Fort Klock: A Farmer's Fortress on the Mohawk

Around seventeen fifty, a German immigrant fur trader named Johannes Klock built a fortified stone house on the south bank of the Mohawk River. The Mohawk Valley was frontier territory, and ordinary homes doubled as refuges. Klock's compound sheltered neighbors during both the French and Indian War and the American Revolution.

Loyalist and Native American raiding parties targeted the Klock property in seventeen seventy-eight and again in seventeen eighty. The family held on. After the Revolution, the farm returned to peaceful life. The site now encompasses thirty acres including the original homestead, a Colonial Dutch barn, a blacksmith shop, and a nineteenth-century schoolhouse. In nineteen seventy-two it was designated a National Historic Landmark. Today Fort Klock is one of the most intact mid-eighteenth-century fortified homesteads in the United States, a reminder that for settlers in the Mohawk Valley, the line between farmhouse and fort was very thin.