Place:Fonda, Montgomery, New York, United States

source: Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names

source: Family History Library Catalog

the text in this section is copied from an article in Wikipedia

Fonda is a village in and the county seat of Montgomery County, New York, United States. The population was 795 at the 2010 census. The village is named after Douw Fonda, a Dutch-American settler who was killed and scalped in 1780, during a Mohawk raid in the Revolutionary War, when the tribe was allied with the British.

The Village of Fonda is in the Town of Mohawk and is west of Amsterdam. In 1993, the Mohawk people bought land here to re-establish the Kanatsiohareke community formerly at this site.

The Fonda Fair is an annual agricultural event that takes place in August.

History

the text in this section is copied from an article in Wikipedia

The village of Fonda developed near the site of the former Mohawk village of Caughnawaga, also known as Kanatsiohareke. Here the Mohawk had cultivated corn in the floodplain on the north side of the Mohawk River.

In the late 17th-century, Kateri Tekakwitha resettled here. She was a Mohawk girl who had converted to Catholicism and became renowned for her piety. She lived here with relatives after her parents died in a smallpox epidemic. She had survived it but was marked by scars. The village has a national Catholic shrine devoted to her; she is the first Native American saint. After French attacked the village in the late 17th century, Kateri and many other Catholic Mohawk moved to the Jesuit mission village of Kahnawake, established on the south side of the St. Lawrence River, opposite Montreal in Quebec, or New France.

European settlers, mostly German and English, officially organized the present-day village in 1751 at the former site of Kanatsiohareke. The settlement was later named for Douw Fonda, a Dutch-American settler who was scalped in a Mohawk raid during the Revolutionary War.^[1] His family were ancestors of the American actors Henry Fonda, Jane Fonda and Peter Fonda. Henry Fonda wrote about them in his 1981 autobiography, as follows:

Early records show the family ensconced in northern Italy in the 16th century where they fought on the side of the Reformation, fled to Holland, intermarried with Dutch burghers' daughters, picked up the first names of the Low Countries, but retained the Italianate "Fonda". Before Pieter Stuyvesant surrendered Nieuw Amsterdam to the English the Fondas, instead of settling in Manhattan, canoed up the Hudson River to the Indian village of Caughnawaga. Within a few generations, the Mohawks and the Iroquois were butchered or fled and the town became known to mapmakers as Fonda, New York.

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