ALBANY.
From A set of plans and forts in America, reduced from actual surveys, 1763, published in London. (Copy in Harvard College library,—5325.67.) A map of the region about Albany and Schenectady, from Sauthier’s map (1779), is given in Pearson’s Schenectady Patent (1883), p. 290. Cf. Mag. of Amer. Hist. Feb., 1886.
While Winslow was employed in pushing forward from Albany his men and supplies, French scouting parties constantly harassed him. Col. Jonathan Bagley was making ready sloops and whale-boats at Lake George; and the English were soon as active as the French in their scouting forays, Capt. Robert Rogers particularly distinguishing himself.
FORT FREDERICK AT ALBANY.
From A set of plans and forts in America, reduced from actual surveys, 1763, published in London. An old view of the fort is given in Holden’s Queensbury, p. 313. There is an early plan of Albany and its fort (1695) in Miller’s Description of the Province and City of New York, of which a fac-simile is given in Weise’s Albany, pp. 257-8. The Catal. of the King’s Maps, i. 13 (Brit. Mus.), shows a MS. plan of Albany of the 18th century. There is a plan dated 1765 in the Annals of Albany, vol. iv. 2d ed.
Mrs. Grant’s Memoirs of an American Lady gives a picture of Albany and its life at this time, which may be compared with the description in Kalm’s Travels. (London, 1771, vol. ii. p. 98; also in Annals of Albany, vol. i. 2d ed., 1869.) Parkman (i. p. 319), who sketches the community from these sources, speaks of Mrs. Grant’s book as “a charming book, though far from being historically trustworthy;” while it affords a “genuine picture of colonial life.” Grahame (United States, ii. 256) considers the picture of manners “entirely fanciful and erroneous.”
Mrs. Grant herself says “I certainly have no intention to relate anything that is not true;” yet it must be remembered that she wrote in 1808, forty years after she, a girl of thirteen, had left the country. The book was published at Edinburgh in 1808; again in 1809, also in New York and in Boston the same year; in London in 1817, and again in New York in 1836 and 1846. The last edition is one printed at Albany in 1876, with notes by Joel Munsell and a memoir by Gen. J. G. Wilson. Cf. Munsell’s Bibliog. of Albany; Lossing’s Schuyler (1872), i. 34; Tuckerman’s America and her Commentators, p. 171.