A Revolutionary War-era boat is being painstakingly rebuilt after centuries buried beneath Manhattan
Workers digging at Manhattan's World Trade Center site 15 years ago made an improbable discovery: sodden timbers from a boat built during the Revolutionary War that had been buried more than two centuries earlier.
Now, over 600 pieces from the 50-foot (15-meter) vessel are being painstakingly put back together at the New York State Museum. After years on the water and centuries underground, the boat is becoming a museum exhibit.
Arrayed like giant puzzle pieces on the museum floor, research assistants and volunteers recently spent weeks cleaning the timbers with picks and brushes before reconstruction could even begin.
Though researchers believe the ship was a gunboat built in 1775 to defend Philadelphia, they still don't know all the places it traveled to or why it ended up apparently neglected along the Manhattan shore before ending up in a landfill around the 1790s.
'The public can come and contemplate the mysteries around this ship,' said Michael Lucas, the museum's curator of historical archaeology. 'Because like anything from the past, we have pieces of information. We don't have the whole story.'
From landfill to museum piece
The rebuilding caps years of rescue and preservation work that began in July 2010 when a section of the boat was found 22 feet (7 meters) below street level.
Curved timbers from the hull were discovered by a crew working on an underground parking facility at the World Trade Center site, near where the Twin Towers stood before the 9/11 attacks.
The wood was muddy, but well preserved after centuries in the oxygen-poor earth. A previously constructed slurry wall went right through the boat, though timbers comprising about 30 feet (9 meters) of its rear and middle sections were carefully recovered. Part of the bow was recovered the next summer on the other side of the subterranean wall.
The timbers were shipped more than 1,400 miles (2,253 kilometers) to Texas A&M's Center for Maritime Archaeology and Conservation.
Each of the 600 pieces underwent a three-dimensional scan and spent years in preservative fluids before being placed in a giant freeze-dryer to remove moisture. Then they were wrapped in more than a mile of foam and shipped to the state museum in Albany.
While the museum is 130 miles (209 kilometers) up the Hudson River from lower Manhattan, it boasts enough space to display the ship. The reconstruction work is being done in an exhibition space, so visitors can watch the weathered wooden skeleton slowly take the form of a partially reconstructed boat.
Work is expected to finish around the end of the month, said Peter Fix, an associate research scientist at the Center for Maritime Archaeology and Conservation who is overseeing the rebuilding.
On a recent day, Lucas took time out to talk to passing museum visitors about the vessel and how it was found.
Explaining the work taking place behind him, he told one group: 'Who would have thought in a million years, 'someday, this is going to be in a museum?''
A nautical mystery remains
Researchers knew they found a boat under the streets of Manhattan. But what kind?
Analysis of the timbers showed they came from trees cut down in the Philadelphia area in the early 1770s, pointing to the ship being built in a yard near the city.
It was probably built hastily. The wood is knotty, and timbers were fastened with iron spikes. That allowed for faster construction, though the metal corrodes over time in seawater.
Researchers now hypothesize the boat was built in Philadelphia in the summer of 1775, months after the first shots of the Revolutionary War were fired at Lexington and Concord in Massachusetts. Thirteen gunboats were built that summer to protect Philadelphia from potential hostile forces coming up the Delaware River. The gunboats featured cannons pointing from their bows and could carry 30 or more men.
'They were really pushing, pushing, pushing to get these boats out there to stop any British that might start coming up the Delaware," Fix said.
Historical records indicate at least one of those 13 gunboats was later taken by the British. And there is some evidence that the boat now being restored was used by the British, including a pewter button with '52' inscribed on it. That likely came from the uniform of soldier with the British Army's 52nd Regiment of Foot, which was active in the war.
It's also possible that the vessel headed south to the Caribbean, where the British redirected thousands of troops during the war. Its timbers show signs of damage from mollusks known as shipworms, which are native to warmer waters.
Still, it's unclear how the boat ended up in Manhattan and why it apparently spent years partially in the water along shore. By the 1790s, it was out of commission and then covered over as part of a project to expand Manhattan farther out into the Hudson River. By that time, the mast and other parts of the Revolutionary War ship had apparently been stripped.
'It's an important piece of history,' Lucas said. 'It's also a nice artifact that you can really build a lot of stories around.'
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The Guardian
39 minutes ago
- The Guardian
‘A dog cemetery would not be treated like this': the fight to preserve Black burial grounds in the US
A large puddle of water and thickets of weeds cover a vacant lot in Bethesda, Maryland. A towering apartment complex overshadows the cracked asphalt, but Marsha Coleman-Adebayo is most concerned about what – and who – lies beneath. The nearly two-acre site in the Washington DC suburb covers the historic Moses Macedonia African Cemetery and another burial ground for enslaved people, with the oldest portion dating back to at least the mid-1800s. Hundreds of bones found there may be the remains of enslaved people and their descendants, while more bodies may lie under the parking lot of the Westwood Tower apartment complex. But like many resting grounds for Black Americans, its preservation is jeopardized by loss of its original community through gentrification and, now, encroaching development. And despite a recent federal law to protect Black cemeteries, they are vulnerable to neglect and eventual destruction. Coleman-Adebayo is the president of the Bethesda African Cemetery Coalition (Bacc), which since 2016 has aimed to save the site from further development and return the land to the descendant community. It plans to eventually erect a museum or monument there. She first learned about the cemetery a year earlier, when she attended a joint county park and planning commission meeting where she met a longtime resident who recalled playing in the long-forgotten cemetery as a child. Every week, Bacc members stage a protest at the McDonald's parking lot next door. Separated into several parcels, the portion of the burial ground that was leveled for Westwood Tower's parking lot in the 1960s is now owned by the housing opportunities commission of Montgomery county (HOC), which provides low-income housing. Another part of the cemetery, owned by the Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning Commission, is overgrown with vegetation. A third section, held by the self-storage developer 1784 Capital Holdings, has incited ongoing Bacc protests since construction for a storage facility began in 2017. The burial site has turned into a legal battleground as the coalition has spent several years in court fighting the HOC. The dispute at Moses Macedonia African Cemetery serves to 'open up the conversation about what a major problem that African Americans are having at these sites,' said Michael Blakey, a National Endowment for the Humanities professor of anthropology, Africana studies and American studies at the College of William and Mary. For over a decade beginning in the 1990s, Blakey directed the African Burial Ground Project at Howard University, where he and a team of researchers analyzed more than 400 skeletal remains of enslaved and free Africans interred in New York City in the 17th and 18th centuries. His work was guided by the descendants' questions about their ancestors. 'Even when they assert their rights as a descendent community, it's a wrestling match with bureaucracies, sometimes even anthropologists,' he said. Burial rites reveal a society's values in life and in death, Blakey added. 'The desecration of Black cemeteries is a reflection, whether in slavery or in current development projects … of the lack of empathy with African Americans as complete human beings,' he said. 'And African Americans, from slavery to the present, have defended those cemeteries with sure knowledge of their full humanity and an insistence upon their dignity.' The Moses Macedonia African Cemetery in Bethesda; the Evergreen Cemetery in St Petersburg, Florida; and the Buena Vista plantation's burial ground in St James parish, Louisiana, demonstrate ongoing fights to preserve Black burial sites in the face of development throughout the US. Amid the scant oversight of Black cemeteries, a growing movement of descendant communities and their allies are protecting the grounds by documenting their existence, protesting development and performing genealogical research on the buried. On a rainy May evening, Coleman-Adebayo held a large white sign listing violations of what she considers a sacred space. 'Even a dog cemetery would not be treated like this,' she told the Guardian. As an Environmental Protection Agency whistleblower who sounded the alarm on US vanadium mining in South Africa in the 1990s, Coleman-Adebayo has a long history of activism. She also helped spearhead the No Fear Act, which discourages retaliation and discrimination in the federal government. Bacc contends that, during a 2020 excavation, a dump truck took earth from the cemetery to a landfill. Members followed and say they found 30 funerary objects including pieces of cloth, a hair pick and a tombstone. They have also demanded the return of 200 bones held by a consulting firm in a Gainesville, Virginia, warehouse to no avail. In August, a circuit court will hear a case in which Bacc and several other plaintiffs are requesting $40m in compensation from the HOC for emotional damage and to build a museum. Coleman-Adebayo looked somberly at the scaffolding erected by self-storage developer 1784 Capital Holdings. 'Look what they're building here on the bodies of African people,' Coleman-Adebayo said. 'How did they die? How did they live? What happened to them? And the county could care less because they're Black.' The HOC and 1784 Capital Holdings did not respond to requests for comment by publication date. The River Road community, an African American enclave linked to the cemetery, was a once bustling district with Black land ownership, a school and the Macedonia Baptist church, which opened in 1920. By the 1950s and 1960s, the area was zoned for commercial use. Now, Coleman-Adebayo's husband, the Rev Olusegun Adebayo, chairs Bacc's board and pastors the church, the only surviving institution of the historically Black community. Black cemeteries have long been threatened. In the 18th century, Blakey said, Black cemeteries were also used to dump waste from pottery factories and tanneries. Historian and anthropologist Lynn Rainville, who has researched Black cemeteries for 20 years, noted that Black bodies were dug up to use as cadavers for 19th-century medical research. But robbers rarely disinterred Black bodies to steal objects or jewelry, as they frequently did to Indigenous burial grounds. After the civil war, Black cemeteries were usually placed in areas with cheaper property values, which later became prime real estate for developers. Some Black cemeteries were also neglected following the great migration of the early 20th century, when 6 million Black people moved from the south to other parts of the US for economic opportunity and to escape racism. As a result, many Black people moved away from their ancestors' graves. 'The Black living communities have long since been forced out of there because of high taxes, high property values,' Rainville said. 'The cemetery is the last of what's left, and then it is at greatest risk.' The development at the Moses Macedonia African Cemetery shows that American society values certain bodies over others, said Rainville: 'If 2,000 prominent, wealthy people in Bethesda, Maryland, came forward and said, 'Hey, these are my relatives,' it would have been stopped by now. No one's digging up Thomas Jefferson, for example. There is a hierarchy of what and when in American society is considered OK to move.' During his travels and work throughout the world, Blakey found that development is the paramount threat to Black cemeteries. He recalled discussing with a Howard University colleague in the 1970s about how Black internment sites, he said, 'were the places developers were said to be most fond of because they knew they could dispose of them with greater ease'. A federal law similar to the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), which requires institutions and federal agencies to return human remains and artifacts to their descendant Indigenous tribes, does not exist for Black Americans, said Rainville. Signed into law in the 1990s, the NAGPRA came after hundreds of years of the desecration of Native American graves. In recent years, a national movement has emerged to protect Black graves by creating a law that parallels the NAGPRA. Enacted into law in 2022, the African American Burial Grounds Preservation Act authorized the National Park Service to fund federal and state agencies, as well as non-profits' efforts, to research and preserve Black cemeteries. But the National Park Service told the Guardian that it has not awarded any grants so far, since Congress has not allocated money to the program. Seeing a need to prevent the erasure of African American burial grounds in her local community, University of South Florida anthropology chair and professor Antoinette Jackson created the Black Cemetery Network, a database of internment sites throughout the US. Of the 193 cemeteries listed on the site, Jackson said that up to 70% of them face preservation challenges, including threats from development, legal battles or lack of resources. A lack of Black political power in the early 20th century fueled neglect and subsequent loss of cemeteries through tax sales, she added. 'It was by design, because many of the ones that were lost were in what became a desirable area for that time,' Jackson said. 'Up until the 1965 Civil Rights Act, [Black political] representation wasn't there in many of these governmental agencies, committees and commissions. So, often, there was no one to defend them, and they were easily given away or changed hands without people really being aware.' She cites a 2021 Florida law that protects abandoned African American cemeteries as a potential model for other states. The law created a taskforce that identified and researched cemeteries, and led an advisory council that provides recommendations for their preservation. Research and academic institutions, non-profits and local governmental organizations may also apply for a grant of up to $50,000 to conduct historical and genealogical research, or to restore and maintain abandoned cemeteries. Jackson received that state grant to find the descendants of the Evergreen Cemetery – one of three graveyards buried under Interstate 175 and Tropicana Field, a St Petersburg stadium being considered for redevelopment. Through Jackson's work, St Petersburg city council member Corey Givens Jr learned that his great-great-great-uncle was buried in the historically Black cemetery. Givens wants the city to conduct a ground-penetrating radar survey of the site to see if any burials remain there. That was done for Oaklawn Cemetery, where mostly white people were interred and at least 10 possible graves were recently found. But the Florida department of transportation, which owns the property where Evergreen and another Black cemetery, Moffett, are located, has refused to allow a survey. Givens hopes that the descendants of people interred in Evergreen and Moffett will have a say in the future of the site. 'Do we just want to leave these bodies there? Or do we feel like we want to spend tax dollars and move these bodies elsewhere?' Givens told the Guardian. 'I really want the community to be in charge of this conversation. I want them to lead it because I don't trust the same governing body that said 'out of sight, out of mind'.' At the site of the Buena Vista plantation in St James parish, Louisiana, the Louisiana Bucket Brigade and Inclusive Louisiana environmental justice groups are using genealogical research of enslaved people buried on the land to fight the construction of a petrochemical facility. The Louisiana Bucket Brigade and Inclusive Louisiana learned through a public records request of the Louisiana division of archaeology's emails that a graveyard for enslaved Africans existed on the land where the Taiwanese company Formosa Plastics planned to construct a $9.4bn facility. 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'So let's instead center this. That would preserve the communities. It would provide so many more jobs. It would be deeply meaningful. It would be a beacon to the rest of the country.' Meanwhile, in Bethesda, about 100 people attended Bacc's 'rebellion' on 19 June, Coleman-Adebayo said, during which the group featured poetry, dancing and speakers who talked about the struggle to protect the cemetery. Bacc also protested at the county's Juneteenth event on 21 June. At Bacc's Juneteenth event, member Joann SM Bagnerise received an award for her outstanding advocacy. Bagnerise, an 87-year-old from Dumfries, Virginia, has traveled over an hour each way to join the coalition's weekly protests for several years. During a recent May protest, she sat in a chair under an umbrella and said: 'The desecration of hallowed grounds is un-American.' The high-rise apartment at the center of the dispute towered behind her. 'There are young teenagers buried here,' she said. 'There are mothers and fathers.'
The Independent
an hour ago
- The Independent
Another hit to Boeing as NTSB faults plane maker over infamous Alaska Airlines door debacle
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Medical News Today
an hour ago
- Medical News Today
Understanding secondary aging: What can influence how well we age?
Secondary aging refers to aging-related changes caused by environmental, lifestyle, and health factors rather than natural biological processes. Aging happens to everyone, but people do not age in the same way. While some aspects of aging are inevitable biological processes, others result from factors a person can often control or influence. These controllable factors make up what experts call 'secondary aging.'Secondary aging includes changes that occur with age due to disease, environmental factors, and lifestyle choices rather than natural biological processes. Understanding the difference between unavoidable aging and preventable aging can help people make better health decisions throughout life. What is secondary aging?Secondary aging involves the aspects of getting older that people can potentially influence or modify. Unlike primary aging, which happens naturally to everyone over time, secondary aging results from environmental exposures, personal habits, and medical conditions that accumulate throughout people of the same chronological age may have very different biological ages based on their secondary aging factors. This explains why some 80-year-olds maintain robust health and independence while others experience significant functional decline decades of secondary aging include cardiovascular disease from diet issues, hearing loss from noise exposure, lung damage from smoking, and mobility limitations from sedentary behavior. These conditions are not the inevitable consequences of aging but rather result from cumulative exposure to harmful factors or lack of protective vs. secondary agingPrimary aging encompasses the universal, inevitable biological changes that occur with time regardless of behavior or environment. These changes happen to all humans and represent the natural deterioration of cells and systems as part of the human life differences between primary and secondary aging include:primary aging occurs in everyone, while secondary aging varies between individualsprimary aging follows a largely predetermined biological timeline, while secondary aging can accelerate or decelerate based on external factorsprimary aging is not preventable (though it may slow down), while a person can minimize secondary aging effects or prevent them entirelyprimary aging includes processes like DNA methylation and telomere shortening, while secondary aging includes conditions such as type 2 diabetes or emphysemaWhat affects secondary aging?Secondary aging results from multiple interacting factors that accumulate over a person's life span, creating either positive or negative effects on the aging process. Lifestyle choices, environmental exposures, and health conditions work together to influence how a person ages beyond the natural biological health status significantly impacts secondary aging, with existing health conditions often accelerating age-related changes. Healthy aging tactics include:maintaining proper weight to reduce the risk of metabolic disorderscontrolling chronic conditions to minimize their cumulative damagepreserving mobility to maintain independence and functionaddressing mental health to support cognitive healthmanaging inflammation to reduce cellular damagekeeping hormonal balance to support multiple body systemsRegular health monitoring allows for early interventions to prevent or minimize secondary aging effects. EnvironmentEnvironmental factors play a crucial role in secondary aging. They include:Air pollution: Experts link exposure to pollutants such as PM2.5 and nitrogen dioxide to respiratory and cardiovascular issues as well as cognitive decline and increased dementia exposure: Chronic noise exposure can lead to hearing loss and heightened stress levels, which can contribute to cardiovascular problems. Sun exposure: Ultraviolet radiation accelerates skin aging and increases the risk of skin cancers. Chemical exposure: Contact with harmful chemicals, such as heavy metals and pesticides, can cause cellular damage and elevate cancer risk. Radiation exposure: Ionizing radiation damages DNA, increasing the likelihood of cancer and other health issues. Illness and diseaseSpecific illnesses and diseases contribute substantially to secondary aging by causing damage that compounds age-related changes. Examples include: cardiovascular disease accelerates vascular agingdiabetes affects multiple systems, including nerves, kidneys, and circulationautoimmune conditions increase systemic inflammationinfectious diseases can cause lasting damage to affected systemscancer and cancer treatments can accelerate cellular agingosteoporosis increases fracture risk and activity limitationsEven after recovery from acute illness, residual effects may persist and contribute to secondary aging. This cumulative damage explains why a serious illness history predicts functional status in later life. However, proper disease management can minimize these choices are the most modifiable factors affecting secondary aging. They include:eating a balanced diet rich in plant foods to support cellular functionengaging in regular physical activity to maintain strength and mobilitygetting adequate sleep, allowing for proper cellular repairavoiding smoking to prevent numerous health conditionslimiting alcohol consumption to reduce organ damagemanaging stress effectively to support immune functionThe combination of multiple positive lifestyle factors provides greater protection than any single factor alone, suggesting the importance of comprehensive healthy lifestyle agingBeyond primary and secondary aging, scientists recognize a third category called tertiary aging, also known as mortality-related aging. It refers to the rapid decline in physical and cognitive function that often occurs shortly before death, regardless of aging involves accelerated deterioration across multiple systems, typically occurring in the final months or years of life. This pattern appears consistent even among individuals who have aged successfully with minimal secondary aging to age healthilyHealthy aging focuses primarily on minimizing secondary aging factors while accepting primary aging as a natural process. Evidence-based approaches to reduce secondary aging include:following a Mediterranean or similar diet rich in whole foodsengaging in both aerobic exercise and strength training regularlymaintaining social connections and meaningful activitiespursuing lifelong learning and cognitive stimulationgetting regular preventive healthcare and screeningspracticing stress reduction techniques such as meditationensuring adequate sleep quantity and qualitylimiting exposure to environmental toxinsavoiding tobacco products and excessive alcoholSuccessful aging approaches recognize that starting earlier provides greater benefits, but interventions at any age can improve outcomes. SummarySecondary aging encompasses the potentially preventable aspects of aging resulting from external factors rather than inevitable biological processes. While primary aging happens to everyone through natural cellular changes, secondary aging varies significantly between individuals based on health status, environmental exposures, disease history, and lifestyle approaches to minimize secondary aging focus on comprehensive lifestyle changes, environmental modifications, and proper management of health conditions. These strategies aim not necessarily to extend life but to maintain quality of life and functional independence for as long as possible.
