The Stockade, Schenectady, NY
Audio Excerpts

Interview with: Wayne Harvey
Interviewed by: Emily Carbone & Nancy Gifford on 5/22/01

Emily: What might be the most outstanding thing about Schenectady that you would want someone to know?

Wayne: Without a doubt, the Stockade. The thing that people don't realize is that there were three Stockades. The first one went around four blocks, the second one went around six blocks and the third one around nine blocks. Nine blocks is what we have as the stockade today. It was four blocks at the time of the French and Indian War, which was the first stockade which was burned down.

When they built the second stockade, it was around more houses that were farther out in the edges that were rebuilt. Then it got too small and they extended it and when they built the third stockade, they moved a block over from State Street to Union Street. The original Stockade went out to State Street.

The interesting thing is that it was Dutch and the Dutch knew land use. The Americans waste land more than anything else that they do. The Dutch came into the wilderness and each of them took a home plot that was 200 by 200 in a square block that was 400 by 400. Four blocks like that and that made up the Stockade, 15 families and 16 blocks, so Arendt VanCurler got two plots. Then you had a garden plot down by the Binnekill and a farm plot in back of that, a place to later run your sheep up on Hamilton Hill and a wood lot in Glenville. They lived in a protected area and then farmed outside and didn't expand and waste all the farm land to live on. It was a grand design.

 

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