Fort Crailo: Where Yankee Doodle Was Born
Near Albany, New York
Across the Hudson River from Albany stands Fort Crailo, a fortified Dutch manor house built in about seventeen oh seven on the Van Rensselaer family estate. Its name comes from the Dutch kraaien bos, meaning crow's woods. In seventeen forty-six the owners added gunports after French and Native raiders attacked nearby Greenbush.
The house gained its most famous legend in seventeen fifty-five, when, by family tradition, British Army surgeon Richard Shuckburgh was quartered here during the French and Indian Wars. Watching the ragtag New England colonial troops muster outside, Shuckburgh reportedly scribbled a mocking ditty to the tune of an old English melody. He called it Yankee Doodle.
The colonists adopted the insult as a badge of pride, and twenty years later they marched to it at Lexington and Concord. The State of New York received Fort Crailo as a gift in nineteen twenty-four and operates it today as a museum of Dutch colonial culture.
