When the fugitive William Lyon MacKenzie arrived in Buffalo Dec. 11, 1837, both the Lake Erie city and the United States were at the dawn of great expansion. The Erie Canal had been completed a decade earlier, and Buffalo was now the gateway for western migration.
There also was talk of expansion to the nation’s south. Just a year earlier, American frontiersmen had taken up arms and carved the Republic of Texas out of Mexico Could northern expansion also be part of America’s destiny? If not expansion, could Americans at least help their neighbors throw off the last English claim on North America? [Read more…] about The Patriot War: ‘Remember the Caroline’
Although it played a highly significant role in the settling and development of the Capital Region, Fort Crailo, the birthplace of “Yankee Doodle” and the manorial seat for generations for one branch of the Van Rensselaer family, remains relatively little known, even within the Capital Region itself.