Robert David Lion Gardiner (1911-2004)
http://www.newsday.com/news/local/longisland/ny-ligard0825,0,4143886.story?coll=ny-li-span-headlines
"60 Minutes" did better. I don't get this article, he helped get DDT stopped
in Suffolk so ospreys could live. His great aunt was the former Mrs. Tyler,
First Lady, her father Senator from NY, killed when the Haddersley
"Peacemaker" cannon blew up on the U.S.S. Princeton, while firing a salute
to Washington's Mount Vernon, where Pres. Tyler and Julia, then future First
Lady, were below decks having champagne, which according to Gardiner, they
were raising a glass to each other and were knocked onto their behinds by
the explosion on deck. The first official funeral in the Capitol (dome
replaced under Lincoln with one from the Bronx by Janes and Kirtland for $1
million during the Civil War) was Senator Gardiner and two Cabinet members.
They also stopped the war in Richmond, VA, to let her go back to NYC after
former Pres. Tyler died there, which she saw in a dream down at the
tidewater Virginia place, he said. There they did the "Virginia Reel" and
she was instrumental in using her great beauty (the most beautiful First
Lady they say, in the latest fashions at 19 from Paris, when she was carried
away in the 60 year old President's carriage from that terrible tragedy) to
get the Texians into the Union as the State of Texas. She rode all night up
to Richmond, VA, to the Richmond Hotel, where former President Tyler was in
charge of that city. She was surprised to see him alright though the next
day he had a heart attack on the steps of it. Both sides ceased hostilities
long enough to allow the grieving First Lady and entourage through the lines
back to NYC.
I had talked to him on the phone over the proposed "TV City" on the
west-side of Manhattan for the Trump organization. The Haddersley Forge was
once located there that built the "free" "Peacemaker" the largest cannon in
the world, that blew up helping to create the tragedy above. We opened a
small part of a parking lot and found nothing. He said the Haddersley's were
very pretentious, their carriage decorated with a coat of arms like they
were British royalty driving around Manhattan then. He studied as did the
other members of the family also in Paris, claimed to be conversant in five
languages and sometimes aboard luxury cruises with well known personages.
He also served in US Naval Intelligence, a veteran, on the USS Princeton he
said. In law school he denied his relation to a precedent setting "bequest"
case, Julia Gardiner after the Civil War was involved in a death-bed changed
will in the a very wealthy real estate family in NYC. I read somewhere she
later lived on Staten Island. He once explained Julia Gardiner to Gloria
Swanson who remarked that someone like Vivian Leigh would have to play her
in a film.
When I worked for Greenhouse Consultants, Inc., on Trinity Place in lower
Manhattan, near "Ground Zero" (I once worked for a Texas based power plant
builder EBASCO who had five upper floors in one of the WTC towers on the
archaeology of Fort Drum, NY now home of the US Army 10th Mountain Division)
our secretary, Mindy Washington, her husband a music professor at
Southampton College, related she was once his bookkeeper at the Gardiner
Manor Mall in Babylon, NY which failed.
He once spoke to the Suffolk County Archaeological Association at the H. Lee
Dennison New York State Office Building in Hauppauge, NY where some of this
information is recalled from. There he spoke of the abandoned US radar
installation from WWII and the ospreys (who fly to Brazil and back, by the
way) and the very old house with portraits of Charles I and II and others. I
was interested because I had read that his niece's husband was once the
lawyer fro "Artforum" magazine, which I was once untested in as part of film
studies back in 1973 at The Media Center in Buffalo, NY. He related the
British Army occupied the house during the American Revolution and quoit
"scars" are still in the woodwork there. Interestingly, the Goelet's are
figured in early iron founding also, earlier 18th and later mid 19th, its
location in the vicinity of the South Street Seaport I have come across in
research.
Originally from Old Saybrook, CT where hostilities engulfed early colonists
I read or heard that the original Lion Gardiner (perhaps from the rock shape
in the water on the way to the island) was sent to spy on Dutch
fortifications in Connecticut, he a "royal fort architect" and was rewarded
Gardiner's Island, the manor land deed signed by the "King of Scotland"
reproduced in a American history reference, the paper of which is guaranteed
to last at least 200 years. I have read it in the library of the Huntington
Free Library, at Westchester Square, Bronx, NY, former location of the Heye
Foundation's Native American collection, still, I think, repository of a
large catalog of many North American (and other) ethnographies maybe not,
now still a free library a few of which still exist. Mr. Huntington made
much money in hardware associated with the western expansion of railroads in
California and left the library to people of the Bronx and others, a friend
I believe of Heye. I donated an official John D. Rockefeller, Jr. biography
(one of 500 by Fosdick) to the library which I found in the trash on 3rd
Ave. near 16th Street one morning among a NYC teacher's affects on the curb.
I also asked him about the Captain William Kidd "treasure" dug up from
Gardiner's Island in the 1890's. I have worked on the site of the Kidd
family property under Nan Rothschild, Ph.D. at the "Hanover Square Site" as
it was called, also site of the Livingston families both important to early
New York. Captain Kidd is sometime referred to by historians as one of the
most maligned characters in American history. Mr. Gardiner said he wondered
about that too and asked the authorities while in England. He said all
property of a convicted felon becomes property of the Crown (his British
privateer partners refused to come forward and provide the legal basis for
his seizing of booty) and that a map of sorts was found in his vest pocket
when they hung him for piracy after a trial for a seaman's murder during a
near mutiny where he threw a bucket which unfortunately killed another. The
map was used since the United States did not exist back in the early 18th
century and the location found and excavated, though some claim it was only
part of it. There is also a story of a large ring and a political influence
never gained through Livingston's wife "next door" and some think more of
the treasure, an Indian princesses dowry, taken in the Indian Ocean, waits
yet to be discovered, Canada rumoring somewhere in the Bay of Fundy, back in
1983, near where my grandfather was from, the highest tides in the world. It
is reported the excavated treasure was used to build a hospital to take care
of old seaman in London, as reported on TV.
As one of the first property owners in Brookhaven Town (or Riverhead, 17,000
acres, part of which might be Sagtikos Manor historic site) New York State's
largest town in area, it would be interesting to get more of the early
story. As told now, a Montaukett princess was kidnapped and held for ransom
on her wedding day by the Narragansetts who had raided from across the Long
Island Sound in eastern Connecticut and Rhode Island. Lion Gardiner
negotiated her release, first said to be 100,000 fathoms of wampum, or
strung together beads shaped and drilled from the mollusk or hard shell clam
(venus mercenaria mercenaria) renegotiated lower its said and perhaps
symbolic of the description of Long Island as the "Fort Knox" onetime, of
wampum, beaded belts and other trade items still existing as far away as
with the Iroquois. One archaeological site in Southold (where it's said
Dartmouth College for natives in part started before New Hampshire) Fort
Corchaug was once said to be a wampum production site and has been set aside
from development, Suffolk County purchasing it for parkland I believe. I
once met one of the Narragansetts at a Shinnecock pow-wow where my
house-mate a Cherokee got to dance, and was shown in Newsday. He and I also
visited the Unkechogue or Poospatuck "Trading Post" and was shown some of
the artifacts found on the properties there and asked perhaps to do some
archaeology there. Interesting some archaeologists think they came from the
North Shore, which is interesting, because in the first treaty between the
Dutch and the English, what was left after the Governor Kieft Indian War
with the Weckqueskecks, (he was admonished and replaced with Governor
Stuyvesant sent up from Curacao) were removed to the Nissiquogue River area
in Smithtown, NY.
George Myers
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