Ahkwesahsne

Ahkwesahsne is a Mohawk community on the Saint Lawrence River, near the mouths of the Saint Regis and Raquette rivers. French missionaries called the settlement Saint Regis, but the Mohawk name was already in use in the eighteenth century. Its position on the river placed it along the waterway between the Great Lakes and the settlements of New France.

In the 1750s Mohawk families moved upriver from Kahnawake, and French Jesuits established a mission at the site. Refugees from the Oswegatchie mission also settled here after the upheavals of war. The boundary drawn between British territory and the United States after the American Revolution crossed the community's lands. In 1796 a treaty involving the Seven Nations of Canada reserved a much smaller tract for the people of Saint Regis.