Cherry Valley
Near Cooperstown, New York
On November eleventh, seventeen seventy-eight, Cherry Valley became the site of one of the most devastating frontier attacks of the Revolutionary War. A combined force of British Loyalists under Captain Walter Butler and Haudenosaunee warriors led by Mohawk chief Joseph Brant swept through the settlement in a surprise raid. More than forty colonists were killed, including the garrison commander, and at least seventy more were taken prisoner.
The village was burned. The attack came in part as retaliation for American raids on Haudenosaunee villages earlier that year, part of the brutal cycle of violence that consumed the Mohawk Valley frontier throughout the war. Cherry Valley's destruction, alongside the earlier Wyoming Valley massacre, helped prompt George Washington to authorize the Sullivan-Clinton Campaign of seventeen seventy-nine, which destroyed more than forty Haudenosaunee villages across central and western New York.
The town was rebuilt and today is a quiet Otsego County village along US Route Twenty.
