The Brant House

The Brant House

The Brant House

On this day in history, November 11, 1778, British Loyalists and their Mohawk and Seneca Indian allies attacked a village and fort east of Cooperstown near Lake Otsego in New York State during the American Revolutionary War, killing scores of soldiers and civilians in the Cherry Valley Massacre.

It was cold, foggy and snowy in Cherry Valley, New York, that morning. While the war was being waged in pitched battles in the chief colonies, British and Indian forces fought a guerrilla war in the west, and many villages were raided. The fighting was fierce in the Mohawk Valley of New York, and the frontier was in an almost constant state of terror.

The Seneca tribe was incensed about the recent burning of Tioga by troops led by patriot Colonel Thomas Hartley; his accusations of Iroquois atrocities at the Battle of Wyoming, where the British and Indians torched the towns on the banks of the Susquehanna River in Pennsylvania, as well as the colonists' destruction of the native settlement of Onoquaga.