MVLS I Spy Oral History Interviews

DAR House, Fort Plain, NY
Audio excerpts | Current photo | Historic photo

Interviewer: John Resch
Speaker: Deborah Skivington

Background: Deborah Skivington is a member of the Fort Plain Daugters of the American Revolution.

This is the oldest building in Fort Plain that was built here… in 1786. It didn't look a whole lot different than it does now.

It's also kind of a secret house…it sits on an interior lot. When it was built, it was the only house around….As the village developed kind of around it, if you don't know where to look, people don't know where it is…. It sits inside and behind a few other houses. It also used to sit on the creek. It kind of seems funny for this trading post to be sitting on this hill in the middle of no place, in the middle of Fort Plain, but at one time the creek ran down at the bottom of Mohawk Street before they changed its course for the Erie Canal. Then it made a lot of sense.

It was the largest building in the Mohawk Valley west of Schenectady….It was the center of activities around here….It was the only store around.

Isaac Paris, a brother-in-law of Washington Irving, was the first merchant in the town after the Revolution. In 1786, he erected a large house in which he resided and traded for several years…. Mr. Paris was a fair as well as a very extensive dealer and his kindness became proverbial…. Says Spafford in his Gazetteer of 1824, speaking of the town of Paris, Oneida County, "In 1789, …. when the settlements in this quarter were in a feeble and infant state, Isaac Paris supplied the inhabitants with Virginia corn on a liberal credit and took of us as in payment ginseng and anything we could get, supplying our necessities in the kindest manner for which, in gratitude, when the town was erected, we requested to have it named Paris.

It was [then] occupied by the Bleecker family for nearly one hundred years…. The last resident, Miss Lulu Bleecker, is the one we obtained the house from in 1932.

[As a trading post], it was probably a good place to be to say hi to people, to see if there was any mail coming in, or maybe pick up a pouch of tobacco….

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