Where America Is

One of the most critical topographical features in American history is a small, flat stretch of land in rural central New York. Shrouded today in woods, marked at one end only by a modest stone monument, it varies from one to seven miles in length, depending on the season.

Yet because of this little spot, the Oneida tribe of the Iroquois Confederacy sided with the Americans, ultimately throwing critical momentum the colonists’ way. Because of it, the nearby Oriskany Battlefield became one of the bloodiest sites of the Revolutionary War. Because of it, savvy observers, George Washington among them, would realize that this place of portage was the key to joining the Atlantic to the continent’s interior—a connecting of watery dots that would go on to change not only America, but the world.

That slice of land is known in English as the Oneida Carry. History saturates this place, in every direction: from the Haudenosaunee peoples to the Jesuit martyrs; from the Second Great Awakening to the colorful boom years of the Erie Canal; from the rise and fall of manufacturing jobs in the twentieth century, to the opioid and fentanyl crises in the twenty-first.

Critical as it is to the nation’s story, the Carry symbolizes something else for me. It is the geographical center of the hamlets and villages in which I grew up—my own interior metaphor for a life that began around it, and, like the nation, expanded outward into the vast America that this deceptively humble place made possible.

Mary Eberstadt is a senior research fellow at the Faith and Reason Institute. This piece appears in First Things’ symposium “Where America Is.”