History, Natural History & the Arts
What does the Lake George Battlefield Park Alliance mean to Lake George Battlefield Park? A more useful question might be: What would Lake George Battlefield Park be without the Alliance?
Established in 2002 with sixty members, the Lake George Battlefield Park Alliance now has a membership roster ten times that size. [Read more…] about Historians, DEC Collide Over Lake George Battlefield Management
Most people probably have never heard of the Canadian Regiments that played an important role during the American Revolutionary War. These units recruited French and British Canadians and fought throughout the war, spanning campaigns from the northern frontier to the Battles of Saratoga and the Siege of Yorktown. [Read more…] about The Continental Congress’s Canadian Regiments
In 2021, while browsing the shelves at Berry Hill Bookstore, just outside of Deansboro, in Oneida County, NY, I noticed an old book entitled New York COMMISSIONERS for Detecting and Defeating CONSPIRACIES.
The book described this commission’s origins, powers, and jurisdictional controversies. Among the topics were stories of counterfeiters, deserters, murders, robbers, plunderers and more. [Read more…] about New York’s Commission for Detecting and Defeating Conspiracies
In September 1777 during British General John Burgoyne’s campaign to capture Albany and secure the lower Hudson Valley, American militia commanded by Major General Benjamin Lincoln (1733–1810) staged a daring raid on the British army’s supply line between Fort Ticonderoga, Lake George and Skenesborough (now Whitehall).
Now known as the Pawlet Expedition, it’s one of the most unappreciated operations of the Saratoga Campaign, according to historian Bruce Venter. [Read more…] about The Pawlet Expedition: Disrupting Burgoyne’s Supply Lines
Near Remsen in Oneida County is the Steuben Memorial State Historic Site, which includes a replica of the home and the final resting place of Baron Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben (1730-1794), the first inspector general of the Continental Army during the American Revolution. [Read more…] about Baron von Steuben’s Home in Oneida County
In Deirdre Sinnott’s new historical novel The Loyalist’s Wife (Fossil Fern, 2026) it’s 1777 in New York’s fertile Mohawk Valley, and tenant farmers Jane and Philip Hopper have very different ideas about the war for independence that has consumed the 13 colonies. [Read more…] about The Loyalist’s Wife: A Historical Novel Set in the Mohawk Valley
The Battle of Westchester Creek (also known as the Skirmish at Westchester Creek), a prelude to the Battle of Pell’s Point, was a small military engagement fought on October 12, 1776, during the New York and New Jersey campaign of the American Revolutionary War. [Read more…] about Battle of Westchester Creek Commemoration Planned
On July 7, 1776, the Continental Army’s senior commanders assembled at Fort Crown Point on Lake Champlain to confront a military crisis.
Their meeting during a council of war at Crown Point, fundamentally changed the course of the Revolutionary War in the North, and helped lay the groundwork for the American victory at the Battles of Saratoga a year later. [Read more…] about A 1776 Crown Point Council of War Was A Deciding Factor
Anyone who loves French and Indian War and American Revolution history will want to be present at Lake George Battlefield Park for the premiere of Voices of the Lake George Battlefield, a free, self-guided audio tour of the popular historic site. The unveiling takes place at the Battlefield Park Visitor Center, 75 Fort George Road from 11 am to 1 pm on Saturday, October 10. [Read more…] about New Audio Tour at Lake George Battlefield Park
Clinton County will mark the 250th anniversary of the October 11, 1776 American Revolutionary War Battle of Valcour Island with three days of education, living history, music, ceremony and public commemoration, October 9-11, 2026. [Read more…] about Battle of Valcour Island 250th Anniversary Weekend Oct 9-11
The story of Nathan Hale is a foundational myth of the American Revolution: an earnest but inexperienced patriot takes on the role of spy and unfortunately ends up a martyr to the cause.
Hale was identified by Major Robert Rogers, who pretended to be a fellow patriot, got him to reveal his mission over a drink before arresting him. When searched, British forces found hidden notes and military drawings. Under the laws of war, captured spies were not granted military trials or treated as prisoners of war. [Read more…] about David Maltbie: The ‘Other’ Nathan Hale
Lake George, NY resident Harrison Bird (1910-2003) belonged to a rare class of historians, those whose situate the local within the continental and, indeed, the global.
In four books published by Oxford University Press – Navies in the Mountains (1962), March to Saratoga (1963), Battle for a Continent (1965) and Attack on Quebec (1968) – Bird wrote about Lake George, Lake Champlain, Fort Ticonderoga, Saratoga, Quebec and the northern waterways not as isolated historic sites, but as parts of one strategic corridor: the route by which empires, armies, navies and ambitions moved between Canada and the Hudson Valley. [Read more…] about New York’s Great Warpath & Historian Harrison Bird
The occupation of New York Harbor, and the capture of the city of New York were the most conspicuous British successes of the summer and fall of 1776 during the Revolutionary War. In June, Commodore Peter Parker (1721-1811) and General Henry Clinton (1730-1795) were meeting with defeat at the Battle of Sullivan’s Island at Charleston, SC, and Benedict Arnold was racing to construct a makeshift naval fleet to stall a British invasion from Canada on Lake Champlain.
At the same time, two brothers, General Sir William Howe (1729 –1814) and Commander-in-Chief of the North American Station, Richard Howe (later Earl Howe, 1726-1799), were arriving in New York Bay. [Read more…] about Naval Power & The 1776 Taking of New York City
In December 1776, the American Revolution was just getting started and New York was in crisis. New York’s delegates to Philadelphia had signed the Declaration of Independence in July 1776.
But by the end of the year, though, New York was in peril – Long Island and the city of New York had been occupied by the British, the Westchester County region was not in control of either side, and British authorities were appealing to New Yorkers to abandon the rebels and support the Crown. [Read more…] about Rouse, Brave Citizens: An Appeal to New Yorkers to Support Revolution
Towards the evening of the Battle of Valcour Bay on October 11, 1776, the HMS Inflexible got within point-blank shot of the Americans, “when five broadsides,” wrote Sir Charles Douglas, “silenced their whole line.”
One fresh ship, with scantling [a design] for sea-going, and a concentrated battery, has an unquestioned advantage over a dozen light-built craft, carrying one or two guns each, and already several hours engaged in battle. [Read more…] about Benedict Arnold’s Retreat Up Lake Champlain
In 1775, only fifteen years had elapsed since the expulsion of the New France from Canada following the French and Indian War (1754-1763). The concentration of French power in the valley of the St. Lawrence had impressed upon the minds of colonial leaders the importance of Lake Champlain, of its tributary Lake George, and of the Hudson River, as forming a consecutive, if not continuous, water line of communications from the St. Lawrence River to the city of New York. [Read more…] about The Naval Campaign on Lake Champlain in 1775-1776
The New York Provincial Congress was one of the first revolutionary bodies to outline a new inter-colonial program to finance the Revolutionary War.
On May 26, 1775, only two weeks after the Second Continental Congress met at Philadelphia, the Provincial Congress wrote to New York’s delegates that it was “clearly impossible” to raise by taxes a sum “adequate to the public service” and that it was equally certain that the existing paper money of the various states could not obtain ‘”universal circulation.” [Read more…] about Financing the Revolution: National, State & Local Currencies
Just six weeks after Patriots at the Second Continental Congress in Philadelphia declared independence on July 4, 1776, tens of thousands of troops clashed in one of the largest engagements of the American Revolution, across now-unrecognizable areas of New York City. [Read more…] about Battle of Brooklyn 250th Anniversary Spawns Battlefield App
One of the earliest acts of the New York Provincial Congress was the promise on May 24, 1775, to repay all monies advanced for the resistance to British domination. When the old colonial government was gradually superseded in 1774 and 1775 by an extra-legal government of committees and congresses chosen by the people, these bodies were met immediately by the problem of financing both the political activities and the military operations. The latter began with the plans to seize Fort Ticonderoga and Crown Point, shortly after the colonists had been electrified by the news of Lexington and Concord. [Read more…] about New York & The Struggle to Finance the Revolutionary War
In November 1940, Clayton Bly, a lumber company employee and a military veteran of World War I (1914–1918), unearthed two cannonballs from the Virgin Hollow neighborhood of Lake George.
At the time, Bly probably did not realize he stumbled upon a little understood chapter of Lake George’s colonial history. [Read more…] about Cannonballs & Lake George’s Colonial Military History
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