The Montgomery County landscape with the undulating Mohawk River and its rich alluvial flats made this a desirable place to live and work for the Mohawk people of the Iroquois Confederacy. Here in their homelands they fished, farmed, hunted, and traded, with the river that bears their name giving them easy access to other Iroquois nations to the west and later, with European trading posts to the east.

When the Dutch settlers arrived in the region in the 1600s, a century of international trade, diplomacy, and sporadic warfare ensued. The complex relationship between the Native Americans and colonists ultimately had devastating consequences for the Mohawk nation and their brethren.

Today, their remains a deep connection between this remarkably situated county and its Native American forebears-when you visit any number of sites, you feel the influence of the Mohawks who settled here more than 1,000 years ago. In some ways, history has come full-circle: in 1993 Kanatsiohareke, a traditional Mohawk Community was re-established at the site of a pre-Colonial Mohawk “castle”.

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