The Mohawk River basin can be divided into 53 smaller Hydrologic Units (called HUCs) which are usually watersheds of tributaries. From time to time we will look at individual HUCs.
The Fox Creek HUC straddles Albany and Schoharie Counties. It covers parts of the towns of Schoharie, Wright, Knox, Bern, Rensselaerville, and Westerloo. It is largely wooded or in agriculture. The HUC has an area 296 sq km and a 2000 population of 5,798. Fox Creek flows into Schoharie Creek just north of the village of Schoharie. Tributaries to the Fox include Beaver Dam Creek, Switz Kill, and the Louse Kill. There are no industrial facilities reporting to the Environmental Protection Agency’s Toxic Release Inventory. The Louse Kill gets its name from the migration of the Palatines into the Schoharie Valley. These people, so important in the early settlement of the Mohawk River Basin, came to the New York
Colony as refugees from poverty, persecution, and war in the Protestant German speaking provinces in 1709. They were expected to work off the cost of their passage by making pine tar but the project was mismanaged. Royal Governor Hunter ran out of funds for their support and the people were let go in September of 1711. They made their way into the Schoharie Valley and bargained with the Indians for farmland. According to legend, they first saw the Schoharie Valley at the crossing of a small stream. There they halted, listened to a Divine Service, and washed their clothes. Their lice were carried off by the water. Hence the name.
A few miles away very near the mouth of Fox Creek, and in the Fox Creek HUC, there is an old stone fort. Called the Old Stone Fort, it is now a museum but was built as a church in 1772. The graves of many early settlers cluster around the building. The tallest of the markers belongs to
David Williams.
Resources
Schoharie County figures prominently in New York State history. See Jeptha R. Simms’ History of Schoharie County (1845) conveniently available at http://www.rootsweb.com/~nyschoha/simms1.html.
The Palatine immigration to Schoharie and the Mohawk Valley is detailed in Walter Allen Knittle’s 1937 book Early Eighteenth Century Palatine Emigration: A British Government Redemptioners Project to Manufacture Naval Stores.
The story has been retold more recently (2004) in Philip Otterness’ Becoming German: The 1709 Palatine Migration to New York. I haven’t read it.
The Palatine immigration is treated in a 1958 novel, The Promised Land, by John J. Vrooman. The Vrooman family was already established on the Schoharie when the Palatines arrived. In the book, Fox Creek is written as “Foxen Kill”.
A relatively recent and interesting account of the different perceptions of Major Andre’s captors is in Major John Andre and the Three Captors: Class Dynamics and Revolutionary Memory Wars in the Early Republic, 1780-1831 Robert E. Cray, Jr. Journal of the Early Republic, Vol. 17, No. 3
(Autumn, 1997), pp. 371-397.
The situation in Revolutionary Westchester County, where Major Andre was captured, is depicted in James Fenimore Cooper’s 1859 novel The Spy, a Tale of the Neutral Ground.
