German Flatts: Two Raids, Twenty-One Years Apart

The flat farmland along the Mohawk River here was settled in the early seventeen hundreds by Palatine German refugees, Protestants who had fled religious war and poverty in southwestern Germany. The British Crown resettled thousands of them in the Mohawk Valley in the early seventeen hundreds, and they built a prosperous farming community called German Flatts. They paid a brutal price for the valley's strategic importance, not once but twice.

The first raid came on November twelfth, seventeen fifty-seven, during the French and Indian War. A French-Canadian officer named Picoté de Belestre led roughly three hundred troops and Native allies out of Montreal. A friendly Oneida warrior had warned the settlers, but they had made no defensive preparations. At three in the morning, Belestre's force struck simultaneously at the settlement's small fortified blockhouses and overpowered them one by one. Between forty and fifty settlers were killed. About one hundred fifty more, including many women and children, were taken prisoner to Canada. The settlement was reduced to ash.

The Palatine Germans rebuilt. They were here again when the Revolution came. In September of seventeen seventy-eight, a force of roughly four hundred fifty men, Mohawk warriors under Joseph Brant and Loyalist Rangers under Captain William Caldwell, descended on the rebuilt community. This time, a militiaman named Adam Helmer ran roughly thirty-five miles ahead of the raiders to warn the settlers, who managed to shelter in two nearby forts. Brant's force could not take the forts. Instead, they burned sixty-three houses, fifty-seven barns, a sawmill, and drove away hundreds of horses, cattle, and sheep. The people survived, but a generation of labor was erased again.

They rebuilt a second time. The descendants of those Palatine refugees are still here.