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The first white settlement here was established in the early 1730s, when John Henry Lydius, a Dutch trader from Albany, opened a trading post. His business thrived until it was destroyed during a French and Indian raid in the 1740s.
In 1755, as the last of the French and Indian wars heated up, the English arrived in force and built Fort Edward. Within a few years, 15,000 British and colonial soldiers were based here, including the famed Rogers' Rangers.
Starbuck said the sutler site probably isn't the original Lydius trading post. It's more likely the sutler's store that appears on maps from the late 1750s, and possibly the same one mentioned in contemporary records as belonging to a "Mr. Best." The building apparently burned down around 1760, after the bulk of the British army had advanced on French-held Canada.
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Starbuck has spent most of the past 15 years conducting digs at 18th-century military sites here and in Lake George. Those excavations tended to focus on places made famous by massacres and battles. He concedes that finding the cellar of a merchant's storehouse may not carry the same cachet with history buffs.
But the sutler site does offer a rare glimpse into an important aspect of frontier life in colonial America.
"Sutlers tend to be overlooked but they're a huge part of the (settlement) process," he said. "This is where a community begins. It's like a prelude to the founding of the towns up here."
Starbuck said the Fort Edward sutler site could wind up being second in terms of significance only to Michigan's Fort Michilimackinac, another 18th-century outpost where archaeologists have found hundreds of thousands of artifacts over the past 45 years.
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