One summer day in 1775, the American Revolution reached John Fonda’s farm by way of an ordinary footpath. On June 25, Thomas Hunt, a servant of Tryon County Sheriff Alexander White, crossed land where Fonda had planted meadow grass and peas. John Kinton, who was plowing nearby, later testified that Hunt carried a brush scythe across his shoulder. Fonda, holding a hoe, told Hunt to keep to the path beside the fence so he would not damage the crop.

Hunt refused. Kinton saw the two men grapple, but said he did not see either strike a blow; he heard Hunt threaten Fonda’s life. When the dispute was brought before the Tryon County Committee of Safety that August, Fonda gave his own account under oath. He said Hunt raised the scythe as if to strike, and that he responded with his hoe, knocking Hunt down. Fonda maintained that he then went home, leaving Hunt behind. The two accounts are not identical in every detail, but both place a quarrel over cultivated land at the center of the affair.

The sheriff’s response gave the episode its larger significance. White arrested Fonda and put him in the county jail at Johnstown. By that summer, colonial authority in the Mohawk Valley was already being contested, and an arrest by the royal sheriff could become a matter for the revolutionary committees as well as the courts.

Samuel Ludlow Frey, writing in explanatory notes to the published minutes in 1905, supplied the sequel. He reported that Fonda’s supporters went to Johnstown one night and released him. They also attempted to arrest White, who fired into the crowd. Shots were exchanged, and White escaped. Frey’s version is a later historical narrative, not a second sworn deposition; its particulars should therefore be attributed to him rather than presented as the committee’s eyewitness finding.

A footpath across a planted field had thus become entangled in the struggle over who possessed the right to enforce law in Tryon County. For John Fonda, the upheaval did not end with his release. Five years later, during the 1780 raid on Caughnawaga, he and his brother Adam would be taken captive and carried toward Canada—a story to which the next chapter returns.

Sources: The Minute Book of the Committee of Safety of Tryon County (1905), pp. 49–51 (testimony recorded 25 Aug. 1775), and pp. 136–137 (Samuel Ludlow Frey’s later historical notes). The account of the 1780 captivity is part of the family narrative addressed in Chapter 4, not documented by these 1775 depositions.

Two colonial men facing each other beside a farm field, one carrying a scythe and one a hoe.
In June 1775, John Douw Fonda confronted Thomas Hunt, a servant of the Tryon County sheriff, over a path across planted land. Their dispute involving a scythe and hoe became a matter before the revolutionary Committee of Safety. Historical reconstruction; details and likenesses are interpretive.

Sources and references

  • The Minute Book of the Committee of Safety of Tryon County, the Old New York Frontier (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1905), pp. 49–51, testimony of 25 August 1775 concerning John Fonda, Thomas Hunt, John Kinton and Sheriff Alexander White (contemporary testimony; witnesses disagree on whether blows were struck).
  • Samuel Ludlow Frey, explanatory notes in The Minute Book of the Committee of Safety of Tryon County (1905), pp. 136–137 (later commentary about the release and attempted arrest; not independent eyewitness testimony).