Fort Hendrick

Variant name of place

Fort Hindreck; Fort Hindrek

Geographic position

42.9881° N, 74.8025° W

Event

Occom's First Mission to the Oneidas

Sources

"Finding Fort Hendrick." New York State Museum. http://www.nysm.nysed.gov/research_collections/research/history/hendrick/pagefour.html; "Forts". New York State Military Museum and Veterans Research Center. http://www.dmna.state.ny.us/forts/fortsE_L/hendrickFort.htm; Hinderaker, Eric. The Two Hendricks: Unraveling a Mohawk Mystery. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010; Geo coordinates at https://www.google.com/#q=geographic+coordinates+of+.

General note

From 1754 to 1760, Fort Hendrick was the name of a British fortification located at the Upper Castle of the Mohawks (often referred to as Canajoharie), now the town of Danube in Herkimer County, central New York. The Upper Castle, established in 1710 at the northern edge of Mohawk territory, had an earlier fortification within its boundaries built in 1747 at the mouth of the Nowadaga Creek just south of the Mohawk River to defend the Mohawks from French raiding parties coming down from Canada. Because of Mohawk demands for additional protection during the French and Indian War, Colonel William Johnson, the superintendent of Indian Affairs, expanded the original two blockhouses into a square fort of upright pickets fifteen feet high, one foot thick, with portholes and an interior platform. It probably also had small cannons in each bastion and a house on each wall for stores and barracks for the garrison, which comprised one office and twenty-five men. It was named for the revered Mohawk chief Henderick Peters Theyanooguin, widely known as King Hendrick (1692-1755), who lived in Canajoharie and died in the Bloody Morning Scout that launched the Battle of Lake George in September 1755, a month after the improvements on the Fort were completed. King Hendrick achieved fame when he gave an important speech at the Albany Congress of 1754 in support of the British cause against the French; subsequently, many ships and taverns were named in his honor. The Fort, and the village around it, were a destination when Occom travelled north on his missions to the Oneidas and on his itinerant preaching tours. He recorded having dinner there in 1761, though Wheelock confused it with Fort Herkimer, about eighty miles west. In 1774, Occom travelled to Fort Hendrick and stayed with Joseph Brant, a Moor’s graduate and chief of the Mohawks. It eventually fell into disuse, but its location is noted by a historical marker.