Of his sons, Hon. Peter Gansevoort, who was born in Albany in 1789, was long one of the most prominent and honoured citizens of Albany. The elder son, General Herman Gansevoort, from whom Melville received his name, lived at Gansevoort, a village in the township of Northumberland, Saratoga County, New York. In 1832-33, the brothers built on the site of the birthplace of their father what is now the Stanwix Hotel. As a boy, Melville spent most of his summers as guest of the Gansevoorts, and in his novel _Pierre_, the childhood recollections of his hero are transparent autobiographical references to his own early memories. “On the meadows which sloped away from the shaded rear of the manorial mansion, far to the winding river, an Indian battle had been fought, in the earlier days of the colony, and in that battle the great-grandfather of Pierre, mortally wounded, had sat unhorsed on his saddle in the grass, with his dying voice still cheering his men in the fray.... Far beyond these plains, a day’s walk for Pierre, rose the storied heights, where in the Revolutionary War his grandfather had for several months defended a rude but all-important stockaded fort, against the repeated combined assaults of Indians, Tories and Regulars. From behind that fort, the gentlemanly but murderous half-breed, Brandt, had fled, but survived to dine with General (Gansevoort) in the amiable times that followed that vindictive war. All the associations of Saddle-Meadows were full of pride to Pierre. The (Gansevoort) deeds by which their estate had been so long held, bore the cyphers of three Indian kings, the aboriginal and only conveyancers of those noble woods and plains. Thus loftily, in the days of his circumscribed youth, did Pierre glance along the background of his race.... Or how think you it would be with this youthful Pierre if every day, descending to breakfast, he caught sight of an old tattered British banner or two, hanging over an arched window in the hall: and those banners captured by his grandfather, the general, in fair fight?”
On February 22, 1832, so it is recorded in Joel Munsell, _The Annals of Albany_ (Vol. IX, Albany, 1859) “the military celebrated the centennial anniversary of the birthday of Washington. Col. Peter Gansevoort, on this occasion, presented to the artillery a large _brass Drum_, a trophy of the revolution, taken from the British on the 22nd August, 1777, at Fort Stanwix, by his father, General Peter Gansevoort.” The sound of this drum was tapping in Melville’s memory, when he goes on to ask: “Or how think you it would be if every time he heard the band of the military company of the village, he should distinctly recognise the peculiar tap of a British kettle-drum also captured by his grandfather in fair fight, and afterwards suitably inscribed on the brass and bestowed upon the Saddle-Meadows Artillery Corps? Or how think you it would be, if sometimes of a mild meditative Fourth of July morning in the country, he carried out with him into the garden by way of ceremonial cane, a long, majestic, silver-tipped staff, a Major-General’s baton, once wielded on the plume-nodding and musket-flashing review by the same grandfather several times here-in-before mentioned?”