The Marshall House is a house in Schuylerville, New York listed on the National Register of Historic Places for both its place in American history and its architectural significance.
Pre-Revolutionary history
The Marshall House is listed on the National Register of Historical Places for both its place in American history and its architectural significance. Constructed in 1770–1773 as a gambrel-roofed, heavy timbered farmhouse and remodeled in 1867–1868 in the Italianate Style, the Marshall House retains substantial integrity of design and materials. Despite its modifications, the building remains understandable as a rare, extant example of pre-Revolutionary residential architecture. It is one of only two extant “witness” buildings associated with the pivotal Revolutionary Battles of Saratoga that took place in 1777.
Pressed into service as a British field hospital, the building became the refuge of the Baroness Frederika Riedesel, whose well known diary chronicles the tribulations, deaths and heroism of other noncombatants, wounded officers, and men who sheltered with her through a six-day artillery bombardment and siege.
The pre-Revolutionary history of the property referred to as the Marshall House is incomplete. The building was erected “on lot number one of the tenth allotment in the general division of the Kayderosseras patent, bounded on the south by the north line of the Saratoga patent, containing about ”. The property now comprises .
The area, originally called Saratoga, was inhabited by Dutch and English settlers beginning in 1684 who came to advantage themselves of the plentiful water power afforded by the confluence of the Hudson River, the Fish Creek, and the Batten Kill at this point, in addition to being aided by rich soils. There are some indications that the subject house and its surrounding farm served as a collection point for timber and local produce for shipping down river to Albany, to be sold there by the three-man partnership that built it.
Known with certainty is that the property soon came into the hands of Peter Lansing, an Albany merchant, whose family were prominent land owners and fellow merchants in the upper Hudson Valley. However, local nineteenth-century accounts hold that the Lansings and others fled south upon the approach of the British army and its Indian allies in the summer of 1777.
The Battles of Saratoga and the Baroness Frederika Riedesel
The Marshall House attained its fame for the rôle it played in the events leading to the British surrender following the Battles of Saratoga fought during September–October, 1777. Traveling with the British army was the Baroness Frederika Riedesel, the young wife of Major General Friedrich Adolf Riedesel, commander of the German soldiers who formed part of the British army under Lieutenant General John Burgoyne. During the afternoon of October 10 American batteries emplaced on the east side of the Hudson River opened fire on Riedesel's defenses some fifty rods south of the Marshall House. The baron, seeing the house, urged his wife and their three young children to seek safety in its stone cellar. Baroness Riedesell was soon joined by other women in like circumstances as well as by wounded military personnel.
Observing the commotion surrounding the house the Americans mistakenly supposed it to be an enemy headquarters and began firing upon it. As aforesaid, the baroness recounted in her diary the ordeal of those besieged in the house: “We were at last obliged to resort to the cellar for refuge, and in one corner of this I remained the whole day, my children sleeping on the earth with their heads in my lap; and in the same situation I passed a sleepless night. Eleven [cannon balls] passed through the house, and we could distinctly hear them roll away. One poor soldier who was lying on a table for the purpose of having his leg amputated, was struck by a shot, which carried away his other; his comrades had left him, and when we went to his assistance we found him in a corner of the room, into which he had crept, more dead than alive, scarcely breathing”.
The bombardment resumed the following morning. As their danger continued, the refugees and wounded suffered for want of water, the well having gone dry:
”At length we found a soldier’s wife who had courage enough to fetch us some from the river, an office nobody else would undertake, as the Americans shot at every person who approached it; but, out of respect for her sex, they never molested her”.