they’ve gotten mucked up today? And wouldn’t we know by now if they got through okay? Then I thought maybe this is a misprint.