‘We Don’t Know What We Don’t Know’: Lifelong Massapequa Resident Investigates Local History In New Book

MASSAPEQUA, NY. — Growing up in Massapequa, St. John’s University professor Dr. John DiMarco didn’t hear an awful lot about Fort Massapeag. On Tuesday, DiMarco told Patch he “didn’t really know much about it, didn’t know about it at all, really.”

“We had basic curriculum in social studies about the New York Native Americans, but never learned about anything specific to Massapequa. So it was kind of intriguing to me, as I’m in my 50s now, learning about it,” DiMarco continued.

DiMarco said Tuesday that once he started looking into the history of the fort, his “curiosity took over,” launching him down a years-long rabbit hole that culminated in the publishing of his new book, “Hidden in Massapequa: Unearthing Fort Massapeag.”

The book tells the story not only of a misunderstood Massapequa landmark, but of decades of local efforts to preserve the history that took place there, spanning from the times before the United States of America existed to the 1990s, with brief stops in the 1930s and 1970s in between. DiMarco has described his book as a "visual history," drawing information from artifacts preserved at museums across New York state and attempting, as he put it, "to bridge the gap between complex archaeological records and the general public, especially for students and families who want to understand the history of Long Island.”

Despite the copious research that went into its publishing, DeMarco said the book came about from the simplest of happenings.

“I really started to research this a few years ago, I saw a sign over in South Massapequa. ‘Indian fort,’ basically, is what the sign says. And I was kind of interested about it, so I started looking up and I started to see conflicting stories about a massacre with Captain John Underhill,” DiMarco said.

Those stories, DiMarco said, told the tale of a bloody battle between Indigenous people and European settlers, culminating in hundreds of Indigenous people being buried at the fort site. After researching, including finding primary reports from when the land around Fort Massapeag was purchased for real estate development in the 1930s, DiMarco said the evidence of such a massacre was sparse.

“What I ended up finding out was that the fort was kind of a special place. And the massacre really has been disputed, because they didn't find anything there that would indicate that there was a battle,” DiMarco said. “There were no musket balls, there were no broken skulls. The bodies were in fetal positions with artifacts around them, which indicates a burial ground.”

Upon further research, DiMarco realized that this “fort” had actually been just a part of a larger Indigenous community in what is now southern Massapequa, with artifacts found around the “fort” that indicated the presence of trade between Indigenous and European people. That more nuanced relationship, DiMarco said, was an important one to try to show in his book.

“I’m trying to educate the community, because the idea is that it was the site of the Massacre, which literally didn't happen. It was a place of refuge, the fort was, and it was a trading post,” DiMarco said. “The majority artifacts that they found were pipes, and many of those pipes had European markings on them, and the style was European. And they found extra Native American pipes, so that means that there was trading going on… it kind of is a historiography, a kind of tells the history of the history of [the fort]."

When asked why he was eager to tell the “history of the history,” DiMarco said he wanted to enhance the historical literacy of people who read his book, finding multiple historical sources to form a more complete, nuanced story of what really happened at Fort Massapeag.

“I tried to look at it from a point of view of, 'what am I seeing in some of this literature and what am I seeing in 20th century archaeological investigation?'” DiMarco said. “What was really amazing about this is the folks that were there in the 1930s, digging up artifacts and plotting out the land. A lot of artifacts were lost when they were building more towards Merrick Road. And as they moved more south, that land was more inhospitable, so it was used for firewood, it was used for other things that kind of got overgrown. So the idea that people are understanding kind of a version of what actually happened there, I think is better than just knowing these kind of stories that they think are part of just a colonial narrative, because it was more than that. It was a complex relationship."

That connection to the 1930s is just part of a more recent effort, also detailed in DiMarco’s book, to preserve the historic site in Massapequa. Articles from the Brooklyn Eagle, letters from Nassau County residents and photos of Queens-based history buffs, DiMarco said, all stack up to show a decades-long effort to keep an account of what happened here.

In one case, DiMarco said an 18-year-old man named Ralph Solecki traveled from New York City to Massapequa in the 1930s in hopes of digging up Indigenous artifacts, after hearing accounts of people doing so. Photos of Solecki, shovel in hand, appear in the book. 60 years later, DiMarco said, Solecki, who had become a professor in Columbia University’s archaeology department, authored the report that was used to nominate the Fort Massapeag site as a National Historic Landmark, a designation it received in 1993.

“I give the story as a composite…I have a section on the artifacts, which are images and captions of all of the different items, and then the last part is the people. So it's all the archaeologists, all the historians, all the preservationists who worked to keep this thing from being, you know, a row of houses,” DiMarco said. “I mean, the town moved the road. I have both plans, it was fascinating to see this. So, you know, I've been able to find that stuff, and then, once I was able to do that, now I had a treasure trove.”

When asked why it’s important that people read his book, DiMarco said it could fill gaps in peoples’ historical knowledge that they didn’t know were there.

“We don't know what we don't know. And I think being curious, especially about where we live, is vital to understanding how we got here and how we're moving forward,” DiMarco said. “Most importantly, I think it gives us lessons as to how people are living and getting along in much more difficult times, and it shows also how the town really came together with academics, historians, and local preservationists to rescue this Indigenous place and have it recognized as more than just the spot with a sign, meaning that it's a very special place in the annals of not only New York history, but United States history.”