Stephen Adam Fonda was born April 23, 1832, into the Mohawk Valley branch of the family. He spent much of his early life around the Fonda homestead and farm economy before the Civil War interrupted ordinary life.
In 1862 he went to war with the 115th New York Volunteers as sutler, serving through the conflict. Afterward he returned to Montgomery County, where his public life became as important to local memory as his military service.
From veteran to sheriff
Fonda was active in Democratic politics, served as supervisor of the town of Mohawk, and became sheriff of Montgomery County. Contemporary obituaries remembered him as both a Civil War veteran and a former sheriff, a combination that placed him prominently in county affairs.
His term as sheriff is associated in the surviving family research with Montgomery County’s last hanging—a grim but historically revealing episode from the period when capital punishment was still administered locally rather than through the later centralized state system.
Fonda lived into his eighties and remained connected with veterans’ and fraternal organizations. He died at Fort Plain in January 1917.
The larger narrative is the transition from wartime service to county government: one man moving from the logistics of a volunteer regiment into the everyday—and occasionally severe—responsibilities of nineteenth-century local public office.
Sources and references
- “Stephen Fonda,” death notice, New York Times, 16 January 1917 (Civil War veteran and local identity; original page not verified).
- “Mr. Stephen Fonda,” obituary, New York Herald, 16 January 1917 (former Montgomery County sheriff and 115th New York service, as quoted in family research).
- “The Late Stephen Fonda,” Fort Plain-area obituary, January 1917 (surviving clipping transcription; newspaper title and original page unresolved).
- U.S. Civil War Draft Registration Records, 1863–1865, Stephen Fonda, New York, Congressional District 18 (draft entry not proof of precise 115th regiment duties).