Old Stone Fort, Schoharie

The building you can see from the road started its life as a church. The Palatine German settlers of the Schoharie Valley were mostly Reformed, and in seventeen seventy-two they built themselves a handsome stone meetinghouse at the edge of the village. They had barely finished dedicating it when the Revolution changed everything.

By seventeen seventy-seven the Schoharie Valley was a war zone. The fertile fields here fed the Continental Army, which made the valley a prime target for British-backed raiding parties operating out of Canada. Local families converted the stone church into a fortified refuge. They threw up a log stockade enclosing about half an acre around the building, added blockhouses with cannons at two corners, and built huts against the inside of the walls whose roofs doubled as firing steps. The place became known as the Lower Fort, the southernmost of three defensive positions along the Schoharie River.

The fort's defining moment came on October seventeenth, seventeen eighty. A force of roughly eight hundred Loyalists and Haudenosaunee warriors under Sir John Johnson and Mohawk Captain Joseph Brant swept down the valley, burning farms and driving off livestock. When they reached Schoharie village they turned their cannon on the stone fort. Three cannonballs struck the building. One left a hole in the cornice molding that you can still see today, alongside the original beam the ball passed through, now on display inside.

The garrison held. The sharpshooters posted in the church tower laid down enough accurate fire that Johnson decided the fort was too costly to take. He broke off the attack and marched his raiders north toward the Mohawk Valley, where they continued their destruction. The Lower Fort had stopped them cold.

After the war the building returned to its congregation. It served as a church for decades, then became a museum in eighteen eighty-eight, when the Schoharie County Historical Society was formed to run it. Today it holds one of the most complete collections of Revolutionary War-era material in upstate New York, and that cannonball hole in the cornice still tells the story better than any exhibit label.