Fort Decker: Where Brant Burned Minisink

Fort Decker in Port Jervis is one of the oldest surviving structures in New York State, a stone and log building raised before seventeen sixty as a frontier defense during the French and Indian War. In July of seventeen seventy-nine, Mohawk war chief Joseph Brant, fighting for the British, led a raid on the Minisink settlement and burned the fort.

The survivors fled to Goshen and raised a militia to pursue Brant, but the result was catastrophe. Within days, at Minisink Ford, Brant's force ambushed the patriots in the only major engagement of the entire Revolutionary War fought in the upper Delaware Valley, killing dozens. The house that replaced the original fort was built in seventeen ninety-three and still stands today at one twenty-seven West Main Street, operated by the Minisink Valley Historical Society as a museum of the region's colonial and revolutionary history.