When Darryl Brittain bought an 18th-century stone house in Marbletown 17 years ago, he was not only embarking on a major restoration project but also an intellectual adventure. It would ultimately result in the writing of a history of the Ulster County township (currently under consideration for publication by Bluestone Press) and a series of lectures on such topics as early farming, mills and breweries, which he regularly presents at regional historical societies.
Located on the Hurley Flats, a fertile valley that”™s still heavily planted with corn, the 1791 house had many of the original features when Brittain purchased it, including several fireplaces ”“ one is a walk-in hearth in the kitchen ”“ massive ceiling beams, wide-board floors and a beehive oven. It also came with a confused pedigree: As he started researching the original deed and reading up on the early history of Marbletown, he discovered that much of the published information was wrong.
The existing histories “focused on the famous people and names” and not much else, Brittain said recently over a glass of wine at a restaurant near his house, where he lives with his wife and daughter (his son is away at college). What the books didn”™t reveal was that one in five people were black, for example. Slave labor was relied upon for the cultivation of the main crop, spelt wheat, in the early 1700s, Brittain said. The subjugation of the blacks lasted well into modern times: Local octogenarians told him that as recently as 50 years ago, blacks didn”™t enter a white person”™s house. When African-Americans visited a local tavern, they went around to the back with their pails (growlers) to pick up their beer. In those days, it was the blacks who occupied the old stone houses, which were considered cold, dingy and dark.
His “people”™s approach” to the telling of the story of the past infuses every aspect of his research. For example, the main reason Marbletown was parceled up and sold off to soldiers encamped in nearby Kingston in the late 1600s was that the British colonial government was anxious to get the rowdies out of town, Brittain said. Many of the soldiers ended up selling their plots to the Dutch families who”™d originally settled in the area. Brittain said one challenge in researching the local records is that many are in Dutch. It was the language of choice for many land deeds up until the early 1800s.
Similar forces that impact the economy today were factors back then. For example, in the early 1700s many of the landless white farmers left for New Jersey because they couldn”™t compete socially or economically with slave labor. “They thought it was beneath them to do work on farms,” an echo of the attitude many farmers are discovering among the native-born today. And after the Erie Canal was built and cheaper wheat arrived from the Ohio Valley, the farmers planted so much wheat in a desperate effort to compete that they depleted their land. They ultimately shifted to rye, which was better adapted to the worn-out soil.
Brittain is president of the consulting firm Decision Economics, whose current clients include Corn Products International, Associated British Foods, Iogen (a Canadian cellulosic ethanol producer), Mitsubishi and Pegasus Capital Advisors, a private equity firm that”™s seeking to identify pharmaceutical products for acquisition and the building of a new company. His work has often taken him overseas, and on his trips to London he has spent much of his free time in the British Museum archives, pouring over maps and records of Marbletown from when it was still a British colony. The New York Historical Society and New York Public Library, both in Manhattan, were two other treasure troves of information, along with local county sources.
He is currently putting together a genealogy of Marbletown”™s African-Americans, a project that has involved locating black cemeteries in the area. He”™s also working on identifying the location of Indian villages. “Pre-contact,” ”“ prior to the mid-1500s, when French fur traders and Spanish conquistadors first arrived on the continent ”“ “this area was very heavily populated. The valley is littered with arrowheads.” His findings won”™t be published, due to concerns about scavengers raiding the sites for artifacts.
Brittain holds advanced degrees in chemistry and economics from the University of California at Los Angeles and Columbia University. He said the analytical skills he has deployed to help businesses restructure has come in useful for his hobby. Researching Marbletown”™s early history “is like the competitive intelligence I do for companies,” he said. “I find out all the facts and put together the bits and pieces.”
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