Deserontyon had spurned Brant’s invitation to build a unified community by the Grand River that he felt too close for comfort to the Americans. His distaste for this former neighbors was absolute, “I thought I could not live in peace so near those people… the Americans are like a worm that cuts off corn as soon as it appears,” according to historian Janice Potter-MacKinnon. Deserontyon, who had married Joseph Brant’s daughter Catherine, built a chapel a Christian schoolhouse for his followers and his own children. Over time, his relations with Brant grew uneasy as his father-in-law accused him of causing divisions within the Mohawk nation.

For his war losses, Deserontyon received 800 pounds as a lump sum and forty-five pounds annually as a pension in addition to 3000 acres of land. In 1797, he and Joseph Brant went to New York and agreed to withdraw Mohawk land claims in return for a small sum.

King George III designated Deserontyon’s little wooden church as a Chapel Royal – the only one located outside of London, England – and in 1798 and gave them a three-paneled alter piece with commandments and prayers translated into the Mohawk language. The church bell he also donated was thought to be the first in Upper Canada.

The eight pieces of Queen Anne silver, which Deserontyon had retrieved from Fort Hunter in 1783, was missing a chalice at the time of its recovery. Of the seven remaining seven pieces, four went to Brant’s community west of Lake Ontario and three to Deserontyon’s for use in his Mohawk wooden chapel where it was used in his funeral services in 1811.

The British crown’s continued its largesse to Deserontyon’s chapel with a gift of a Bible from Queen Victoria around the time the wooden building was replaced by a stone church in the 1840s. During a royal visit in 1984, Queen Elizabeth II presented the Bay of Quinte Mohawks with a replacement chalice for the one that hand gone missing two centuries earlier.

This piece and the silver pieces retained by Deserontyon are still used in official ceremonies on the Tyendinaga Mohawk Territory on the Bay of Quinte to this day.

(019) The bible given by Queen Victoria in the mid-1800s to Capt. John Deserontyon's Mohawk community on the Bay of Quite is on display to this day in Christ Church, Her Majesty's Chapel Royal of the Mohawk near Deseronto, Ontario.

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