It Happened Here--The Palatines

Part 2, the Diaspora

King's Highway, Saugerties

The Palatines generally greeted the news of Governor Hunter's abandonment of the Tar-making project and of them, with excitement, as a release from servitude.  Many of those in the West Camp, who were less involved in tar-making continued on the lands in which they were settled,  eventually buying them. New settlements grew. A few miles west of West Camp the Palatines built, with their Dutch neighbors, a stone church, inscribing their names on a wall of this church at "Katsbaan".

Old Kings Highway, N. of Katsbaan (off of Rte. 32)

Some of the Palatines petitioned the Crown
 for the land bought by Gov. Hunter for
the tar-making project, but apparently their efforts were fruitless.

 

Similarly, they attempted to purchase land from Robert Livingston, but Livingston would not budge, only offering tracts for "three life leases." A few Palatine families accepted his terms.

Inscribed stones from old church in wall of the1867 Church

Rte 9, cor. 9G, north of Rhinebeck

After Robert Livingston rejected their offers to purchase land, about thirty families moved south to the adjoining patent owned by Henry Beekman. Beekman welcomed them and sold them land.  In 1713 they named their village after their homeland (the Rhine) and the landowner who treated them fairly (beck or beek).

Rte. 146 at Wagner Rd., Guilderland Ctr.

Most of the Palatines, however, continued to hope  they could find homes in their "promised land," "Scorie." After Governor Hunter's declaration that the Palatines must "shift for themselves" seven leaders of the villages,  the "list men" who kept records of the people in their jurisdiction, set off for the Schoharie headed by John Conrad Weiser. They hired an Indian guide who led them from Albany to Guilderland, into the Helderberg Mountains, then along the Fox Creek to Schoharie. They found the Indians in the Schoharie valley "hospitable" and readily to gave them permission to settle. After turning the last fifteen miles of the twenty-four mile track from Albany to Scoharie from a narrow Indian trail to a cart road, the first group of fifty families set out. They were followed in March 1713 by a second group of about one hundred and fifty families. The first winter the Palatines survived mainly because of the generosity of the Indians who gave them maize and showed them how to forage for edible native plants, roots and nuts.

Knox-Gallupville Rd., Knox

The Palatines settled in seven villages (dorfs or dorps), overseen by the listmasters.  Weiser's Dorf, and Hartman's Dorf, (named for Hartman Winedecker) were located in what is today Middleburgh. With Brunnen Dorf, named for the springs that flowed from the hillside, and Fuch's Dorf, named for its location where the Fox Creek enters the Schoharie Creek, was Smith's Dorf in the area that became "Schoharie".  North of them was Gerlach Dorf, and on the Cobleskill Creek, Kniskern's Dorf.

Rte 145, Main St., Middleburgh

     As in the camps, they built schools, churches and parsonages

Rte 30, N. of Middleburgh

Rte 30, Schoharie

Rte 30, Schoharie

Rte 30, Scoharie

Parsonage, Warner Hill Rd., Schoharie

The immigrants had barely settled into their new homes when they came under legal attack from none other than Governor Hunter. Though Hunter had "temporarily" released them from servitude and told them they must provide for themselves, he did not expect they would they would form permanent self-sufficient communities and he blamed them for the failure of the tar-making project, which threatened his financial ruin. 

The first assault on the Palatines claim to the valley began with Samuel Bayard's scheme to sell the Palatines titles to their land. Bayard's father Col. Nicholas Bayard had received a patent for almost the entire valley given to him by Governor Benjamin Fletcher (1692-1697), no doubt for a "consideration." (Fletcher was recalled for corruption and association with pirates, and had retired from the governorship an estimated  £300,000 wealthier) But in 1698 the Crown repudiated his "extravagant" land grants.* Though the exact nature of Samuel's scheme remains unclear, the younger Bayard entered the valley with a document he circulated offering title to the Palatine landholders. He was unceremoniously expelled from the valley by the Palatines.

A more serious threat came from Adam Vrooman of Schenectady. Vrooman had claimed to have bought some land from the Schoharie Indians in 1711. In the summer of 1714 Gov. Hunter issued him a patent for much of the land in the upper valley, including Weiser's Dorf. The Palatines were outraged. Enticing the local Indians with alcohol they re-marked their boundary claims, and bought additional land on the hillsides for 300 Spanish dollars. They began a campaign to harry Vrooman from the valley by driving their horses at night over the land Vroman attempted to plant and pulling down a stone house he was attempting to build. His son was pulled from a wagon and beaten, and Vroman's life was threatened. He too left, but his name remains in the valley as the name of a rocky promontory looking down on the fertile fields of the valley south of Middleburgh, "Vroman's Nose."

After failing to peddle his titles to the Palatines, Samuel Bayard assembled five partners to invest in Schoharie lands. Though he appears to have failed to sell them title to the lower Schoharie Valley, they applied directly to Hunter himself and received a patent in November 1714. Three years later  two other partners joined them with interests in the area of the Fox Creek. They informed the Palatines they must buy or lease their lands or leave. The partners appealed to the court in Albany to get the Albany County sheriff to deliver papers requiring the settlers to "pay up" and to surrender John Conrad Weiser, who they identified as their ringleader. At Weiser's Dorf a riot occurred, led by the women of the village. They pulled Sheriff Adams off his horse, beat him up, dragged him through the filth of their barnyards and carried him out of the valley on a fence rail, depositing him, with two broken ribs, on the road back to Albany.

The next year, when the Governor visited Albany.** He ordered a committee of three men from each dorf to come to Albany to explain their people's actions. Angrily he forbade the Palatines from planting crops until they had bought or rented their land.

Johann Conrad Weiser and two others made a bold attempt to go over the Governor's head and seek an audience with George I, Britain's new German king from Hannover.  Sneaking out of the valley, they made their way to Philadelphia and boarded a ship bound for England.  But a short distance from port their ship was taken by French pirates who took everything of value off the ship, including the money raised by the Palatines to support the trio while seeking to get a royal audience. The ship refitted in Boston then sailed on to London.  They arrived penniless and managed to subsist for a while on commercial and personal loans, but the loans came due, and they were no closer to their goal. They were thrown into debtors prison, where one of the petitioners died. Finally, money to pay their debts and free them from prison arrived. Weiser soldiered on alone after his other companion returned to America, where, his health broken, he also died. By then Governor Hunter was back in London seeking reimbursement for the tar making fiasco. Though unable to advance his own cause, he used what influence he had left to sabotage the Palatines' efforts. After five years of fruitless lobbying Weiser, also, returned home. Then, in what could be described as a karmic twist of fate, Hunter got a ruling from the Board of Trade. The Board would consider reimbursing Hunter if (1) he produced receipts for expenditures to Robert Livingston and others, (which he expected) and (2) he produced affidavits from the Palatines that they had been adequately provisioned, supported and compensated for their efforts! (Needless to say, no such affidavits would be forthcoming from the Palatines!) In 1719 Hunter's commission as governor of New York was revoked and he was replaced by William Burnett in 1720.

With the government's support, and the arrest of several Palatine leaders, the seven partners were able to force about 1/3 of the Palatines to buy or rent their land from them.  Another group of thirty three families moved to the Tulpehocken valley in Berks county Pennsylvania where other Palatines and several sects of German religious dissenters had successfully settled.

Early in his tenure as New York's new governor, Burnett addressed the Schoharie problem by granting himself a patent on land in the Mohawk River Valley with several Palatine leaders named as co-patentees.  Before this, the Mohawk clans had vigorously resisted attempts of European settlers to occupy their lands but now they were feeling vulnerable. Disease and war had reduced their numbers from several thousand to about 600. In the last century a large number of their people had been converted to Catholicism by the Jesuits and had decamped for lands around Montreal.  The last war had seen their homelands raided by the French and Algonquin enemies.  Their experience with the Palatines in Scoharie had been generally positive. The Palatines, more than the English and Dutch, seemed to respect Indian peoples and their life-styles and they were generally good neighbors. If the Mohawks could lease land to them it might limit uncontrolled European settlement.  Having Palatine neighbors might increase their security in the next (inevitable) war with the French.
The new governor also saw the benefit of creating buffer communities of non-Britons located between invading French and Indian raiders, and the exposed towns of Schenectady and Albany.

Rte 30, N. of Schoharie (now missing)

             "Gerlach Dorf

    Johan Christian Gerlach
  Palatine Listmaster Settled
      near this site in 1717
Gerlach along with most of this
Dorf's Palatines Removed to the
  Mohawk Valley in 1722-1723
 Schoharie Valley Bicentennial 1995"

The Burnett Patent allowed nearly 92 heads of families, over 300 people, to settle on lands from  Little Falls, 24 miles west along both sides of the Mohawk. The settlements of Palatine, Palatine Bridge, Stone Arabia, Oppenheim, German Flats, Frankfort and others came into being between 1723 and 1726. Their numbers were swelled by the arrival of another ship of Palatines that arrived in 1722.  Included with them was the "Erghtmer" (Herchheimer or Herkimer) family.

For thirty years the Palatines lived in peace and growing prosperity along the Mohawk River until the last French and Indian war when their homes and farms were twice attacked and burned by  the French and their Algonquin allies in 1757, 1758 and again, by their Loyalist neighbors and Iroquois former-friends, twenty years later in the American Revolution.  Nicholas Herkimer, son of Palatine immigrants led the defense of the valley from Fort Herkimer in the last "French War" and turned back a British, Loyalist, Indian invasion in 1777, being mortally wounded in the Battle of Oriskany.  

Rte. 5,  North Illion

Gen. Herkimer Statue, Park Ave. Herkimer

For many years much of this part of the Mohawk Valley remained unoccupied.  After the wars some Palatines returned to pick up the pieces of their shattered lives, but many moved elsewhere, completing the last chapter of the Palatine diaspora.

*Another of Fletcher's thirteen "extravagant " grants revoked by the Crown was one used for the West Camp settlements.
**New York City was the seat of the Colony's government, as New Amsterdam had been the seat of New Netherlands in Dutch times.


Addenda--On 5/12/13 I wrote on a piece on "New York's Wooden Roads." Since then I have taken photos at a couple other sites. The newer Pomeroy sign makes an interesting observation about the noise arising from wood planks laid over wooden stringers under the wheels of wagons.

County Rte.110, Broadalbin

     

1315 Township Rd. Altamont



Note--This installment of NYSHMs has been delayed due to technical problems. These have included being unable to download several photos which if corrected, will be shown in the next installment's  Addenda