Onesquethaw Valley Historic District

Onesquethaw Valley is a farming district of about 3,400 acres along Onesquethaw Creek, around 10 miles south of Albany. It lies mostly in New Scotland, with small portions in Bethlehem and Coeymans. About 25 houses with farm buildings, plus archeological sites, are scattered across open fields and woodland. Eight eighteenth-century stone houses are the architectural centerpiece; most face the creek rather than the present roads, and five share a similar form of one and a half stories, five bays and a centered doorway. Other buildings include Greek Revival and Victorian farmhouses, Dutch barns, mill sites and a small cemetery. The settlement traces to a 1685 patent to Teunis Slingerlandt and Johannes Appel, and an early survey map of 1719 shows houses that survive in part today. Residents were prominent in Tory activity during the Revolutionary War. Descendants of the LaGrange, Winne and Slingerland families still farm the creek flats, giving the valley a continuous link to its colonial past.