05/25/2026
Memorial Day Speech
By Thomas Shannon, Germantown Historian
Given at the Second Reformed Cemetery, May 25th, 2026.
We gather here today to honor all of the heroic Americans who have lost their lives defending our country. Originally created as Decoration Day, a solemn remembrance of every soldier and sailor who fell during the Civil War, Memorial Day has taken on a broader context, and I urge you this year, 2026, to remember the sacrifices of our local militia during the Revolutionary War. It is a testament to them and all subsequent servicemen and women that our soil, our town, Germantown, last directly felt the ravage and ruin of war in 1778.
That Revolutionary conflict carved a new identity for our community, given a political status and a name it never had before - German Camp. In the recently formed Albany County Committee of Correspondence, the propertied men of German Camp, of which there were many due to the nature of the 1741 land distribution, were given four delegates to elect to the committee. Previous to this novel arrangement, the Palatines here, their children, and grandchildren were represented in the Provincial New York Assembly by the guaranteed Livingston Manor Assembly seat, an institution they had no influence on, and certainly no control over.
One of the first delegates elected from German Camp was a highly esteemed merchant, John Kortz Jr., whose parents were among the original Palatine Germans who settled here in 1710. As the war ramped up in the Hudson Valley in early 1777, the fledgling New York State Government demanded loyalty oaths from all politically prominent men. Kortz refused to take this oath and was imprisoned on a ship anchored in the Rondout Creek, a short distance from the state capital in uptown Kingston. The prison fleet at Rondout was broken up a few days before the burning of Kingston and Kortz was banished behind enemy lines, which is to say he was banished to New York City, where he spent the following six years of the war.
On the other side of things, Philip Rockefeller, likewise one of the first people ever democratically elected from German Camp, also served as the Adjutant of the Tenth Regiment of the Albany County Militia. His brother Diell Rockefeller, Jr. commanded the Tenth Company of that Regiment, the fighting men coming entirely from German Camp. The company served with honor at the Battles of Saratoga, and even more locally, during the misnamed Battle of Egremont, part of which occurred at Long Lake, better known today as the larger of Twin Lakes at Elizaville.
The coda to the Burning of Kingston in October 1777 was the burning, a few days later, of Chancellor Robert R. Livingston’s estate, Belvedere, and his mother’s, which you know as Clermont. A year prior, Livingston served on the Committee charged with drafting the Declaration of Independence. During this time, the people of German Camp braced for disaster by temporarily breaking up the Lutheran and Reformed churches and driving all cattle, livestock, and other valuables inland, away from the river. This task undoubtedly fell on the shoulders of women, children, and elderly, because the local militia was at Saratoga. A thin line of Continental soldiers under the command of General Israel Putnam arrived just in time to spare German Camp and the Livingston Manor House the fate that befell Kingston and Clermont.
The great emergency of 1777 was over, though no one knew it yet. Gloom hung over the early months of 1778 here in the Hudson Valley as all prepared for another tough year, unaware that the theatre of battle would soon shift far to the south. Political violence continued however, most notably in June 1778, when a band of thirty Loyalists forded the Roeliff Jansen Kill near Ford Road, causing some property destruction and other mayhem before being driven off by musket fire.
No small part of the character of our community was formed in these times. When Margaret Beekman Livingsotn needed skilled workmen to rebuild Clermont, she summoned three men from military service, two from Clermont, one from German Camp, all of them Palatines. When Chancellor Livingston wanted to reside closer to his burned out house to supervise the construction of a new one, he lived with one of the Clum households in German Camp. When John Kortz Jr. was finally allowed back in German Camp shortly before his death in 1784, he came back to an estate that had NOT been confiscated in the interim. When New York State passed “An Act for Dividing the Counties of this State into Towns” in early 1788, our community was called Germantown, forever shucking off the word “camp” and its connotations of our impoverished origins in the New World. And finally, when it came time for Germantown to elect its first Supervisor, the choice was John Kortz III, son of a man who spent almost the entire Revolutionary War a suspected Loyalist.
On this Memorial Day let us reflect on the American Revolution and be humbled that war has never been on our doorstep ever since. Thank you to all American servicemen and women. God bless!
