Sunday Rerun: Gimme a head with hair

I once found a dollar bill that some rich person used as a bookmark in a library book I took out.

People leave all manner of things in books. I've found love letters, birthday cards, grocery lists and pressed dried flowers in among the pages of books, and that's from a lifetime of rooting through used books.

And one of my mini-collections is old almanacs...those little books that contain the deets on the sun and the moon and the stars, crazy weather predictions that someone wrote a year and a half ago, and recipes for refrigerator pickles.

But at Schaffer Library at Union College in Schenectady, New York, they have found a lock of hair from the revered head of George Washington in an old almanac!

India Spartz is the head of Special Collections and Archives at the library there, and she says, “This is a very significant treasure. It’s a tremendous testament to history and our connection to some of the most important historical figures.”

What happened was, Daniel Michelson, who's a historical records project archivist at the college, was going through the shelves, and there he came upon a little leather-bound book titled “Gaines Universal Register or American and British Kalendar for the year 1793.”

This was a popular almanac of its day and was the property of Philip J. Schuyler, the son of Gen. Philip Schuyler, one of the College’s founders.

Gen. Schuyler was a FOG (Friend of George) who served under Washington in the Revolutionary War and, later, as a US senator.

Stuffed inside the almanac you'll find some notes in Philip Schuyler's writing, including a recipe on preserving beef for summer's use.

This is the first confirmation that creamed chipped beef on toast was part of the early American diet, one supposes.

And then John Myers of the library staff found an old yellowed envelope in the almanac, back by the ads for gladiolus bulbs and trusses. On the envelope are the words “Washington's hair, L.S.S. & (scratched out) GBS from James A. Hamilton given him by his mother, Aug. 10, 1871.”

In the envelope: some gray hairs, tied up in a thread.

Because everything about our colonial history now is somehow connected to the Broadway musical "Hamilton," here is the connection. James Alexander Hamilton was the third son of Alexander Hamilton, who fought with Washington in the Revolutionary War, but then they stopped fighting long enough to see Hamilton appointed as the first secretary of the Treasury when Washington became president. Alex was married to Eliza Schuyler, so there's your family circle right there, although I can say in all honesty that no members of my family have come to me with requests for locks of my hair.

It says in Ron Chernow’s Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Hamilton (the wellspring for the musical which has people lined up from New York to pay thousands for tickets for a seat to sleep in) that George and Martha Washington were really tight with Alexander and Eliza, so it's presumed that Martha Washington said to Eliza, "George died. Here's some of his hair to hand out to your family."

Historians believe that Washington had wavy hair, and now some more of it is waving hello.