Fort Hunter: Queen Anne's Fort on the Mohawk

In seventeen ten, four Mohawk and Mahican chiefs sailed to England and asked Queen Anne for Anglican missionaries. She sent them, and ordered a fort built in Mohawk country to protect the mission. In seventeen twelve, Fort Hunter rose at the junction of Schoharie Creek and the Mohawk River: a one hundred fifty-foot square stockade with blockhouses at each corner, built beside a Lower Mohawk village of a few dozen houses.

For a century it anchored the frontier. Then the Erie Canal arrived, and in eighteen twenty the fort was demolished to make way for the waterway that was about to change everything. The canal crossed Schoharie Creek here, first on a log and stone dam and later on a fourteen-arch stone aqueduct built between eighteen thirty-nine and eighteen forty-one. You are looking at one of the oldest and most layered crossroads in upstate New York: a Mohawk village, a Queen's fort, and an engineering wonder that opened the continent, all stacked on the same acre.