NY State Museum

Today we went on a long-day trip to the New York State Museum. I never had been to the museum so this was something new to experience for me. Even though I enjoyed the presentations given by the curators, my feet were killing me and my legs kept aching from standing all day. The wide range of topics discussed included the Albany Almshouses which intrigued me the most, the first New Yorkers, and the archaeology of Euro-Americans.

The Albany Almhouses intrigued me the most. It’s amazing how almost a thousand people were buried in stacks over one another after living a life of strenuous labour and misery. All those people who were amputees, single mothers, mentally ill, and the old and poor ultimately all died from exhaustion from working all their life to make ends meet. The condition of their lives and their bodies seems like it’s almost out of a horror story. I could never imagine being in a situation such as this hundreds of years ago; always being worried about where to get food, suffering from fractured bones, and living in homes in bad condition. The story about the woman who was buried in a bolted hexagonal coffin with a window on it to see her face was really interesting and creepy to me.

The sculpted heads we were shown by Andrea Lain looked so real. I thought if I got up close to it one of them will wink at me so I kept my distance pretty far. But it was interesting seeing the damage these skulls had; you can distinguish the kind of lifestyle they had back in the 1800's.  You can see the amount of strenuous labour they had to endure from the osteoporosis and damage on their bones to the missing teeth which indicated lack of proper dental hygiene and to the smoking pipes that caused holes in their teeth.

Sculptures of Deceased bodied found in Almhouses

If there's anything the remains of these bodies had in common it would the infinite amount of poverty that was widespread among these people. It is unfortunate because a majority of the workers were immigrants who came here to New York, where the Albany and Troy area was prospering, in hopes of looking for a better life. But all they got was the heart-wrenching poverty they tried desperately to escape but couldn't; doing strenuous labour for at least some money to survive was all they could muster here at the time and they had no choice. 

In the Albany County Almshouse Cemetary, a five-foot grey granite reads " Let me glide noiselessly forth; with the keys of softness unlock the locks with a whisper. Here lies those once buried." (by Walt Whitman).