It was a stockade, weakly garrisoned, and, with the scattered village of thirty families, of the same name, upon the plain below, was destroyed in the autumn of 1745, by a horde of Frenchmen and Indians, under the noted partisan Marin, whose followers, as we have seen, performed a sanguinary tragedy at Sandy Hill ten years later. They had left Montreal for the purpose of making a foray upon some English settlements on the Connecticut river. It was late in the season, and at Crown Point, on Lake Champlain, the Indians refused to go eastward, because of their lack of preparations for the rigour of winter. On the suggestion of Father Piquet, the French Prefect Apostolique of Canada, who met the expedition at Crown Point, Marin led his white and red savages southward, towards Orange, as Albany was then called by the French, to cut off the advancing English settlements, and bear away what plunder they might obtain. Father Piquet accompanied them, and the invaders fell upon the inhabitants when they were asleep. They burnt the fort and most of the houses, murdered some who resisted, and carried away captive over one hundred men, women, and children.

Upon the south side of the Fish Creek, on the margin of the rapids, stood a brick mansion, pierced near the roof for musketryj and owned and occupied by a kinsman of General Schuyler, bearing the same name. His house was attacked, and in an attempt to defend it he was shot. His body was consumed, with other persons who had escaped to the cellar, when, after plundering the house, the savages set it on fire. That Saratoga estate was bequeathed by the murdered owner to his nephew Philip (the' General), who built a country mansion, elegant for the times, near the site of the old one, and occupied it when Burgoyne invaded the valley in 1777.