The village is named after Douw Fonda,[3] a Dutch-American settler who was killed and scalped in 1780, during a Mohawk raid in the Revolutionary War, when the tribe was allied with the British.

European settlers, mostly German and English, officially organized the present-day village in 1751 at the former site of Kanatsiohareke.

The settlement was later named for Douw Fonda, a Dutch-American settler who was scalped in a Mohawk raid during the Revolutionary War.

Henry Fonda wrote about them in his 1981 autobiography, as follows: Early records show the family ensconced in northern Italy in the 16th century where they fought on the side of the Reformation, fled to Holland, intermarried with Dutch burghers' daughters, picked up the first names of the Low Countries, but retained the Italianate "Fonda".

Before Pieter Stuyvesant surrendered Nieuw Amsterdam to the English the Fondas, instead of settling in Manhattan, canoed up the Hudson River to the Indian village of Caughnawaga.

Within a few generations, the Mohawks and the Iroquois were butchered or fled and the town became known to mapmakers as Fonda, New York.

[4]After the opening of the Erie Canal in 1825, Fonda thrived with the growth in trade and traffic that accompanied it.

As the county seat, it also did well with the arrival of the railroad in 1835, which increased cross-state transportation and shipping of goods.

In 1973 the Caughnawaga Indian Village Site was listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

[6] This is the first land the Mohawk have held in the valley since being forced out in 1783 after the Revolution, when Great Britain ceded its former territories in the colonies to the United States.

[6] The name Kanatsiohareke means “The Place of the Clean Pot,” referring to a ten-foot-wide and ten-foot-deep pothole in the creek bed caused by rock scouring.