Remote Scottish village in Upstate New York

[DCampbell16B]

Remote Scottish village in Upstate New York

Background: I was very involved in reenactments in the late ‘70s and 80’s. This was mostly to do with the Bicentennial of the American Revolution. There are a couple of obviously Scottish settlements in the Albany NY area, such as Loudonville and Broadalbin. In collecting first person accounts of the war for research I got a book of collected journals kept during the Sullivan-Clinton expedition against the Six Nations of the Iroquois in Upstate New York (or as some of us still say here, Upper York State). Two armies were sent, one up the Susquehanna and one down it. The army going down met on Otsego Lake. The outlet of the lake is the head of the Susquehanna (in order to get the supply boats down the river, they built a dam at the outlet and raised the lake one foot).

The book itself has no copyright information, so I assume there is no copyright on these entries.

The journal of Lt. Erkuries Beatty has the following entries for August:

“Thursday, 12th. March’d of this morning 7 o’Clock, had the advanced Guard to day proceeded down the West side of the river as usual, 12 miles came to a Small Scotch Settlement called Albout* on the other side of the River 5 miles from Unindilla, which we burnt but the people had gone to the Enemy this last Spring went on to Unindilla Crossed the River to the East sideand encamped, the River was about middle deep when we waded it – This settlement was destroyed by our detachment last fall excepting one house which belonged to one Glasford who went to the enemy this spring, his house was Immediately burnt, when we came on the ground to day, we passed several old Indian encampts, where the encamped when the detroy’d Cherry Vally the Road midling hilly.

And skipping to later in his entry of August 17th:

“...in front of our Compys, encamping ground there was a tanfat farm with several Hides in a tanning which they Soldiers got & close by it they discovered a little man in a hole which was laid there & a little dirt thrown over him just to cover him, we had his head uncover’d but he was so putrified, we could Not discover whether he was a white man or Indian but supposed to be a white man as there was a Scotch Bonnet found near him...”

“ *(footnote in the book, not from the journal) ALBOUT.- A Scotch, tory settlement on the east side of the Susquehanna river, five miles abaove Unadilla, was burned Aug.12, 1779, by Clinton’s detachment. Most of the Scotch Settlers went to Canada at the beginning of the difficulties; those who remained were more in sympathy with the British than with the Americans. See Capt. Gray’s map where the name appears as ALEOUT”

Part of the map is attached.

Aleout or Albout would be on present day Ouleout Creek. There is no village there now.

Unindilla is present day Unadilla.

[OC Richard]

That's fascinating.

I had read that Scottish settlers in places like North Carolina, loyalists, fled to Canada.

It's valuable to have an eyewitness account of a Scottish Loyalist settlement, though sad to hear what happened to it.

My grandmother told me stories of two Scottish settlements in Appalachia, in West Virginia, that existed when she was a young girl around 1910.

She said that an entire coalmining village in Scotland had immigrated not long before, but here had been split between two coal towns.

My grandmother said that every Sunday afternoon all the Scots from one village would process to the other, led by pipers, walking along the train tracks. (This is what people did before there were roads.)

As I recall she said they alternated which village the gathering would take place at.

Sadly all of the Scots moved on to some other place. (My grandmother herself was a first generation American, of an extended Cornish mining family that arrived in Appalachia in the 1880s.)