newjerseynewsroom.com

BY JOE TYRRELL

NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM

From northern New Jersey, Fort Edward, N.Y., is a straight shot up I-287 and I-87 north of Albany, about 3½ hours from Morristown. Depending on interests, there are several useful exits from the Interstate.

Routes 146 and 67 reach the Hudson south of Stillwater and the Saratoga Battlefield. Route 29, Lake Avenue, skims the outskirts of Saratoga Springs on the west, and hits the river at Schuylersville.

Having gone in and out of fashion, Saratoga Springs is again the regional hub, with its spas, terrible water, pleasant cafés, arts district and race meeting that this year runs July 23 through Labor Day. Oh yes, it's also the home of Trey Anastasio of Phish.

Farther north, Saratoga Road to Route 197 crosses the river into the Village of Fort Edward, nestled in the northern end of its municipality.

Today, the town floats in its own time bubble. A major commercial center for much of its existence, today the area is known mainly for a particularly noxious Superfund clean-up.

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New Jersey's Jane McCrea was inspiration for America

For 30 years, General Electric's old manufacturing plants in Fort Edward and Hudson Falls dumped as estimated 1.3 million pounds of carcinogenic polychlorinated biphenyls into the Hudson. The PCBs polluted 200 miles of the river, but especially the vicinity.

A controversial dredging project may or may not be addressing the problem.

But there are better things to see, beginning with a small but informative visitors center on Route 197 Rogers Island in the Hudson. The island was home to Native Americans, then to British and American troops during colonial wars.

It takes its name from Robert Rogers, the daring if often reviled leader of frontier forces whose "Ranging Rules" remain the heart of Army ranger tactics today. The center is a center for archaeological digs on the island and in Fort Edward.

Cross the bridge east into town and the circumstances of Jane McCrea's death are understandable almost at a glance. Next to the gas station by the bridge, a mid-19th Century structure is obviously not the "Jane McCrea House," despite a marker to that effect.

But the house was built by a McNeil descendant on the spot of the cabin. From there, it is little more than a quarter-mile drive up Broadway, Route 4 through the village, to a sharp climb slanting over railroad tracks. But do not crest the hill, make a quick right turn onto an isolated block with a day care center.

Rising to businesses on the crest, the lush hillside supports three tall pines — and a marker commemorating Jenny McCrea. The ground is greatly altered and the spring gone, but this is just about the spot of her sad death, a few minutes walk from the cabin site and easily visible from the vanished fort.

Across the street is the Historic Inn of Fort Edward, a spiffy motel.

Returning south to the McCrea House, it's only two more blocks to the residential neighborhood where some remains of Fort Edward are being unearthed in a series of archaeological digs.

Volunteers are accepted during the summer, but because the sites are on private property, entrance is restricted. Friendly neighbors will point out some of the few remainders of the fort, such as an outer berm.

The stretch of Route 4 on the south side of the village is also home to the Washington County Historical Society and the Old Fort House Museum. The latter is an assortment of historic structures, like a one-room schoolhouse and old county fair building, rescued and moved here to escape destruction.

The centerpiece is the Fort House, which was built from timbers taken from Fort Edward by a local official when it was considered surplus after the French and Indian War. Ironically, the builder, Patrick Smyth, was arrested as a loyalist by rebel Gen. Benedict Arnold and jailed.

Confusingly, the house takes its name from the Fort family. Interestingly, it was also home to Solomon Northup, a free black man who was drugged and sold into slavery. Finally returning home, Northup wrote "Twelve Years a Slave," which rivaled "Uncle Tom's cabin" in generating revulsion against slavery.

Continuing south two miles on Route 4, don't blink and stop at the lonely grave of Tobias Van Vechten. The historic marker again says Jane McCrea. But finding her requires heading north again into the south end of village.

In 1823, a canal disrupted the camp cemetery. Most of the bodies, including Jenny's, were reburied in the village. If you turn right on Notre Dame, it's only 100 yards or so to the place where many revolutionary war casualties still lie.

But Jenny is gone from there, too.

She was moved again, with pomp and circumstance, marching up Broadway past her death site to the "plains" on top of Fort Edward Hill. There, McCrea was reburied in 1852. Her sister Mary's daughter, Sarah Hanna Payne, paid for a new marker for her martyred aunt.

Oddly, the headstone repeats an error dating to Revolutionary times, that Jenny was only 17 when she died. She got some company, for Sarah McNeil's remains were brought uptown along with hers.

Despite the family involvement, much of the impetus was commercial. By then, even the children of the Revolution were dying out. In a troubled country, there was money to be made in celebrating the glorious past.

And so, the towering pine overlooking the spring was whittled into canes and other "McCrea" mementos. There was worse. A newspaper story later that year described how the box containing Jane's remains prior to re-interment "had been broken open and nearly all the bones stolen."

In 1895, the two honored dead got more company. The body of Major Duncan Campbell was buried alongside them, closing a circle. During the French and Indian War, the Scotsmen was wounded in an unsuccessful British assault on Fort Carillon, Ticonderoga. He died some days later in the military hospital on Rogers Island.

Before ever meeting Jane McCrea, Sarah McNeil had already been caught up in this legend. She had journeyed to America from Scotland to retrieve Duncan Campbell's body with her first, Alexander Campbell. But he husband died en route, and Sarah had never claimed the dead major.

Meanwhile, Robert Louis Stevenson borrowed Campbell for a ghostly poem set in Scotland but foreseeing his death in America. James Fenimore Cooper also dragooned Campbell as a basis for the British officer in "The Last of the Mohicans." So the Union Cemetery is filled with celebrities.

Still, as the 21st Century dawned, Jenny McCrea's oldest living relative, Mary McCrea Deeter of Kansas, worried that her relative was slipping into obscurity. She found a friend in David Starbuck, an archaeologist and 18th Century specialist overseeing the local excavations.

In 2003, despite some protests, a team of researchers opened Jane McCrea's grave and found bones of two women. One was old and large, the other young and smaller. Bone sample were taken and the grave resealed. DNA tests would identify the older woman as Sarah McNeil.

Two years later, with less controversy, the bodies were exhumed again and brought to the lab at the Rogers Island Visitors study for more testing. While many bones remained, Jenny McCrea's skull was missing.

The question of how she died remains a mystery. But in the end, she was another victim of war, lost forever to her family, her friends and herself, if not to the country that claimed her.

Joe Tyrrell an be reached at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it