Old Stone Fort Museum

The Old Stone Fort was a church before it was a fort — the High Dutch Reformed church the Palatine Germans of Fuchs Dorf built in 1772, with the builders' names chiseled into the walls. When the Revolution came, the congregation stockaded it — the log walls went up in 1777, and the church became the Lower Fort, one of the three defenses along the Schoharie that sheltered the valley's families when the raids came.

The attack came in October 1780 — Sir John Johnson and Joseph Brant brought eight hundred Loyalists and Mohawk through the valley in the raid that burned the farms and the mills, and they hit the Lower Fort on the way north. The cannonball hole is still in the cornice — the mark the British left in the church that had become a fort, in the wall the Palatines had built for worship. The valley burned; the fort held; the families inside the stockade survived the raid that destroyed everything outside it.

The building went back to being a church — the stockade came down in 1785, the congregation worshipped there until it split in 1844, and the state used it as an armory before the county took it for preservation. The Schoharie County Historical Society has run it as a museum since 1889 — the church-fort-armory-museum that has been all four things in the same stone walls, the cannonball hole still visible in the cornice where the 1780 raid put it.

The Old Stone Fort is the archive's church-fort file — the Palatine church that was fortified when the Revolution came to the valley, the building that has the raid's damage in the masonry, the museum that has been telling the county's story in the walls since 1889.