Col. Gosen Van Schaick (1736-1789) [Sec 3 Lot 5]
Commanded Fort Orange during the Revolutionary War, Supervised the Tory prison at the fort. Led a campaign against the Onondaga Indians, Sounded the Hudson River for the installation of the “Chain across the Hudson.”
Gosen or Goose Van Schaick was born in 1736. He was the first son of Sybrant Van Schaick, the 31st Mayor of Albany, and his wife, Alida Roseboom. He was named for the Van Schaick family patriarch and called "Goose" Van Schaick. He came of age at the outbreak of a final chapter of the "French and Indian Wars." An exemplary record of service and his father's status helps account for his rise through the provincial officer corps.
In 1756, the twenty-year-old was appointed a lieutenant in the expedition against Crown Point. In 1758, he was promoted to Captain and took part in the actions against Fort Frontenac and Fort Niagara. He was appointed Major of a New York regiment in 1759. In 1762, he became Lieutenant-Colonel of the First New York Regiment. In the assault on Ticonderoga in 1758, he had received a severe wound on the cheek from a French musket ball that left him with an infection that marred his appearance, turned malignant, and from which he ultimately died.
After the war, Goose Van Schaick returned to Albany. In 1766, he joined his neighbors in signing a protest against the Stamp Act. During those years, he followed his father in business and in the management of his family's country acreage.
In October 1770 at the age of thirty-four, he married twenty-year-old New Jersey native Maria Ten Broeck in New York City. By 1787, the marriage had produced six children; all were baptized in the Albany Dutch church. His father died in 1772, leaving Goose Van Schaick's extended family established in the comfortable riverside home. Shortly thereafter, he purchased more property along North Market Street and continued to manage family lands up and down the valley.
His major wartime contribution came in military service where he served the American cause throughout the conflict. He was an early and ardent supporter of the crusade for American liberties. In May 1775, he was elected to the Albany Committee of Correspondence representing the first ward. In July, he was commissioned Colonel of the Second Regiment of the New York Line by the Continental Congress. For wartime service, he received a number of land bounties - including a bounty right in conjunction with the first regiment of the Albany County militia.
He is most famous for his April 1779 expedition against the Onondaga Indians, starting from Fort Stanwix. His force of 558 troops attacked and burned their principal settlement, together with provisions and stores, killed their cattle, and took 32 prisoners without a loss of a single man. Because the most militant warriors had already left, the villagers were mostly neutrals. The Onondagas accused the soldiers of raping and killing the women. On May 10, 1779, an act of the Continental Congress: "Resolved, that the thanks of Congress be presented to Colonel Van Schaick and the officers and soldiers under his command, for their activity and good conduct in the late expedition against the Onondagas". At the time, the expedition was considered to be more effectual than the soon-following Sullivan Expedition.
He was appointed brevet brigadier general on October 10, 1783, and he served until November 1783.
Near the end of the war, he made a number of trips to Philadelphia for surgery on his old war wound or, as his son wrote, "to have the cancer cut out of his face." By mid-1783, he had returned home to Albany.
The years that followed found him involved in certifying military bounty grant applications, providing for a still growing family, supporting the nearby Dutch church, and living modestly and out of the spotlight. His Market Street home was valued on the assessment roll in 1788.
He filed a will in November 1788 noting that he was in "a declining state of health." It named his wife and children and parceled out his Albany real estate and other property as well. He died at his home on July 4, 1789, of cancer of his facial wound received in the battle of Fort Ticonderoga of 1758. H may have been buried first in the family cemetery on Court St. until 1808, when he was reinterred in the Reformed Dutch Burial Grounds.