Lecture: Kevin Wright speaks on 1609: A Country What Was Never Lost

[Steenrapie]

On March 18, 2010, historian Kevin Wright will present an illustrated talk on his new book 1609: A Country that was Never Lost, The 400th Anniversary of Henry Hudson’s Visit with North Americans of the Middle Atlantic Coast at 7:30 PM in the Second Reformed Church, 436 Union Street, Hackensack, NJ 07601, located at the corner of Anderson and Union Streets, Hackensack.

Profit in silk and spices lured them into Arctic straits, but the chilling reality of the Little Ice Age blocked their passage. And so Henry Hudson and his mutinous crew turned westward armed with vague charts and supposed sightings of the Indian Ocean across a narrow sandy isthmus. Upon their arrival, crowds of curious Manhattans greeted them in canoes made from tree trunks. Dressed in animal skins and mantles woven of turkey feathers, they offered corn, beans, oysters, tobacco, hemp, grapes and pumpkins in trade for cloth, metal tools and trinkets. Mining contemporary sources, historian Kevin W. Wright has carefully reconstructed the native world that Henry Hudson encountered during his fateful voyage of 1609. In so doing, he dispels the fog of nineteenth and twentieth century myths to rediscover the North Americans of the Middle Atlantic Coast. Describing their original homelands and culture in great detail, he brings the panorama of culturally diverse native societies to life. These were truly the First Americans, inclined to live "almost all equally free." Could their natural democracy lie at the heart of the American spirit? The Hudson Quadricentennial marks the birth of the Dutch colony of New Netherland upon the Hudson and Delaware Rivers and the dawn of history for Delaware, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, New York and Connecticut. But as early as 1656, Dutch commentator Adriæn van der Donck wondered how Christopher Columbus or Amerigo Vespucci could have discovered "a country that was never lost?" Through these pages readers step back in time for a visit with ancient Algonquian and Iroquoian communities of Native Americans, including the original Manhattans, the Minisinks of Bachom's Country, the Lenape of the Schuylkill estuary, the Mahicans, Susquehannocks, Mohawks and others whose names have been lost in the mists of time.

Born in Newton, NJ, Kevin Wright was attracted, even as a child, to the history and legends of Sussex County. After graduating Rutgers College, he started in historical interpretation at the restored village of Waterloo in 1977, becoming tour director in 1979. As curator of the Steuben House, a Revolutionary War landmark in River Edge, he built up a large interest and attendance, working with the Bergen County Historical Society. In 1982, he and Alex Everitt successfully led the fight to preserve the 1848 Sussex Courthouse and Newton's oldest streetscape. He prepared the National Register nomination for the Newton Town Plot Historic District. In 1985 his research brought worldwide media attention to NJ’s claim of sovereignty over Ellis and Liberty Islands. He became the first Resource Interpretive Specialist for the northern region of NJ in 2000 and was central to the visioning process for Historic New Bridge Landing, Lusscroft Farm, and the State History Fair. Kevin Wright was President of the Sussex County Historical Society and of the Bergen County Historical Society. He has been a member of the Newton Historic Preservation Advisory Commission since1987.