Site Description
Students dig a shovel test pit
at the Bard 25 site
Based on mid-19th-century cartography, the site belonged to R. Tillotson, as part of his estate known as Miramont, now the central third of the campus. He was Secretary of State for New York in 1816 and later US Attorney for the Southern District of NY. His grandmother was Margaret Beekman Livingston, of Clermont, and his father Thomas Tillotson, Surgeon General of the Revolutionary Army. Dr. Tillotson settled in Rhinebeck after the war for independence. In the 1790 census he had several slaves.
Robert Tillotson appears in the Federal 1820 Town of Red Hook census with two family members. By the 1830 Federal census he heads a household of 19 persons, suggesting that servants and possibly agricultural workers appear under his name. In 1840 Robert is named as a family head in the Annandale vicinity, but he does not appear in censuses of 1850 on.
A small exploratory trench indicated the strong likelihood that the anthropogenic depression was a cellar hole, while 181 shovel tests in the site evaluation phase of research documented the scatter of artifacts below surface. Only a few items were visible on top of the ground, at the foot of several trees in this wooded, rocky area.