It was a cold February night, 322 years ago, that 200 French, Sault and Algonquin warriors descended on the stockaded village of Schenectady. It’s unlikely that the story of the stockade being guarded by snowmen was true, though that would be a lighthearted element of an otherwise heartrending story of death by musketball, hatchet and bashing on the frontier. It was a lesser event of a forgotten war, retaliation for an earlier massacre in Lachine, near Montreal. There were no snowmen or any other guards, and the attackers found the gate ajar. The massacre began about two hours before dawn, catching the villagers in their beds. In the next hours, 38 men, 10 women and 12 children were killed. Simon Schermerhorn, wounded, mounted a horse and rode the path through the woods to Fort Orange (Albany) to raise the alarm, but by the time they could respond prisoners were already being marched north.
Survivors were rounded up and marched across the frozen river to the home of Johannes Glen in what is now Scotia, whose previous kindnesses to the French were repaid as he was allowed to save his relatives, and the legend is that he claimed far more than were related by blood. The rest were marched to Canada; some escaped or died along the way.
A Van Eps family genealogy page has a complete list of the dead, here.
Prof. Pearson’s colorful recitation of the events of the massacre is available at the Schenectady County Historical Society page, here.
The village was rebuilt before long, despite on-going tensions with the residents of Albany, who were fiercely protective of the fur trade and did not want the residents of this agricultural outpost on the Mohawk River to cut into their trade.
