Claverack, New York - "Blessing For Our Journey"

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The German column of the Convention Army spent two nights in Kinderhook, New York, and resumed their march from Saratoga to Cambridge on October 24, 1777.  Their commander, Major-General Friedrich Adolph Riedesel, along with his wife and three of their children, now traveled with them.  In the week since the surrender on the 17th, the column had traveled south through the Hudson River Valley and now southeast along the west slope of the Taconic Mountains.  Four months earlier Johann Christoph Dehn, a clerk with the Specht regiment, had written optimistically to his parents in Germany: "We are on a march to visit the rebels. To this end, we will be embarking on Lake Champlain, leave Canada and take up residence in Albany."  [1]  Instead, their march on the 24th would take them further east and further away from the objective of their campaign.

Montressor's 1775 map of New York shows "Klaverack" as both a town and a region.
From Kinderhook they entered Claverack.  "Klaverack", as it appears on British engineer and mapmaker John Montressor's 1775 "A Map Of The Providence Of New York With Part Of Pennsylvania And New England" (available online from the Library of Congress), appears to refer to both a town and a region.  The region stretched from the Hudson River to the Massachusetts border, and included not only today's town of Claverack, but the present-day New York towns of Ghent and Hillsdale, all southeast of Albany and Kinderhook.  

Today Claverack is set back from the Hudson River and Massachusetts border.  The town is centered around the intersection of Routes 23 and 9H, and the Taconic Parkway runs near its western boundary.  The area is home to a number of structures that date back to 1777 or earlier - most of these private homes that are not open to the public.  One of the earliest surviving houses in the region is likely the Van Rensselaer Lower Manor House originally thought to date back to 1685, but likely dating to around 1715.  Another is Jan Van Hoesen House, also dating from around 1715 and said to be "the most intact remaining example of Dutch architecture unique to the Hudson Valley".  The Cornelius S. Muller House, a brick Dutch colonial style building, is marked with iron anchor bolts that form the date "1767".  Muller was said to have supported the Revolution.  The local Committee of Safety reportedly met in his home, and its basement was used to hold local Tories at times. [2] 

The Reformed Dutch Church of Claverack, as seen from the front with three doors and its tower, built of brick.
The region the German column traveled though had become home to a number of Dutch and German settlers beginning in the middle of the seventeenth century.  The Specht Journal notes of their march on the 24th: "We marched through Claverack, a village only inhabited by Franks, that has a German Lutheran church.  ... most of the German inhabitants have their origin in Franconia and therefore, in many districts, they call all Germans 'Franks' no matter what providence they may have come from originally." [3]  

As they passed through Claverack, "The local pastor stood by the roadside with some of his lambs to give us his apostolic blessing for our journey."  The pastor, they later learned, had been a stocking weaver, "This happens in America, I am sorry to say, almost only in the Evangelical Church." [4] 

Is it possible the church they marched past still stands today?  There are several church buildings and cemeteries in the region that date from the period.  The Reformed Dutch Church of Claverack, pictures above, was built in 1767 and still stands just a little north of the intersection of Routes 23 and 9H.  

Its pastor in 1777, the Reverend John Gabriel Gebhard, was German.  He had been educated in Heidelberg, Germany, graduating in 1768, and licensed as a minister in Utrecht in the Netherlands in 1771, before immigrating to America. [5]  It's not likely that he had been a stocking weaver.  That, among other things, most likely rules out the Reformed Dutch Church of Claverack as the site of the German column's roadside blessing.

[1] Baer, Friederike, Ph.D., "Esteemed Parents! Dearest Brother!", Hessians - German Soldiers In The Revolutionary War, https://friederikebaer.com/2023/08/21/esteemed-parents-dearest-brother-quebec-1777/ accessed 9/28/2023.
[2] See: "The Architectural and Historic Resources of the Hamlet of Claverack, Columbia County, New York", National Park Service, National Register of Historic Places Multiple Property Documentation Form, June 1991, accessed online October 1, 2023 at: https://npgallery.nps.gov/NRHP/GetAsset/NRHP/64500446_text 
[3] Specht Journal, p. 106.
[4] Letters From America, p. 120.
[5] Gebhard, Elizabeth L., The Parsonage Between Two Manors, Bryan Printing Company, Hudson, NY, 1909, pp. 1-7, accessed online at: https://usgennet.org/usa/ny/county/columbia/gebhard/chapter_1.htm September 28, 2023; Weis, Frederick Lewis, "Colonial Clergy Of The Middle Colonies", American Antiquarian Society Proceedings, Worcester, MA, 1956, p. 224.


Next Week: Where The Germans Went - "Continued On Through Spencertown"

For more on the Convention Army's 1777 march from Saratoga to Boston, see:

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