Angelica: Named for Hamilton's Sister-in-Law
New York
The town of Angelica carries the name of one of the most glamorous women in the founding era: Angelica Schuyler Church, eldest daughter of General Philip Schuyler, sister-in-law of Alexander Hamilton, and wife of the international financier John Barker Church.
After a debt owed to John Church by land speculator Robert Morris went unpaid, the Churches foreclosed on a one-hundred-thousand-acre tract in western New York in eighteen hundred. Their son Philip Schuyler Church chose a site along the Genesee River and in eighteen oh five established a town there, naming it for his mother. Angelica remains the oldest town in Allegany County.
Angelica Schuyler Church herself was known across two continents for her wit and correspondence. She counted Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin among her admirers, and her letters to Hamilton are among the most studied in Revolutionary-era scholarship.
