A few years ago, I was driving down NY-17K outside Montgomery, belting along to the radio, when I saw one of those rusty blue-and-yellow historic signs zip by in a blur. I always find this frustrating. How am I to read the small text while traveling at 55 mph? Usually, I let it go. But this time, I turned around to check it out.
Mastodon Dig 1800. 1st U.S. Science Expedition remains exhibited London & Amer. Philosoph. Society, Philadelphia. Dig painted by Charles W. Peale, 1810.
Back home, it took a little digging of my own to get the fuller story. In the spring of 1801, the artist, inventor, and naturalist Charles Willson Peale traveled from Philadelphia to Orange County, New York, tracking down rumors he had heard about the discovery of some very large bones. Peale, like the newly inaugurated president, Thomas Jefferson, took offense at the suggestion by certain European scientists that North America had never been fertile enough to support large mammals, and that even the humans who lived there were “feeble.” Their civilization, the implication went, would forever remain feeble as well. The great promise of the new American republic would never add up to much.
Led by Jefferson, American scientists—including Peale— committed themselves to refuting such claims. Finding and reconstructing a fully intact large-mammal skeleton would go a long way toward countering European condescension about North American animals. It would also, symbolically, prove the worth and vitality of the American experiment. The project, Peale wrote in his diary, was “an object of vast magnitude.”
Once he arrived on the site, Peale contracted with the farmer whose land the bones rested on—he had found them while digging around for fertilizer—and offered nearly $5,000 in today’s currency (plus new dresses for the farmer’s wife and daughter, and a gun for his son) in exchange for the right to remove the bones. Then he built a massive waterwheel to drain the swamp where the fossils lay. After taking the bones to Philadelphia, Peale mounted the skeleton in his museum where it became a sensation, a triumph of science and a source of national pride.
After Peale’s death in 1827, the mastodon was eventually bought by German naturalist Johann Jakob Kaup for Darmstadt’s Grand-Ducal Museum of Hesse. It can now be seen in the State Museum of Hesse. A replica of the skeleton, along with Peale’s original painting of the dig, which shows the waterwheel and a crowd gathered to watch the excavation, are on view at the Maryland Center for History and Culture in Baltimore.
Here in the Hudson Valley, a full mastodon skeleton can be seen at Museum Village in Monroe. It was discovered in 1952 when some workers went to expand a drain in nearby Harriman—but that’s another story. Meanwhile, every day, thousands of drivers pass the sign outside Montgomery without being aware of the nation-making history it commemorates.
Related: Inside Former Slave John Bolding’s Journey to Freedom in Poughkeepsie
