Kanadaseaga: The Seneca Capital That Vanished
Near Geneva, New York
Before the town of Geneva existed here, this ground was Kanadaseaga, the Lower Seneca Castle and principal capital of the Seneca Nation, Keeper of the Western Door of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy. For generations the Seneca held the western boundary of the alliance that stretched from the Hudson River to the Niagara. In seventeen seventy-nine that changed.
General George Washington ordered Generals Sullivan and Clinton to destroy all Haudenosaunee settlements in New York. Their army burned forty towns, destroyed one hundred sixty thousand bushels of corn, and drove thousands of Seneca refugees to shelter under British protection at Fort Niagara. Kanadaseaga was razed to the ground.
Its people never returned. Within fifteen years, the village site was platted as Geneva, New York, and the Seneca's carefully maintained capital disappeared beneath the grids of a new American town.
