Herkimer, Ilion & Frankfort

Guns, a general, and a murder: three villages on the Mohawk

Three villages share this bend of the canalized Mohawk River, and among them they hold a strange trinity of American stories — an arms empire, a dying Revolutionary general, and a murder that became a novel. Start with the guns, because the guns are the canal’s doing.

Eliphalet Remington II learned his trade at his father’s forge in the hills above the valley, hammering out rifle barrels good enough that customers rode miles to buy them. But a barrel is heavy, roads were bad, and every wagonload cost him money to move. Then, in 1825, the state opened a ditch across the whole width of New York, and Remington did the arithmetic. Three years later, in 1828, he bought roughly a hundred acres of flat ground astride the new waterway at a hamlet called Morgan’s Landing and moved his works down to the canal bank. The reason was blunt and commercial: on the canal, a barrel could ride a boat to market instead of a wagon. The settlement that grew up around his factory took a new name — Ilion — and the gun works Remington planted on that towpath ground stayed there, through the Civil War contracts that made the Remington name a rival to Colt, and on through two centuries of American manufacturing, until the factory finally went quiet in 2024. Nearly two hundred years of industry, all because a man wanted his freight on the water.

The general’s story is older and sadder, and it belongs to the valley before the canal was ever imagined. Nicholas Herkimer was a Palatine German farmer and militia officer whose Georgian brick home — completed in the 1760s and now the Herkimer Home State Historic Site — still stands above the Mohawk just east of here. In August 1777, with a British column besieging Fort Stanwix at present-day Rome, Herkimer led some eight hundred Tryon County militiamen west to break the siege. In a wooded ravine near Oriskany on August 6, they were ambushed. The Battle of Oriskany was among the bloodiest single engagements of the Revolution, hand-to-hand and merciless. Herkimer took a musket ball in the leg early in the fight; as the story is told, he had himself propped against a tree and went on directing his men, smoking his pipe, refusing to leave. He was carried home to that brick house on the river, where his shattered leg was amputated by an inexperienced surgeon. The wound would not stop bleeding, and roughly ten days after the battle — on August 16 — he died. He is buried on the grounds of his own home, within sight of the water the canal would later follow.

Then the strange one. In the village of Herkimer stands a squat stone jail — long known as the 1834 Herkimer County Jail — part of the downtown Historic Four Corners. In 1906 it held Chester Gillette, awaiting trial for the drowning of Grace Brown, a pregnant young woman, on Big Moose Lake up in the county’s northern woods. The trial in Herkimer that autumn was a national sensation; Gillette was convicted and, in 1908, executed. He might have faded into a footnote — except that Theodore Dreiser took the case, the ambition, and the killing and reshaped them into Clyde Griffiths, the doomed protagonist of his 1925 masterwork An American Tragedy, later filmed as A Place in the Sun. The stone jail that held the real man is still there, a few steps from the canal that runs through these towns.

One more local marvel, older than all of it. Dig into the dolomite rock around Herkimer County and you can pull out “Herkimer diamonds” — not diamonds at all but double-terminated quartz crystals, naturally faceted at both ends, formed here some half a billion years ago. They occur in quantity essentially only in this pocket of the Mohawk Valley, which is why the region’s dig sites let visitors keep what they crack loose. Guns, a general, a murder, and a gem sealed in stone since long before there was a Mohawk River to be canalized — and the water, as ever, is the thread that ties it all together. (For which canal you’re actually floating on through here, see Which canal is this?)