EASTERN NEW YORK TIMELINE - 1690-1694

1690

January

King William of England appoints Henry Sloughter governor of New York.

Feb 8

French troops set an Indian settlement in Schenectady, New York, on fire. All but two of the 80 houses are destroyed.

Feb 9

French troops and their Indian allies massacre Schenectady settlers. 69 inhabitants are killed and 27 captured. Some escape and are saved from a violent snowstorm by sleighs from Albany. Captain John A. Glen claims many survivors are his relatives to obtain their release. Inhabitant Willem Tietsoort, a blacksmith who had lived among the local Indians for the past 22 years, escapes with his daughter, who will become permanently paralyzed by the cold, to Esopus (Kingston).

Apr 11

Massachusetts calls a special meeting of the United Colonies of New England. Two companies of troops are dispatched to Albany.

May 1

An intercolonial congress meets in New York City to plan attacks on Montréal and Québec. They also discuss the establishment of provincial laws.

August

Fitz-John Winthrop leads a colonial force of 150 to Montréal by way of Lake Champlain but is forced to turn back at Lake George by disease.

State

Acting governor Jacob Leisler appoints Johannis Hardenbergh sheriff of Ulster County. He will lose the position next year with Leisler's arrest. ** Albany’s Dominie Godfridus Dellius complains of the abuse the Dutch clergy undergo under Leisler’s rule. ** Prior to the February, attack Schenectady consists of 60 houses and 300 inhabitants. ** Albany mayor Peter Schuyler builds a blockhouse out in the forest to the north for his military stores and calls the post Saratoga.

Ireland

Charles Clinton, ancestor of New York politicians Gerorge and De Witt Clinton, is born to James and Elizabeth Clinton in County Longford.

1691

May 13

New York's first assembly as a royal colony reenacts 1683's Charter of Liberties. It passes Acts 6 through 10, establishing means for dealing with the poor and vagabonds, enabling the election of representatives, levying monies for the maintenance of a force of fusiliers, enabling the city and county of Albany to repay expenses of the late disturbances by levying local Indian trade groups, and declaring the rights and privileges of colonists.

Oct 1

New York colony’s Albany County is confirmed and its borders delineated.

Oct 7

Massachusetts is given a new charter by William and Mary, restoring the charter of 1629 and making it a royal colony, including Plymouth, Nova Scotia and all territory up through the Maine area. Cornwall County (parts of the Maine coast) and Dukes County (some of the islands off Massachusetts) are taken off New York colony. The charter also makes property the basis of suffrage instead of religion, provides for a governor appointed by the crown, and a Council elected by the General Court, subject to the governor's veto.

State

Dutch immigrant and New Amsterdam settler Jacob Leendertsen Van Der Grift dies in his early sixties at his Newton, Long Island home.

Albany

Mayor Peter Schuyler leads an expedition against Canada, camps at the Great Carrying Place, the portage between the Hudson River and Lake Champlain.

1692

State

Cornwall County is surrendered to Massachusetts. ** Interpreter Arnout Viele leads a party of eleven Europeans and a number of Indians out of Albany, across Pennsylvania, and down the Ohio River to a point near its mouth.

Massachusetts

Dutch settlers from the Hudson Valley begin moving into the Berkshires.

1693

Oct 5

Colonel William Smith is granted St. George Manor, on Long Island.

1694

Aug 15

Colonial delegates meeting in Albany sign a treaty with the Iroquois, to keep the Indians from siding with the French.

© 2011 David Minor / Eagles Byte

NAPOLEONIC COMPLEX

Script No, 480, September 16, 2006

© 2006 David Minor / Eagles Byte­

Back in June of this year [2006] the U. S. Interstate highway system celebrated its 50th anniversary. When it was built back in the 1950s one of the justifications for the immense project was national security. (It was named the National System of Interstate and Defense Highways). Rapid troop movement within the country would be facilitated.

Another set of projects under way 150 years earlier had a similar goal. Napoleon Bonaparte was the multi-tasker par excellence. To help solidify his sphere of influence over France and much of Italy he would have to be able to move his forces quickly to anticipated trouble spots - no plans for Moscow yet - and the biggest bottlenecks were the passes through the French and Italian Alps. He knew that from experience. So, in addition to his many other projects - defensive works in Belgium, Italy and Poland, the harbor at Cherbourg, a canal connecting the Mediterranean with the Red Sea (that one didn’t work out, then), and the beautification of Paris - the Corsican corporal undertook a roads project of his own.

The plan was to construct a broad carriage road along an alpine route that would penetrate the mountains between Switzerland and Italy at Simplon, and the French pass at Mont Cenis. The first or eastern would allow penetration close to the region around Milan and the more western would allow quick access to Turin.

Construction accounts and records are not readily available, but French engineers and road builders, working between the years 1803 and 1811, somehow managed to pull it off. On the outer fringes of the route Bonaparte had crews pushing roads through marshes and forests in north-eastern France and west-central Germany. In a time when most of the work was done by crude machines and brute strength the builders bridged ravines in the mountains and chopped passes through until carriages (and cannon, of course) could be sent rapidly back and forth between borders. It might take fifty winding miles of zig-zagging road to cover a crow’s flight of thirty and, although the eighteen-foot-width permitted three carriages to travel side-by-side, there were many sections where it took sixteen mules to pull them up and down the nearly perpendicular roadway. In the winter it was necessary to attach runners to the carriage wheels.

Several times a year the hands-on French dictator would make an inspection tour of the various projects he was pushing through western Europe. He’d stop at each work site and subject his project managers to a rigorous and minute examination of their progress, until he was fully satisfied with the work.

Back in 1804, the same year he became emperor, he wrote, "Men are only as large as the monuments they leave." He actually left several smaller ones - a hospice and barracks at Cenis and a triumphal arch (never completed) near Milan. Lord Byron had his own view of the engineering feat and perhaps, in an oblique dig, of its creator. “The Simplon is magnificent in its nature and its art – both God and Man have done wonders – to say nothing of the Devil – who must certainly have had a hand (or a hoof) in some of the rocks and ravines through and over which the works are carried.”