The Banished Children of Eve (85 page)

Opened in 1961, the Van Rensselaer Shopping Center was for a brief period the largest such retail operation in the Capital District area and represented a milestone in the county's economic development. The Center's success, as is often said in the retail trade, was guaranteed by three ingredients: location, location, location. Situated beside the juncture of an interstate highway and the main county road, and anchored by two major department stores, the Center did over $500,000 in gross sales on its opening day.

The Cannon Development Company of Garden City, Long Island, oversaw construction of the project, which was conceived, financed, and built in under two years. A prime reason for this expeditious completion was the enthusiastic support received from the county government. In light of the controversy that came to surround the selection of the site, this support was invaluable.

The land
on which the Center is constructed had been taken up by a small cemetery and a derelict church. Though familiar landmarks to the long-term residents of the area, few knew the true history of the property, which had for many years belonged to a sect of Negroes that had purchased it sometime after the Civil War. Although never officially incorporated, the small community of houses built around the sect's church was known locally as Midian's Well, the same name as the church.

Most of the residents of Midian's Well worked as waiters and menials in and around Troy, and there is a passage in one of Phyllis Conner's turn-of-the-century short stories (which are often set in Rensselaer County) that gives us a vivid, if fleeting, picture of these Negroes:

In the rear of the drafty horsecar that rollicked up the Schuyler Road was the usual band of silent, dignified ebony creatures, who sat with hands folded as if in prayer, their eyes cast upon the tobacco-stained floor.

There is also a mention of the Negroes of Midian's Well in the police report published in the Troy
Record
of December 19, 1889:

Negro funeral turns disorderly.
Death of local woman, “Mother Maria,” results in illegal ceremony in front of church that blocks road. Warning issued. No summons or further action undertaken.

Beyond these fragments, nothing is known of the sect or its practices, except that sometime around the end of the First World War the last of its members either died or moved away, and the houses fell to ruin: The church itself was taken over by Negro Baptists and was still in use as late as 1941. Soon after, it, too, was abandoned and, along with the adjoining gravesites, became little more than a rendezvous for local youths on Halloween.

The condemnation
proceedings completed and title to the site transferred to the sponsors of the Van Rensselaer Shopping Center, the work seemed ready to begin. The first step was the removal of the occupants of the graves to a specially designated section of Evergreen Cemetery. On the day the process was to commence, the Reverend Thomas Montgomery of the Mount Pisgah Memorial Church organized a protest. The demonstrators lay down and refused to move until a public hearing was held on the disinterment.

The sponsors agreed to such a hearing and it was held within a week. Speaking against allowing the disinterment, the Reverend Mr. Montgomery said, “We must not and will not sit idly by while the bones of these holy men and women are wantonly and needlessly disturbed. They are our ancestors in faith and in hope, and their memory must be honored, not obliterated.”

Replying on behalf of the county, Norman Sandwaller, an attorney with the Office of Deeds and Titles, pointed out that the bodies would be reinterred in dignified and appropriate surroundings. “Subsequent development of the site,” he said, “would benefit Negroes along with everyone else.”

The County Commission subsequently confirmed the decision to allow full clearance of the site by a vote of 7 to 0. A week later, on April 14, 1961, construction began.

—Calvin A. Hutchinson,
New Frontiers: From Mohawks to the Modern Age: A History of Rensselaer County
(Albany: The State University Press, 1965)

Each belongs here or anywhere as much as the welloff

… just as much as you,

Each has his or her place in the procession.

—Walt Whitman,
Leaves of Grass,
1855 edition