Stockade Historic District - History - 17th and 18th Centuries

17th and 18th Centuries

A group of Dutch settlers, mostly merchants and fur traders looking to do business with Native Americans, settled the banks of the Mohawk in an area between the present Ferry, Front and State streets and Washington Avenue in 1661. This group of twelve houses surrounded by a wooden stockade, 200 Dutch feet (about 187 feet, or 56.6 m) on a side is considered the founding of the city of Schenectady. After the 1674 Treaty of Westminster ended the Third Anglo-Dutch War the settlement, like all established by the Dutch in New Netherland, came under British control as part of the Province of New York.

The small frontier settlement was almost wiped out in 1690 during King William's War, the first in the series of conflicts known as the French and Indian Wars. French troops and their Algonquin and Sault allies, retaliating for a series of British-backed Iroquois raids on their territory, were on their way to an assault on Fort Orange at present-day Albany when their scouts found that Schenectady's stockade was almost minimally staffed, and changed their plans to attack this target of opportunity.

In the course of the ensuing Schenectady massacre, many of the houses and barns were burned and most of the inhabitants of the village either killed or taken to Montreal as prisoners. Local members of the Mohawk tribe, in particular one who had become known among the settlers as Lawrence, encouraged the Dutch to rebuild.

By 1692 the community had been rebuilt and repopulated with a mixture of English, Scottish and Dutch settlers. The stockade was rebuilt and by 1704 took in College Street on the east and Cowhorn Creek on the south. The French and Indian Wars continued into the next century, ending in 1763, by which time the stockade had been extended to the river on the north. The costs of retaining control over the North American colonies eventually led Parliament to consider different taxes on the colonial economy to pay the mounting costs. These in turn led to discontent in the colonies, and one of the first "Liberty!" protest flags over the Stamp Act 1765 was raised over the Dutch Reformed Church then at the corner of Church and Union streets (it is now in the Schenectady Historical Society building on Washington Street).

During the Revolutionary War Schenectady served as headquarters for several of the local Committees of Safety. George Washington visited the area at least three times, due to its strategic importance. After independence, the stockade, which had begun to deteriorate from neglect during the war, was dismantled. Only some of the footings remain, mostly buried. The village continued to grow as the main point of departure for travel to the west. Buildings and wharves along the riverfront and the Binne Kill accommodated the travelers and cargo that came overland from Albany and boarded bateaux for the trip west to Lake Erie.