The Battle of Klock's Field

By October of seventeen eighty, the Mohawk Valley was exhausted. Four years of Revolutionary War had turned neighbors into enemies and transformed this productive agricultural corridor into a contested frontier of raids, burnings, and ambushes. Continental supply lines depended on the valley's grain, and the British in Canada understood that destroying those harvests could starve the rebellion.

In late summer of that year, General Frederick Haldimand, the British governor of Quebec, authorized a large-scale raid into the Schoharie and Mohawk valleys. The force was led by Major John Johnson, a Loyalist who had once been one of the most powerful landowners in this very valley, commanding roughly nine hundred forty Loyalists, Mohawk, Seneca, and Cayuga warriors. They swept south and east, burning settlements and crops as they went.

On October nineteenth, as Johnson's force moved east through this corridor near present-day Saint Johnsville, they were intercepted. Brigadier General Robert Van Rensselaer had rushed from Schenectady with several hundred militia and levies. The two forces collided here, at the farm of a German-American settler named Klock, in a running engagement along the north side of the Mohawk River.

The battle itself was tactically inconclusive. Van Rensselaer's men forced Johnson to break off and retreat, but pursuit was slow and the raiders slipped away. The damage they left behind was enormous. By Johnson's own accounting, his forces burned more than two hundred dwellings and destroyed enormous stores of grain across the valley in that single campaign, a devastating blow to the region's capacity to supply the Continental Army.

The site here is marked by a New York State historical marker. Fort Klock, a fortified stone farmhouse from the same era, stands a short distance away and is open to visitors, one of the few surviving structures from the valley's brutal frontier war years.