Day 46 - Tuesday, June 26th - Herkimer to Latham, NY - 186 Miles To Go

Distance:  78.8 miles

Elevation Gain:  2395 ft. or 30.4 ft./mile

Net elevation change:  -59 ft.

Click Here To Ride Along !!

By and large the hotels we have stayed in on this trip have been remarkably consistent. Sure, some have been nicer than others, but when I think back there aren't really any that that stand out as really good or really bad.  That all changed last night with our stay at the Red Roof Inn in Herkimer. This old style drive-up motel with each room's entrance directly off the parking lot was backed up to the train tracks and a highway. Ithad less charm than the Bates Motel from Physcho. This is the first and last Red Roof Inn, I will be staying in. I can't imagine anyone got a decent nights sleep. The complimentary breakfast was so limited we had the option of going to Denny's instead.

The riding conditions started out cold, that's right cold. Temps at the start were in the high 40's/low 50's and stayed that way for what felt like forever. But it did warm up getting into the high 70's and even low 80's once we were at the hotel in Latham. The wind wasn't really a factor. We spent the first 63 miles on NY-5 which for the most part follows the track of the Mohawk River. A very pleasant ride to this point. 

Once we reached Schenectady we crossed over to the southern side of the Mohawk and it was at this point the nature of the ride changed. There was more traffic to deal with along with what seemed to be more turns. Combine this with narrow roadways that were at times more potholes then road and climbs and descents through intermittent shade and sun and there was some slow going that at times felt like you were trying to pick a path through a mine field. A rather nerve-racking final 16 miles for me. 

Out of the hotel we went east on NY-5 once again and reached Little Falls at mile 8. With a population of nearly 5000 the city is built on both sides of the Mohawk River at a point where the rapids prevented travel further upriver. 

Another nine miles down the road and we were in St Johnsville at mile 17. It is a town with a population 2,600 named either for and an early surveyor and commissioner, Alexander St. John, or from a former name for the area, St. John's Church. Nobody seems to know for certain.

A couple of miles further east brought us to the site of Fort Klock, a fortified stone homestead built around 1750. It operates today as a living history museum and is a good example of a fortified home and trading post of the mid 18th century.

At mile 21 we passed the Palatine Church, a historic Evangelical Lutheran church built in 1770.

Right after this we crossed the Carogo Creek that empties into the Mohawk River. We had been riding more or less parallel to the Mohawk but hadn't really been able to see it but this changed when we reached Nelliston at mile 24, a village of about 600 named for the Nellis family who came to the area in 1722 as part of the Palatine immigration.

All of a sudden the Mohawk is right there.

We came next to Palatine Bridge at mile 26. It is actually a village with a population of  over 700 that was settled in 1723. Its name comes from a combination of the Palatine immigration and a bridge that was built across the Mohawk River in 1798.

After this we ride another 12 miles before we reached Fonda at mile 38, a village of nearly 800 that is named after Douw Fonda, a Dutch-American settler who was scalped in 1780 during a Mohawk raid in the Revolutionary War, when they were fighting on the side of the British. His family were ancestors of the actor Henry Fonda.

Some pictures from the stretch into Fonda and our one SAG stop overlooking the Mohawk Valley.

The village of Fonda was developed near the site of the former Mohawk village of Caughnawaga, where the Mohawk had cultivated corn on the north side of the Mohawk River. In the 17th century it became the home of a Mohawk girl, named Kateri Tekakwitha, who converted to Catholicism and became renowned for her piety. There is a national shrine here devoted to her as the first Native American saint. After a French attack on the village in the late 17th century, Kateri and many other Mohawk moved to a Jesuit mission village of Kahnawake, established opposite Montreal in Quebec, Canada on the southern side of the St. Lawrence River.

About  five miles after the SAG we came to Fort Johnson at mile 46, a village of nearly 500 people and named for William Johnson, an Irish official of the British Empire who moved to New York to manage the estate of his uncle. In 1739 he purchased land including the site of the village and established a mill in 1744. The original name of the settlement was "Mount Johnson."  The community was the original seat of power of William Johnson before he moved on to found the City of Johnstown further west. He rose to become the British Superintendent of Indian Affairs in the northern colonies and was highly influential because of his strong relationships with the Iroquois, especially the Mohawk.

Mile 48 brought us to Amsterdam, a city of nearly 19,000 named for Amsterdam in the Netherlands. The first Europeans to settle here were Dutch immigrants about 1710 and they called the community Veeders Mills and Veedersburgh after Albert Veeder, an early mill owner. After the Revolutionary War, many settlers came from New England and Anglo-American residents changed the name to Amsterdam in 1803. The completion of the Erie Canal in 1825 was an economic boom to the city, which became an important manufacturing center known for its carpets.

That's it for pictures. I don't recall deciding not to take anything more and the western outskirts of Schenectady were still another 20 miles off where I remember putting the camera safely away to deal with traffic and bad roads.  In any case we reached Scotia at mile 63. It was incorporated in 1904 and has a population of nearly 8000. The land was purchased in the 17th century by Alexander Glen, a native of Scotland who chose Scotia as the name. Scotia is Latin for Scotland.

At mile 63 we crossed to the south side of the Mohawk River and entered Schenectady, the county seat of Schenectady County with a population over 66,000. The name is derived from a Mohawk word meaning "beyond the pines". The city was founded on the south side of the Mohawk River by Dutch colonists in the 17th century, many from the Albany area, who were prohibited from the fur trade by the Albany monopoly, which kept its control after the English takeover in 1664. The residents developed farms on strip plots along the river and turned to agriculture and rearing livestock. The original families and their descendants controlled the local government in the form of acting as "trustees". It wasn't until after the Revolutionary War that truly representative government was installed. Because of its location along the Mohawk River and Erie Canal, Schenectady developed rapidly as part of the Mohawk Valley trade, manufacturing and transportation corridor.  By 1824 more people worked in manufacturing than agriculture or trade, and the city had a cotton mill, processing cotton from the Deep South. 

I couldn't tell you exactly when we left Schenectady and entered the Albany/Latham area. I was just glad to get to the hotel. 

Sneak Peek At Tomorrow

We have 186 miles to go and tomorrow we will go 75 miles to Brattleboro, VT. This will be our 12th state line crossing and 13th state. To add to the fun there is nearly 5400 feet of climbing and just because it shouldn't be easy I see a note on tomorrow's cue sheet that at mile 34 there is a 6.3 mile climb where the last 3.5 miles is steeper. Seems like a perfect time for a bad cycling pun. It's a hill, get over it.

So what's the story with Brattleboro? It has a population of nearly 12,000 and is located about 10 miles north of the Massachusetts state line at the junction of the Connecticut and West Rivers. Brattleboro originally started out as a blockhouse and stockaded to defend the Massachusetts Bay Colony from the Abenaki Indians who sided with the French in the French and Indian Wars. In peacetime it developed quickly and the largest organ manufacturer in the US, Eastern Organ, operated in Brattleboro for nearly a century starting in 1852. Rudyard Kipling settled in Brattleboro after marrying Carrie Balestier, a Brattleboro native, in 1892. This is where he wrote Jungle Book. The first person to ever receive a Social Security check was Ida May Fuller from Brattleboro.