As flames took hold of Major Jelles Fonda’s house, the story goes, music began to sound. The home possessed a clock capable of playing several tunes, and the mechanism apparently continued to operate while the building burned. In the later telling, those nearby stopped to listen to an unexpected melody rising from a house under destruction.

The detail survives in historical accounts assembled long after the raid. It makes a powerful image, but it is not a contemporary eyewitness statement in the Tryon County committee minutes. Other embellishments—that listeners interpreted the music as a spirit speaking, or that an elaborate mirror passed from hand to hand among the plunder—should likewise be presented as part of the older narrative rather than as independently witnessed fact.

Whether every detail occurred as later writers described it is less important than what the story conveys. Jelles’s house was not simply a building on a battlefield. It contained the possessions and routines of a family, the products of years of trade, and objects that once marked the hours of ordinary life. The music of the clock—if the account is accurate—made the destruction unforgettable.

Fire spreading through a furnished colonial room as a tall clock stands near the flames.
Later accounts of the 1780 raid on Major Jelles Fonda’s home relate that a musical clock continued playing as the house burned. The striking episode survives as family tradition, not as an independently verified eyewitness report. Historical reconstruction; details and likenesses are interpretive.

Sources and references

  • Jeptha R. Simms, History of Schoharie County, and Border Wars of New York (Albany: Munsell & Tanner, 1845), p. 359 (musical clock story; retrospective account).
  • Jeptha R. Simms, The Frontiersmen of New York, vol. II (Albany: G. C. Riggs, 1882), p. 338 (later retelling of same tradition; not independent contemporary corroboration).