Guy Park: A Loyalist's Estate on the Mohawk

Guy Park was built in seventeen seventy-four on the north bank of the Mohawk River by Guy Johnson, nephew and son-in-law of Sir William Johnson, the Crown's superintendent of Indian affairs. The stone Georgian manor house was meant to anchor the Johnson family's control over the Mohawk Valley and their alliance with the Haudenosaunee Confederacy. When the Revolution came, Guy Johnson fled to Canada with hundreds of Loyalist Mohawk followers, and the estate was confiscated.

The house survived and is one of the best-preserved pre-Revolutionary structures in the Mohawk Valley. Today it stands in the city of Amsterdam as a reminder of the Loyalist world the Revolution swept away, including the deep ties between the Johnson family and the Mohawk people who fought alongside them.