USA > New York > Wayne County > History of Central New York : embracing Cayuga, Seneca, Wayne, Ontario, Tompkins, Cortland, Schuyler, Yates, Chemung, Steuben, and Tioga Counties, Volume I > Part 6
USA > New York > Cayuga County > History of Central New York : embracing Cayuga, Seneca, Wayne, Ontario, Tompkins, Cortland, Schuyler, Yates, Chemung, Steuben, and Tioga Counties, Volume I > Part 6
USA > New York > Seneca County > History of Central New York : embracing Cayuga, Seneca, Wayne, Ontario, Tompkins, Cortland, Schuyler, Yates, Chemung, Steuben, and Tioga Counties, Volume I > Part 6
USA > New York > Ontario County > History of Central New York : embracing Cayuga, Seneca, Wayne, Ontario, Tompkins, Cortland, Schuyler, Yates, Chemung, Steuben, and Tioga Counties, Volume I > Part 6
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Pennsylvanians pushed up the Susquehanna to Tioga Point, where Sullivan's men had rendezvoused. Diverging there, some made settlements along the Chemung and others established forest homes along the east branch of the Susquehanna and its tributaries.
Other adventurers from the East, crossing from New Eng- land or the Hudson River counties to Unandilla, dropped down the Susquehanna in canoes and settled on its banks or those of the Chemung. Some left the stream and traveled northward between the Finger Lakes. Others, who settled in Cortland County, came by way of the Chenango and the Tioughnioga Rivers.
Still a third band took the ancient Genesee Indian trail through the Mohawk and penetrated the region from the north- east, settling the communities in the northern half of Central New York.
All were driven westward by land hunger, the ancient in- stinct to possess a home they could call their own. In the eastern
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provinces twin spectres loomed forever before these men who braved the forest wilds-one that they might die and leave chil- dren where there were no asylums; the other, that accident might come to incapacitate the breadwinner and that on his recovery he might be thrown into prison for debt. To such as these the story of a land of abounding harvests and mighty streams and tranquil lakes, clothed Central New York with an irresistible lure. Whether by horseback, afoot or by cumbersome batteaux or lithe canoe, their driving passion was to reach the new land and stake out a home. Many of them reached their goal over poorly marked Indian trails.
As early as 1756 Gen. William Johnson built a stockade fort and block houses at Geneva, Ontario County, to be occupied by Seneca Indians and British should they be forced to defend them- selves against the French.
Early in the Revolution Col. John Butler, in charge of Tories at Fort Niagara, erected near the present canal bridge, Geneva, a barracks and storehouse, from which Indians marched to the Battle of Oriskany and the Wyoming Massacre.
In 1785 Amos Draper, an Indian trader, and James McMas- ter, an agent, settled at Owego, Tioga County. Two years later Jacob Fredenburg, who fled from Massachusetts after Shay's Rebellion, came to Penn Yan, Yates County, where as a volun- tary exile he was adopted by the Indians. Penn Yan, however, was not settled until 1791 when Robert Chison and James Scho- field built their cabins there. In this same year, 1787, disciples of that strange woman, Jemima Wilkinson, made their first set- tlement at the outlet of Lake Keuka, a mile south of Dresden, and Job Smith pitched his tent where Seneca Falls now stands.
A big settlement year was 1788, when eleven men from Kingston prospected in the Ithaca Valley, where in 1791 Jacob Yaple, Isaac Dumond and Peter Kinepaw returned and planted corn, for the nineteen settlers who arrived that fall. The year 1788 saw the settlement of Montour Falls begun by Silas Walcott and a Mr. Wilson. Messrs. Culver and Smith came as the first settlers at what is now Watkins Glen, calling the spot Salubria. Col. John Hendy, who had visited the site of Elmira back in
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1782, came with a small boy to settle and plant the first white man's corn in the Chemung Valley. John Harris arrived as Cayuga County's first settler, stopping on the Cayuga Indian reservation near Cayuga village. Peter Smith located on lot seven in Ovid. A "solitary log house, inhabited by one Jennings," stood early in 1788 at Geneva a little south of what is now the junction of Washington and Exchange streets. But within a year a line of straggling huts dotted the trail, the largest being a trading post. Here, September 30, 1787, the Lessee Company agents had held a conference with the Indians, leasing the land for 999 years, a lease declared void by the Legislature the following year.
Judge Oliver Phelps opened a land sale office in Canandaigua in 1789, before which time were early white settlers who had sought to name the frontier hamlet Walkersburgh in honor of William Walker, a land business agent of Lenox, Massachusetts. Naples, originally called Watkinstown, was founded in this year by New England pioneers. John King, with three relatives, set- tled at Union Springs, Cayuga County, and Edward Richardson started a grist mill there. Capt. Roswell Franklin, a soldier of the Revolution, located near Aurora in the same county and David Wisner came as the first settler in Romulus, Seneca Coun- ty. Pioneers came to the Moravia Valley, Cayuga County, for hay and there in 1791 the first permanent settler was John Stoyel.
The following year, 1790, a white man and his wife built a cabin at Hector on Seneca Lake and the year after Joseph Beebe, his wife and her brother, Amos Todd, from Connecticut, reared a rude home on the banks of the Tioughnioga in the town of Homer at a point on the main road immediately north of the present vil- lage of Homer. They were Cortland County's first settlers.
The year 1792 saw the opening of a tavern at Rushville, On- tario County, by Elias Gilbert. Abner Treman, a veteran only thirty-one years old, built a hut at Trumansburg, Tompkins County. Samuel Baker, a Mr. Aulle and Capt. Amos Stone set- tled at Hammondsport, Steuben County, and Capt. Charles Wil- liamson, sent out by the Pulteney Company of England, arrived on the site of Bath in the same county to found a model English city. John Miller and family settled in Cortland County near the
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present County Home, and Joseph Chaplin, pioneer road builder, made the first permanent settlement at Virgil, in the same county.
Auburn was settled in 1793 by John Hardenbergh, a Revolu- tionary War veteran, and the same year Darius Kinney came to Homer, Cortland County.
The following year brought Dr. and Mrs. Japhet Hunt, two sons and three daughters, up the Tioughnioga in canoes to settle a mile south of what is now Marathon, Cortland County. Na- thaniel Potter, Jonah Stiles, Christopher Whitney, David Morse and Benjamin Brown located at Truxton in the same county.
There were sprinklings of other settlers throughout Central . New York in those early days and by the first decade of the Nine- teenth Century the entire district had scattered cabins. Space permits enumeration of the first pioneers of all the communities. But enough are mentioned to give a glimpse of the chronological order in which various sections of the area were settled.
Settlement of the region now embraced in the eleven Central New York Counties was made by men who had secured their land through two means-purchase and grant or bounty by the state and federal governments. Under an Indian treaty, the Onon- dagas ceded to the state all their lands except the Onondaga reservation and fishing and hunting rights. These lands, and another lying to the west were under an act of Congress, Septem- ber 16, 1776, and under other legislation, set apart as bounty lands to Revolutionary War soldiers, and became known as the Military Tract. This tract lay within what are now the counties of Onondaga, Cayuga, Cortland and Seneca, and parts of the counties of Oswego, Tompkins and Wayne.
In 1780, the first general sub-division of this tract into town- ships was made by Simeon DeWitt, surveyor-general, who himself later acquired the land where Ithaca now stands. There were 1,800,000 acres set apart for soldiers on the Indian lands of the Military Tract and by 1790 twenty-six townships had been sur- veyed, each intended to contain as nearly as possible 60,000 acres. Each township was divided into 100 lots. Three more townships were added to the tract, making twenty-eight in all. Six lots in each township were devoted to gospel and school purposes. Lots
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were drawn for claimants. Many soldiers settled on their land, others sold their apportionments, some several times, and land titles became confused.
The second method of procuring land-by purchase-applied chiefly to the territory of Central New York west of a line run- ning across the state from Lake Ontario to the Pennsylvania line at a point almost due south of Seneca Lake. This land, compris- ing 2,600,000 acres, was known as the Phelps and Gorham Pur- chase. It had been sold to Judge Oliver Phelps and Nathan Gorham in 1787 by Massachusetts, which claimed title through settlements made at the close of the Revolution. Two years later Phelps opened at Canandaigua the first regular land sale office in America. Before the middle of November, 1790, about fifty townships in this newly surveyed purchase had been sold to indi- viduals or to companies of farmers.
At the southeastern end of the district were other smaller tracts acquired by purchase instead of grant, although they lay east of the Phelps and Gorham pre-emption line. A tract be- tween the Owego and Chenango Rivers, comprising 230,400 acres and known as the Boston Ten Townships, was ceded by Massa- chusetts to a group of sixty individuals and settled or sold by them.
Then there was another tract of 29,812 acres in the southerly half of the town of Owego, patented to another group and known as Coxe's Manor and sold to settlers.
Still another tract of 363,000 acres east and south of the head of Seneca Lake was purchased of New York State in 1794 by John W. Watkins and Royal R. Flint and then sold to settlers. By 1793 there were 7,000 inhabitants on the lands west of the Pre-emption line and 6,640 on the Military Tract and contiguous tracts to the south of it.
The earliest civic division in this section of the state was Tyron County, formed in 1772 and changed to Montgomery in 1784. It included the entire state west of a north and south line drawn through the center of Schoharie County. Ontario County was next formed January 27, 1789, and included all that part of Montgomery County lying west of a north and south line drawn
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through Seneca Lake, two miles east of Geneva. Herkimer County was formed in 1791, extending from Ontario County to Montgomery. Onondaga was formed from Herkimer March 5, 1794, and included the original Military Tract.
As Central New York-America's first "Great West"- opened its doors to the East, roads could not be hewed out of the forest fast enough to accommodate the settlers. Men from the New England colonies had seen this wonderland when Sullivan's army devastated the region, and strong arms and strong hearts, inured to hardship and to toil, poured into the Indians' garden spot. With them they took the church and school, the twin chil- dren of free institutions.
From the interior of the district, cargoes of wheat began to arrive in Albany and instead of gewgaws for the Indians, utensils for the homes and farms of settlers went out in return. Settlers came in tented wagons and brought with them as much as they could carry of provisions and household stuff. As they advanced, when the trails were new, trees were cut down and logs pushed away. Now and then a corduroy bridge was thrown over swampy places so the wagons could pass. Progress of these pioneers was slow. Sometimes they would come to the end of the road or upon a gang of wood choppers. Then they would stop and help the workmen through.
Every family who had managed to build its log cabin in a clearing would take in all the travelers the little home could hold. When the immigrants came to one of these forest abodes as night fell, they would take bedding enough out of the wagons to cover the floor and the women and children would sleep there in the house. Men remained in the wagons all night. When dusk fell, with no house in sight, the women and children would occupy the covered wagons and the men roll up on the ground beneath them. Wild beasts roved the forest where Indians still lurked, so con- stant vigilance was needed, when night shadows choked the trail.
For the most part the early roads followed the trails of the Indian. Engineers today have found that these ancient paths through the forest were not without system. Where a trail fol- lowed a stream or lake, it always ran as close to the shore as
CAYUGA COUNTY COURT HOUSE
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CAYUGA COUNTY COURT HOUSE, AUBURN, N. Y.
HIGH SCHOOL, AUBURN, N. Y.
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possible, lying outside the close timber growth or banks and ravines.
From the time the ancient Roman roads of England were laid out as imperishable reminders of another day, highways have been inextricably intertwined in the history of progress. Like the advance guard of an army, road preceded empire building. So it was in Central New York. The first task of the newcomers was the cutting out of roads, many of them following the paths chartered by the moccasined feet of the Indian through the wilder- ness. Today it costs as much per mile to build many of Central New York's roads as was expended in a whole year's building program on all the roads which the state boasted in 1797.
The expansion westward to Central New York was so tre- mendous that state revenues were insufficient to build roads fast enough, so turnpikes were constructed by private enterprise, and were immensely profitable, some paying as high as 80 per cent dividend a year. In 1790 and '91 a party of pioneers under direction of a General Wadsworth improved the trail between Whitestown in the eastern part of the state to Canandaigua. In 1797 a law was passed authorizing the raising of $45,000 by lottery to improve the state's roads and of this $2,200 was allotted for the improvement of the Genesee trail, the first public road opened west of Utica.
This great turnpike ran substantially along the route of the road from Skaneateles by Franklin Street to Auburn and west- ward through Seneca Falls, Waterloo, Geneva and Canandaigua. Cayuga Lake was the only water obstacle to almost a straight line of road, so agitation was early started for a bridge to avoid a detour northward. In 1796 the Cayuga Bridge Company was formed and the biggest engineering undertaking yet attempted in Central New York was launched. The longest bridge on the western hemisphere up to that time was constructed entirely of wood, at a cost of $25,000. It was destroyed by ice in 1808, re- built in 1812-13 and finally abandoned in 1857, all at a cost of $150,000. The span was more than a mile long and wide enough for three carts to pass. The toll was 561/2 cents. In both 1929 and 1930 a bill to permit the building of a modern highway
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bridge over the line of the ancient one was passed by the Legisla- ture, as a result of a movement by the Finger Lakes Association, but was vetoed each time by Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt.
The western terminus of the old bridge was at Bridgeport, where abutments of the historic span are still visible. The east- ern terminus was marked by a tavern kept by Hugh Buckley, who settled there about 1796. Next to the tavern and the bridge was the first jail in Cayuga County, a log structure built against the bank along the lake shore, the top being on a level with the em- bankment. Prisoners were let down through a trap door in the top.
In 1800 the Legislature passed an act incorporating the Se- neca Road and Turnpike Company, to run between the home of John House in the village of Utica and the court house in Canan- daigua, substantially covering the old route of the Genesee Road. The act required the land to be six rods wide and twenty feet of it in the center to be covered with broken stone or gravel to a depth of fifteen inches. Toll gates were to be ten miles apart and the toll for a two-horse vehicle twelve and one-half cents; for four horses, twenty-five cents. No persons passing to or from their farm with their cattle or teams carrying firewood, going to or returning from mill for the grinding of grain for family use, going to or returning from any funeral, were obliged to pay toll in the town where they resided.
The Cherry Valley Turnpike, now known as Federal Route 20 or the Grant Highway, was also laid out in 1800. It ran from Cherry Valley, scene of the famous Indian massacre in Otsego County, to the present site of Skaneateles, there to connect with the Seneca Turnpike to the west.
A public road built from Oxford, on the Chenango River di- rectly through to Ithaca in 1791-'93 became the great highway for immigration in the southern part of the state. It was con- structed by Joseph Chaplin and extended through Willet, Virgil, Dryden, and Groton. In 1806 a road was opened from Virgil to Cortland.
In 1804 the Susquehanna-Bath Turnpike, an extension of the great Catskill Turnpike from the Hudson, was chartered. It ran
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from Jericho, now Bainbridge, through Richford, Caroline, Slat- erville and Ithaca to Bath. What is now State Street, Ithaca, formed a part of this road.
Then in 1807 a charter was granted for a road from Ithaca to Owego and not long afterward construction of a road from Ithaca to Geneva by another turnpike company was under way. Both roads opened in 1811. As many as 800 teams a day passed over the Ithaca-Owego Turnpike.
Toll was paid on some of the turnpikes according to the width of tires, wagons with twelve-inch tires being allowed to pass free. A ton of freight cost eighty-eight dollars from Albany to Buffalo, which fell to twenty-two dollars and finally to six dol- lars, with the advent of the Erie Canal. The condition of these earliest roads required the use of three, four and often seven or eight horses to draw a load.
The turnpikes created the new industry of teaming. With sturdy pioneers at the reins, loads of merchandise in transit from Albany to Buffalo and intermediate points throughout Central New York, and returning loads of grain were constantly passing over the early roads. At Reed's Tavern, a short distance west of Auburn, as many as a hundred of these draught horses were often stabled in a single night.
History, fashion and frivolity with a grim battle against the elements and against want, were concentrated along these old roads. Then there was little night travel. Stumps and ruts were too hazardous even to the cumbersome, heavy wagons. And across the travel lanes through the forests wild animals frisked and the howl of the wolf started echoes in the woodland glades.
The problem of wolves was one of the earliest encountered by settlers. Livestock fell prey to the forest mauraders. Real danger lurked by the pioneer cabin. Depredations of the animals were so numerous that bounties for wolf pelts were offered in many counties. A wolf was always shot on sight. Big wolf hunts were sometimes organized.
Indicative of the wolf nuisance even a quarter of a century after the first settlements of Central New York had been estab- lished is an ancient account of the last great wolf drive in Tioga
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County in 1828. In January of that year the towns of Richford, Berkshire, Candor and Lisle held a conference to discuss the wolf problem. They decided on the drive to oust the animal. On a given day the settlers mobilized, each man with a gun, a dog and a cow bell. They formed in a great line. At night sentinels stood guard, ringing bells and shooting occasionally, so that the wolves would not run back past them.
Then a forward march began just north of Richford and the line ran east to Hunt's Corners and west to near Slaterville. Every man on the line stepped forward, firing his gun and ring- ing the bells. At night trees were set on fire to frighten the wolves. Every man had his knapsack full of food and he got a fresh supply at cabins as he went on. The line was kept in a semi-circle, forcing the wolves toward the center. Every day new volunteers joined the rout.
The drive opened on the second Tuesday in February and continued to its climax on Friday, when the wolves were driven beyond the Susquehanna. Residents south of the river and into Pennsylvania long had a bitter grudge against the Trogans for deluging them with the pests.
The absence of roads, mills and markets formed the great perplexity of early settlers, next to the daily battle for life and to the troublesome wolves. During the earliest period grist mills were few, although they formed the first industries of the new land. Settlers were often forty or fifty miles distant from these mills.
The customary substitute for millstones was an enormous mortar made by digging and burning a hollow in the top of a hickory or other hard wood stump. Into this the corn was put and pounded into coarse meal by action of a heavy pestle at- tached to a sweep or spring pole.
Central New York pioneers were, as a rule, poor in the world's goods. If a family owned a yoke of oxen, a few primitive house- hold articles and a small stock of provisions, they were considered in comfortable circumstances. Homes of the settlers were hardly worthy of the name house. Often the abode was merely a cabin of logs, of a size such as could be handled by one man. It was
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covered with bark and did not always have a floor. Those homes which boasted floors had usually one made of split logs or "puncheons" which were seldom on a level. The man who lived in a house of as large as sixteen feet square, with shingle roof, a board floor and a glass window was held as affluent.
Furniture of the early dwellings was simple. A feather bed was a luxury. Most bedsteads were made of poles and strips of bark. Chairs were usually a slab split from a log with holes bored in the corners and rough legs inserted.
But newcomers to the district were always welcomed. Their arrival meant more acres cleared, more buildings, more mingling with humankind. Settlers for miles around would assemble to help the new arrival build his frontier domicile. A nimble whiskey jug usually spurred construction. "Logging bees," to help a neighbor clear his land for an early crop, were also ex- amples of the pioneers' cordial cooperation in a united front to master the crowding forests.
Tea and coffee were rare. Money was even scarcer. But early the great maples in the "sugar bush" provided maple syrup which would today be prized on any table. Grains, maple sugar, pottery and at last potash formed the principal marketable articles for settlers. Numerous asheries were put into operation for making potash, a product from the ashes of the great trees whose destruction was the first aim of the pioneer.
In this settlement period, Central New York was almost self- supporting. Articles obtained from the outer world were few. Families subsisted largely on the things they grew and their own ingenuity produced. Necessity made both men and women "jacks of all trades." And it nurtured motive forces in those early settlers that made communities strong and ready for the new and broader life.
CHAPTER V TAVERN AND STAGE COACH DAYS.
FIRST STAGE LINES-COMPETITION-U. S. MAIL-WAR FOR SABBATH OBSERV- ANCE-ROMANCE OF ANCIENT INNS-HOSTELRIES ALWAYS HUB OF COM- MUNITY LIFE-LIQUOR CHEAP AND PLENTIFUL.
Advent of the turnpikes brought two distinct institutions to Central New York-the old-time tavern and the stage coach, as it first appeared in America. These cumbersome vehicles fol- lowed paths where the questing pioneer had left the deep ruts of his wagon wheels and often his scalp and skeleton as well. The stage coach with the weekly mail, the stage coach with happy honeymooners or with prospectors, homeseekers, woodsmen, gov- ernment agents - adventurers all; the stage coach with its romance and hardship was one of the factors which hastened the upbuilding of Central New York.
Stages loaded within and without tore through the country at the rate of three or four miles an hour in "good going." De- spite the bitter cold of midwinter, they found it better traveling then than when summer brought a quiet green tunnel through the forest, for the wheels did not go down to the hubs in the mire. Weekly these lumbering vehicles came through at the start; then twice weekly and finally daily on some of the principal routes. Always they brought a breath from the world outside. To Cen- tral New York the stage brought new life, new blood, new con- tacts; and with it came new cheer, new hope, new ambitions to settlers tired from the strife against the elements in an untamed country they had come to conquer.
The first line of stages across Central New York was pro- vided in 1804 when the Legislature gave Jason Parker and Levi Stevens the exclusive right to run stages for seven years on the
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great turnpike from Utica to Canandaigua. Passengers in each wagon were limited by law to seven adults and the stages made two trips a week.
In 1809 Isaac Sherwood of Skaneateles became the partner of Jason Parker in the stage lines carrying the U. S. mail west- ward. In 1816 a line of stages left Canandaigua and Utica every week day to run through in thirty-six hours. The pro- prietors were Thomas Powell, Jason Parker, I. Whitmore, Aaron Thorpe and Isaac Sherwood & Co. They operated the Old Line Mail and held control of the stage business along the Genesee Turnpike until 1828, when the Pioneer Line began competition. The ensuing fight for patronage was bitter.
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