New York - Day 19 - NW to SE

Saugerties/Woodstock KOA

Saturday, 19 May 2018

today's route

I drove 200 miles today, almost all of it in driving rain and wind.  It was quite a drive.  I saw a herd of cows huddled behind a barn, trying to get some protection from the rain.  A big delivery truck almost blew into me as he was passing me and getting shoved around by the wind.  But we made it safe and sound.

I planned to stop in Rome to get groceries and noticed accidentally that there’s a National Historic Site there so stopped to see what happened.  It’s Fort Stanwix, which I’d never heard of.  It sits at a bend in Wood Creek, which flows into Lake Oneida and, from there, into Lake Ontario and the other Great Lakes.  Then, 6 miles away is a bend in the Mohawk River, which flows into the Hudson River, which flows north to Lake Champlain and, eventually, the St. Lawrence and also flows south, winding up in the Atlantic Ocean.  It was those 6 miles of land that had everybody excited once upon a time.  They’d been used for thousands of years as a connecting link and, at the time of the European settlement of North America, were called the Oneida Carrying Place.  At the beginning of the French and Indian War, the British built a fort there to protect their right to use that area from French interference.  The fort was named Stanwix after the general who had it built.

Gen. George Washington rebuilt it in 1776, on orders from the Continental Congress, to protect the US’s northwest border.  (Picture our nation with a northwest border where Rome, NY, is today.  Not quite what we’re used to.)  The British had the fort under seige for a few weeks during 1777 but reinforcements finally made it through and the British retreated.  That retreat contributed to the later surrender of Maj. Gen. Burgoyne when he needed the additional manpower that hadn’t been able to get past the fort.  Odd how the domino theory works.

From Rome I drove straight through to the campground, wanting to get that yucky rainy drive over with, and not wanting to stop to walk the dogs in the rain any more than I had to.  The road from Rome to Albany runs along the Mohawk River the whole way.  It’s probably very picturesque if it weren’t raining too hard to see anything.  I passed up some things I wanted to see so will go back for part of the way later on.  One is the town of Herkimer.  Does anybody else remember the song/skit on Captain Kangaroo about Herkimer the Homely Doll?

I started noticing lots of Dutch influence in the place names as I moved into this part of the state.  Rensselaer, for instance, and Kaaterskill Creek.

In case you didn’t listen to Weekend Edition this morning, Scott Simon interviewed Al Roker about his new book on the Johnstown Flood, which is still the worst flood in our nation’s history.  He was talking about a 40’ high wall of water moving downstream that took out a functioning steel mill, and carried with it molten steel as it moved along, and it took out a barbed wire factory and carried its product downstream too, sometimes moving at 50 mph.  That sounds terrifying.