St. Johnsville: Palatine Roots on the Mohawk

The Mohawk people held this stretch of river for centuries before European contact. Then, in the early seventeen hundreds, waves of Palatine German refugees arrived, fleeing war and poverty along the Rhine. They were part of a large wave of refugee migration to colonial America, and they remade this valley in their own image.

Palatine families, among them the Timmerman family, settled here in the early seventeen hundreds, and settlers built mills powered by the creek. By the time the Erie Canal opened in eighteen twenty-five, St. Johnsville was a working industrial village. It became an official village in eighteen fifty-seven. The old mills are gone, but the street grid and stone buildings still trace the bones of a community that Palatine farmers carved out of the Mohawk wilderness three centuries ago.