Three Rivers
Hudson~Mohawk~Schoharie
History From America's Most Famous Valleys

History of The OLD FORT HERKIMER CHURCH
German Flatts Reformed Church, 1723
By W. N. P. Dailey, D. D.
Published by the
St. Johnsville Enterprise and News
Lou D. MacWethy, editor
St. Johnsville, NY (Price 35 cents)

Thanks to Betty Hoagey for sending this for the web site!

Organized in 1723. Land given 1730 and 1773. Present edifice begun about 1730. A story of the Palatine people and their early struggles. Many names of first settlers. By Rev. W. N. P. Dailey, DD. Author of History of the Montgomery Classis, R.C.A.

Closing Years of the Rosencrantz Pastorate

We are able to give two pictures of the closing years of the Rosencrantz ministry one by Rev. Timothy Dwight, D. D. President of Yale College who visited this section in 1799 and another by Francis Adrian VanderKemp who made a trip in 1792 from the Hudson to Lake Ontario. Dr. Dwight's sketches were first published in 1822, some years after his death. He speaks of the settlers here about mostly "Dutch farmers, raising wheat, peas and inferior grass." He said the people were a "quiet folk easy going and enterprising." He refers to the churches at Herkimer and Fort Herkimer. He devotes a good deal of space to a discussion of the morals and ignorance of the people, which, with few exceptions, were very low." Herkimer had thirty houses at the time while on the south side the houses were "a story or story and a half Dutch houses." Evidently Dr. Dwight did not make any distinction between the Germans and the Dutch. Then, again, his measurement was that of the narrow Puritan. Gen. Herkimer and Johan Jost Petrie and their successors will compare favorably with Gov. Endicott, Gov. Winthrop and Cotton Mathar as to morality and justice if not in education. Gen. Herkimer died quoting the Scripture but for a hundred years after the Pilgrims landed in New England the Bible was a forbidden book in their churches. Dr. Dwight was the first to tell the year about Hon Yost Schuyler. He says in this 1822 edition that it was the "father" of Hon Yost who was held as a hostage for the return of the "idiot son of the gypsy woman." Inasmuch as Hon Yost Schuyler's father had been dead fourteen years the following editions changed it to his "brother." We have never been able to accept the view of Dr. Dwight that the sister of Gen. Herkimer, the mother of Hon Yost Schuyler, was a "gypsy", nor that Hon Yost Schuyler, Cooper's "Harvey Birch" of the Oriskany Battle was an "idiot" if he could outwit Barry St. Leger, or that Gen. Arnold would wantonly kill a near relative of his commanding officer, Gen. Schuyler.