Onaquaga (also spelled many other ways) was a large Iroquois village, located on both sides of the Susquehanna River near present-day Windsor, New York. During the American Revolutionary War, the Continental Army destroyed it and nearby Unadilla in October 1778 in retaliation for the British and Iroquois attack on German Flatts.
Onaquaga was originally home to members of the Oneida tribe, one of the Five Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy. The Iroquoian-speaking Tuscarora people joined in outlying settlements when they migrated north from South Carolina and became the Sixth Nation of the confederacy in 1722. In 1753, Nanticoke refugees from Virginia also moved into the village.
Following the 1768 Treaty of Fort Stanwix, Mohawks were forced north and west and a number settled in Onaquaga, just west of the treaty line. They were prosperous, had some cattle and poultry, gardens, and fruit trees. Many of the inhabitants were Christians. By the time of the American Revolution, representatives from all of the Six Nations, a group of Algonquian-speaking Lenape people, and also a number of Loyalists lived in Onaquaga.
The Ouaquaga Lenticular Truss Bridge was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2003.[1]
Historian Francis Whiting Halsey, who spelled the name of the village Oghwaga, included this footnote in his 1901 work The Old New York Frontier: