o make further
preparations for a permanent home. This year also he received a
commission as Major in the Battalion of Herkimer County, having
previously been appointed a Captain in a Battalion for Montgomery,
which until 1791 included the counties of Herkimer and Tioga. He was
also appointed, in 1793, by Governor George Clinton, his old Brigade
commander on the Hudson in the beginning of the war, an Associate
Justice for Herkimer County, and designated the same year as one of
the three Commissioners to lay out and construct the Genesee Turnpike.
His last military promotion was that of Lieutenant Colonel of a
regiment of Militia in Onondaga County, in April, 1796, by Governor
John Jay, and gave him the title of Colonel, by which he is most
commonly known in the early annals of Auburn.

In 1794 he had completed a saw and grist mill, on the Owasco Outlet,
near where the Stone Mill now stands, opposite the junction of Genesee
and Market Streets, thus forming the nucleus of a settlement known as
Hardenbergh's Corners until 1805, when it took the name of Auburn.

The death of his wife occurred in the Spring, a little more than a
year after their marriage, leaving an infant daughter, and before his
arrangements were complete for bringing them to their new home in the
wilderness.

In 1795 a colony of ten families from Gettysburgh, Pa., made a
settlement about three miles up the Owasco Lake, and at once organized
a Reformed Protestant Dutch Church, which subsequently took corporate
form and title, Sept. 23, 1796, at a meeting held at the house of
Colonel Hardenbergh, who identified himself with this society in the
faith and order of which he had been educated. His copy of the New
Testament with the Psalms in a single volume, and in the Dutch
language, is still preserved; and bearing on the fly-leaf, under his
own signature, the same date with that of his first army commission,
it shows the signs of ordinary use not only, but the unmistakable
marks of the exposure and hardships incident to a soldier's life.

His second marriage, in 1796, was with Martina, daughter of Roeliff
Brinkerhoff, one of the first deacons of the Owasco church, and the
names of his two children by this marriage, Maria and John Herring,
appear on the baptismal register of that church for the years 1798 and
1800. The only son, John H. Hardenbergh, was in subsequent years one
of Auburn's most prominent and public spirited citizens. As the heir
to the lan