Schoharie Village: Breadbasket of the Revolution

The village of Schoharie is the county seat of Schoharie County, and its name comes from a Mohawk word meaning floating driftwood, a reference to the debris that once drifted down the creek here. Palatine Germans, refugees who had fled religious persecution in the Rhine Valley, settled this area beginning around seventeen eighteen and built a prosperous farming community. During the Revolution, the Schoharie Valley's wheat fields fed Washington's Continental Army, earning the region a nickname it still carries: the breadbasket of the Revolution. The British knew this too, which is why Loyalist and Haudenosaunee raiders systematically targeted the valley's farms across three brutal years of frontier warfare from seventeen seventy-eight to seventeen eighty.