Who Was Corneilus Teabout? And What Was the Sugar Bush Raid? Part II

From Part 1: Corneilus Teabout b. c. 1760? Died 16 December 1858,

In April 1780 Corneilus Teabout, a free man of color, along with 10 others in Captain William Harper’s militia group, was captured at Harpersfield by Joseph Brant’s Tory band. This raid is now known as the Sugar Bush Raid.

Additional information in General Patchin’s memoir was the sale of captives at $8 per head and removal from Fort Niagara to Carlelton Island and then on to Chamblee. We do not know if the Harpersfield captives were among those sold.

Carleton Island, one of the Thousand Islands, was an important resupplying station for the British troops in the Revolutionary War. Several British troops were garrisoned there including Butler’s Rangers. Loyalist forces and Natives used the Island as a base to attack revolutionary forces, those raids included Cherry Valley and Wyoming Valley. Under the terms of the Jay Treaty 1794, the Islands were ceded to the Americans.

Fort Chamblee was also an important location during the French and Indian War when it was burned by the British. It was captured by the Americans in October1775 and held until Spring 1776 and burned again as the Americans retreated. It was subsequently used by the British to house prisoners of war until the end of the Revolutionary War. All prisoners were released in 1783, with many returned to Albany NY. In a return phone call from Fort Chamblee, I was informed that the remains of the fort were only discovered in 2009. Archeological information determined the location, but no other information is currently available, including no known records on individual captives.

General Freegift Patchin declares he was held there, presumably along with other captives, until the end of the War and was sent from there to Montreal, then on to Albany in 1783.

Exactly where Cornelius was housed while he was imprisoned is unknown.  He may have escaped at Minisink and avoided imprisonment altogether.  He may have spent the war at Fort Niagara as a prisoner or he may have been moved to Carlelton Island and then on to Chamblee.  What we do know is he eventually returned to Schoharie County.

In William V.H. Barker’s Early Families of Schoharie County, Corneilus Tibout is listed as probably born before 1762: died at the Schoharie Poorhouse December 1858 [Schoharie Republican 12/10/1858] married by 1787 to Maria [a negress listed in a baptismal record in the St. Paul’s Lutheran Church record as wife of Corneilus 31 August 1788]. 

We find multiple church records of Cornelius and his family starting with a baptism of a son in 1787 and including census records. Cornelius’s obituary in the Schoharie Republican says he was better known as Scoutsy, “an inoffensive colored man of very obliging disposition, rather witty, and generally recognized as one of the landmarks of old Schoharie.” 

Corneilus Teabout’s family persisted in Schoharie County at least until 1935 where I ended my research. There may be descendants of his still hidden in this county and there are branches of the family tree in Schenectady. We have no idea where Teabouts originally came from and no idea where they are buried in the county. Records for the Black population in Schoharie are few and far between or have been lost over time. And yet we know that his sons were involved in the Black Suffrage movement. His descendants encouraged the education of Black children in the county. We have found records of Teabouts from Schoharie County serving in the Civil War.  And although no early records of landownership have been found in the county, we know they lived here probably over on Sunnyside Road and worked as day laborers for over 100 years.