Who was Angelica Schuyler and why does a tiny town in Allegany County bear her name?

If you are from Allegany County, you might have heard that the county’s founder named the town he designed after his mother, but there is more to the story than a son’s maternal devotion.

Author Molly Beer is a native of Angelica.

Who was Angelica Schuyler? Was she the love interest portrayed in the play “Hamilton,” who betrayed her younger sister who was Hamilton’s wife, or is that just a small part of who the woman was and her impact on the developing nation which would become the United States?

It was a mystery to a young girl growing up on a farm outside of the village in the 1980s. While other girls perhaps dreamed about being a Disney princess, Molly Beer dreamed about the real woman who had lived in the sand-colored, brick and stone, white-columned mansion on the bank of the Genesee River. The woman’s friends were the framers of the U.S. Constitution, the patriots and heroes of America’s War for Independence.

“Angelica: For Love and Country in a Time of Revolution” is the name of the book Beer had been researching and writing for most of the last 10 years. It will be released July 1 by W.W. Norton Publishing Company. It is not the first book Beer has written, but it is the first book she’s written about her hometown.

“I’ve written about El Salvador, Mexico and Nepal, but I’d never really written about my hometown,” she said. “Angelica, New York, is just as interesting to me as any place I’ve ever been, but in order to write deeply about Angelica the place, readers have to know WHO Angelica the person was, and I had to know.”

BEER STARTED researching the life of Angelica Schuyler Church in 2016. But she admits that it was just an extension of the information she’d heard as a child listening to oral historians on her front porch telling fascinating stories, and from what she gleaned from visiting the local library.

“I used to ride the school bus past Angelica’s house twice a day, going and coming from elementary school,” Beer said. “She was a person that people who came to our house told stories about. Rural people like to gossip even if it is 200-year-old gossip.

“We didn’t have a television when I was growing up, so while other kids, little girls, were talking about Jasmine and Ariel, I was interested in Angelica,” she continued. “I was one of those little girls with a princess fetish — I think Angelica was my American version of a fairytale princess. Thomas Jefferson was charmed by her wit in the salons of Paris. Alexander Hamilton adored her. Lafayette recognized her granddaughter during his return visit to the U.S. Even the Prince of Wales admired her.”

When she got outside of Angelica, Beer said she was amazed that people knew little about Angelica other than the fact that the town was named after her.

“When I went out into the world, I was always kind of surprised that no one knew, really, about her,” Beer said. “And that kind of made me sad, because little girls in other countries have female leaders in their history — Catherine the Great, Queen Elizabeth (and Mary and Anne…). Even Marie-Antoinette, who was the same age as Angelica, held enough sway that a great deal of energy went into denigrating her. I felt I was lucky to have a REAL person to idolize, not a fantasy.”

So, one reason Beer wrote the book was to bring Angelica’s story to more American girls, and not just the love-interest storyline that historians have diminished her to.

“I wanted to write about a real girl, a real woman, who wasn’t well behaved or prim, who ran away from home and broke the rules sometimes for reasons she felt were more important than the rules,” Beer said. “Because I hope this book will reach girls, I’m really delighted that it’s been picked up by the Junior Library Guild.”

INITIALLY, THE STORY of Angelica Schuyler was told in a historical pamphlet for the village of Angelica. Beers remembered that her mother, Lucia Beer, and local historian David Hagstrom, asked her to write something about Angelica after the musical “Hamilton” debuted on Broadway in 2015.

“Hamilton” is about Alexander Hamilton and his influence on the Revolutionary War and the development of the democratic experiment that became the U.S. Characters in the play include, among a large cast, Hamilton, Aaron Burr, Angelica and her younger sister, Elizabeth, Hamilton’s wife.}

“That year I spent the summer in my hometown researching the life of Angelica and I wrote a brief pamphlet, but there was so much more to learn,” Beer said, admitting that the pamphlet was just the beginning of a journey that has taken her to Saratoga, Ticonderoga, Albany, Boston, London and Paris as she pieced together the life of a revolutionary heroine.

She explained that Angelica Schuyler Church is mentioned and talked about in letters written by Hamilton, John Adams, the Marquis de Lafayette and Jefferson, whose daughters attended school in Paris with Angelica’s daughter.

Beer explained Angelica lived in New York, Boston and London, where her home was a sort of embassy for the fledgling country, dealing with relationships with the court of King George III, after the Revolution, and it served as a refuge for her aristocratic French friends escaping the Reign of Terror.

She witnessed the signing of the Treaty of Paris in 1785, and joined her friends in the celebration when George Washington was inaugurated as the first U.S. president.

Beer doesn’t call Angelica an influencer as the word is used today.

“I think of her more as an interlocutor, someone who tried to keep the peace between the French and the patriots when the French army was stationed in Boston,” Beer said. “She tamped down cultural clashes and tried to keep the peace.”

BEER BELIEVES THAT Angelica’s most important impact on the nation happened while she lived in England near Windsor Castle after the war.

“She became the chief American woman in England,” she said.

Angelica eventually returned from England and even traveled on horseback and by wagon across a wilderness road to visit her son and daughter-in-law on the banks of the Genesee.

Beer isn’t sure where she goes from here, after a summer book tour that will take her to Saratoga, Boston, Newport, Angelica, Heritage Days, Monticello and the Smithsonian.

“It depends on how well the book does,” she said. It will be available on Amazon, Kindle and Audible, as well as in libraries and in bookstores.

“I just think that with the 250th anniversary of the country coming up next year, that it is important to have a woman’s perspective,” Beer said. “I researched and wrote the book I needed in order to understand the origin story of my town and, by extension, the origin story of the United States.”