It Happened Here--The Fish House

Throughout history rich and/or famous people have had their retreats, their summer houses, their dachas or their camps where they could escape the pressures of their jobs that inevitably followed them home. These were often places where, away from the everyday exigencies, their owners could reflect or think creatively. They often became extensions of their personal, as opposed to their official, selves and as such, these places could, sometimes, be used as high status venues where their most important colleagues, clients, allies and enemies could be invited for the famous persons to work their charismatic magic on them. Versailles, Hampton Court, Berchtesgaden, Camp David and the Kennedy Compound are a few such places that come to mind. For others their retreats were much more modest.

Statue of Johnson at the Lake George Battleground

In 1762 William Johnson was near the height of his personal, political and economic power. In 1755 the force he had raised turned back a major French invasion, at Lake George, capturing their major general (Dieskau), and providing the first good news from the battlefield the Crown  had received to date. He was knighted, a baronet, for his efforts--one of only two colonists ever to be so honored. The next year he was appointed sole Superintendent for Indian Affairs for the Northern Colonies and in 1760 the Mohawks gave him 80,000 acres in what would become northern Fulton county. In his life he would own 170,000 acres, becoming the third largest landowner in colonial America. In 1762 he began Johnson Hall, an imposing colonial mansion flanked by two stone blockhouses, designed to impress/intimidate Indian delegates come to make treaties or do other business with His Majesty's Superintendent of Indian Affairs. The same year he began the Fish House.

Johnson Hall, Johnstown

Much smaller and simpler, Fish House was a hunting and fishing camp on the shore of the Sacandaga River where it broadened out into a great marsh filled with ducks and shorebirds, flooding in the spring, and filled with trout and bass and pike.

Co.Rte. 110 at Co. Rte. 109, Broadalbin

It became a retreat where he could go by himself or with a few close friends (and perhaps rendezvous with the two accommodating daughters of the old caretaker of the place.)

Johnson loved to tell stories and like many sociable men in all periods of history seemed to have an extensive repertoire to draw upon whenever he was so inclined.  One of them involved the naming of a creek that emptied into the Sacadaga near Fish House.

Co. Rte. 110, north of Broadalbin

It must have been during the spring when the

water was high and Johnson, a Dutch friend, John (Hans) Conye, and some others were fishing from a boat off of the entrance to the creek. John (Hans) apparently became so excited, he fell in and being unable to swim he nearly drowned. Eventually Johnson and the others fished him out, no doubt inquiring if he had scouted out any fish in his underwater sojourn.

Co.Rte 30 at Lathrop and Griffis Roads, Mayfield

In 1772 Johnson built a nicer place, a few miles northeast of Fish House,   on Summerhouse Point and maintained by two of Johnson's slaves. By then, the old wound from a musket ball buried deep in his hip, received at the Battle of Lake George was bothering him a great deal* for he decided to have a  fourteen mile carriage road built for him from Johnson Hall to his new retreat. At every mile he had a large tree marked with the mile number.  The nine mile tree was a huge pine that survived for twenty five years after Johnson marked the tree, and its stump survived another seventy years. It is possible the pines seen in back of this sign are "grand children" or "great grand children" of that tree.

*Johnson ought relief from the pain of his injury by traveling to several springs to bathe in their waters. He went by carriage to Saratoga and even to Lebanon Springs, on the Massachusetts border.

Marker of the Week --with Halloween approaching I usually try to present a marker with some "spooky" or "haunted" associations

Paradise Point Road., N. of Mayfield, off Rte. 30

attached to it, and this marker has long been associated with unsettled spirits wandering in the vicinity near it. But I hesitate to relate its background story, because of its gruesomeness, even some 135 years after the event.

The area now comprising northern Fulton county stood squarely astride the warpath down the Sacandaga creek valley leading down from the Adirondacks, Lake Champlain and Canada.  From 1778 to the end of the war this area was raided every year by Iroquois war parties. There were fewer raids in 1779 due to the Clinton-Sullivan invasion of Iroquoia, that summer, which threw the Iroquois on the defensive, but what they lacked in number they maintained in ferocity.  When the Dunham homestead was attacked in April, Jacob Dunham and his son put up a resistance, giving time for the rest of the family to escape. Both were killed and subsequently scalped and then the elder Dunham was decapitated.  One of the family's horned cows was rounded up and instead of it being slaughtered,     (captured cattle's usual fate) the frightened beast was held while the severed head was impaled on one of its horns. In that condition it was left for the family to find. --No wonder there are stories of unsettled spirits wandering the fields nearby!