Charles Vredenburgh
"...settlement along Lake George.
...It was to the more fertile, flat lower Champlain country with its strong little rivers...-the New York pioneers first turned. ...Others, before permanent settlement began, had been aware of this district's implicit worth. William Gilliland had begun his short-lived towns here, and in 1766 a peculiar and indefinite person known as Count or Captain Charles de Fredenburg, or Vredenburg, received from the British government a warrant for 30,000 acres extending inland from the mouth of the Saranac River. ...The post-Revolutionary patent obtained by Zephaniah Platt, delegate from Dutchess County to New York's first provincial Congress, by Melancton Smith, also a Dutchess County patriot, and others, covered the identical territory Fredenburg had possessed. It was a far larger tract than present-day Plattsburg. ...New York's practice was to establish townships of vast extent and then, as population increased, to break them up into smaller [ones]. ...The Captain-Count built a house where Plattsburg now stands and a sawmill at Fredenburg Falls, three miles upstream. When the Revolutionary War began, he took his family to Canada and, returning to his property, vanished never to reappear. His house and his mill were burned. "
Contributed by Susan Kenyon
Source: Lake Champlain and Lake George, Frederic F. Van de Water,1890; pg 240 and 241