Fort Hunter, New York

Fort Hunter is a hamlet in the town of Florida in Montgomery County, New York, on the Mohawk River at Schoharie Creek.

In the 18th century, Fort Hunter was built as a fort near the location of one of the two primary Mohawk settlements. The Mohawk name for the village was rendered variously in English as Teantontalago, Thienderego, Tionondorage, and Tiononderoga. The European colonists called it the "Lower Mohawk Castle", while Canajoharie, the other primary Mohawk village, was known as the "Upper Mohawk Castle". The Dongan Charter gave the city of Albany the right to own 1000 acre at the Lower Mohawk Castle.

One of its sachems, Hendrick Tejonihokarawa or Hendrick Peters of the Wolf Clan, was one of the "Four Mohawk Kings" who went to London in 1710 to meet with Queen Anne. They asked her for Anglican missionaries to help offset French Catholic influence in the Iroquois Confederacy, as well as defenses against French soldiers. In 1711, the Crown authorized the construction of Fort Hunter near Tionondorage. The fort contained a chapel and mission house. Queen Anne donated a set of communion silver and sent two missionaries to the colony.

In return, she had asked Tejonihokarawa for help in settling Palatine German refugees then working at English camps in the Hudson Valley. Through Governor Hunter, he made some Mohawk land available to settlers near Schoharie Creek, where some of the Palatines eventually settled.

Fort Hunter is the site of the Schoharie Crossing State Historic Site, which has the remains of the Schoharie Crossing aqueduct and part of a lock from the early nineteenth-century development of the Erie Canal.