Cherry Valley Gorge and Judds Falls

I used to live in Cherry Valley. Come to think of it, I think I’ve lived in every little bitty Upstate town. Oh, I am exaggerating. A little. Last year about this time, the family took a drive out to Cherry Valley to see the Judds Falls.

Cherry Valley is a tiny little place and one of those uber-rural Upstate New York towns very much “out of the way” from the main thoroughfare. It wasn’t always such an isolated settlement. In the days before motorcars and railroads, Cherry Valley was the natural passageway between the western and eastern sections of New York State. A Landmark Village says of it:

Cherry Valley was a gateway to the American Frontier. The reason was this: there is a ridge of mountains and hills that run east to west, separating the Mohawk from the Susquehanna watersheds. But there are smooth fertile glacial valleys both north and south of this ridge at Cherry Valley. The ancient Iroquois discovered that these glacial valleys formed a natural stairway, giving them their easiest way through the ridge. Cherry Valley was also quite near to the Mohawk River itself, which veers sharply south into Canajoharie.

The result was that Cherry Valley was an important link between the Mohawk and the other Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy. Cherry Valley’s favored position along the ridge made it part of the natural route east to west as well.

Cherry Valley was the location of the Cherry Valley Massacre during the American Revolution. Have you ever seen the Mel Gibson movie, “The Patriot”? A great deal of the movie’s plot comes from various little events that actually occurred during the American Revolution. In the movie, Mel Gibson’s character speaks of a massacre of innocent women and children at a fort (called Fort Wilderness in the movie). Gibson and his men take revenge on the Indians and French perpetrators. During the American Revolution, there were several massacres, but the most famous one was probably the Cherry Valley Massacre.

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