As I am writing this week’s post, the nation is learning the fateful outcome of yet another historic election. Though a lot of my writing on the blog this year and many of the programs I have organized with my colleagues at the library and beyond have dealt with the state of our democracy and the election cycle in one way or another, I now want to turn my attention elsewhere and to explore something larger and deeper. However one may feel about the outcome of this election cycle, there is likely to be uncertainty about what the future holds; in such circumstances I have often found it helps to take a broader view.
Our national history appears to be only a very brief and uncertain affair, when viewed in light of the bigger story of the continent on which our country took shape over the last 400 years. I recently had occasion to visit the American Museum of Natural History (available through the Library’s Museum Pass Program), where it came home to me again, after having forgotten the big picture for many years, that some of the geological features of what we now call North America are more than four billion years old, nearly as old as the earth itself. In an area as close by as Princeton Junction, there are geological formations dating possibly to the Mesoproterozoic era that is, one to one and a half billion years ago.
Now, I am no geologist and none of this information comes to me from my own expertise. In fact, as the links above reveal, I depend almost entirely on the database “Science Online” from Infobase. But the experience of sizing up the ground beneath one’s own feet, which such information makes available, reveals a perspective somewhat like that which Caroline Winterer details in her new book, “How the New World Became Old: The Deep Time Revolution in America.” Winterer’s book documents how Americans’ understanding on their own place in the world was dramatically reshaped through the nineteenth century, as discoveries such as dinosaur fossils and glacial flows revealed a more primordial order of the planet than had previously been conceivable. A little exploration in a museum or a database can open up that experience for us even today, revealing how much we take for granted a human-sized sense of time and history in our everyday lives.
Likewise, the historic experiences of the peoples who prevailed throughout this region for more than ten thousand years prior to European colonization, and who continue to live in nearby NJ tribal communities, can put our national history in a different light. Native American Heritage Month provides an occasion to celebrate the cultures and peoples to whom this long history belongs and to see our world in some way with their priorities in mind. For a project our local history team has been developing, I recently read an article published in the Daily Princetonian around this time last year, in which journalist Raphaela Gold reports how “language keeper and teacher Kristin Jacobs and her son Barry Stonefish of the Eelunaapéewi Lahkeewiit, the Lenape Nation of Moraviantown, Ontario, Canada,” having “returned to [the University’s] campus in early November for Princeton’s third annual Munsee Language and History Symposium,” had an opportunity to reflect on the Millstone River and to explain the importance of water in their culture: as Jacobs explained, “Water is life. It’s what creates life. It’s important to always protect that, so we use water in our ceremonies, and it’s a whole other area of knowledge.” In anticipation of the library’s hosting of a panel for the Fourth Annual Munsee Language and History Symposium, library staff have been researching a spring situated under the library and the Spring Street Garage, which feeds Harrys Brook as a tributary of the Millstone River itself. The full history of that spring is greater than I can detail here, but it involves, just as an example, the creation and later backfilling of “Vandeventer Pond” or “Vandeventer Lake,” as it was also called, a small body of water that once stretched from what is now the site of the Spring Street to the intersection of Vandeventer and Nassau.
I and other library staff plan to continue researching the land and water on which the library sits over the next few months, as much to explore the inherent interest of this piece of local history as to pursue the library’s commitment to developing resources and programming aligned with the priorities of Indigenous communities. But for myself I also look forward to digging into a topic near enough that it feels meaningful to my life and to the community, but also bigger than any of us and older and more grounded in the earth’s deep rhythms than even the town itself.
Thanks to Public Humanities Fellow Susan Iseyen for bringing the article from the Daily Princetonian to my attention. Thanks also to Adult Services Librarians Nora Walsh and Dana Treichler for sharing their thoughts on topics raised in the second part of this blog post. Finally, thanks to Paul Davis, Collections and Research Assistant at the Historical Society of Princeton, for introducing me to the Bevan map, the Sanborn maps, and other resources relating to the spring.
Image credit: Bevan, John (Surveyor). Detail from the “Map of Princeton, Mercer County, New Jersey” [copy 4]. [TIFF]. Jersey City : John Bevan, 1852, c1851 (N.Y. : Lith. of Sarony & Co.). Retrieved from https://hgl.harvard.edu/catalog/princeton-pc289m61s