Landmarks of Monroe County, New York : containing followed by brief historical sketches of the towns of the county with biography and family history, Part 8

Author: Peck, William F. (William Farley), b. 1840; Raines, Thomas; Fairchild, Herman LeRoy
Publication date: 1895
Publisher: Boston : Boston History Co.
Number of Pages: 1160

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" As Colonel Fish, the miller, had not those accommodations which I expected, not even a stable, I was obliged to proceed to Mr. King's at the Genesee landing, where I got a good breakfast on wild pigeons, etc. Mr. King is the only respectable settler in this township, in which there are at present twelve families, four of them at the landing. Further improvements are much checked, in consequence of the titles to the lands here being in dispute. Mr. Phelps sold three thousand acres in this neighborhood to Mr. Granger for ten thousand dollars, secured by mortgage on the land. Granger died soon after his removal here, and, having sold part of the land, the residue would not clear the mortgage, which prevented his heirs administering the estate. Phelps foreclosed the mortgage and entered on possession, even on that part which had been sold and improved. Some settlers, in consequence, quitted their farms, others repaid the pur- chase money, and others are endeavoring to make some accommodation with Mr. Phelps."

The town meeting was imported here from New England. In 1789 all the eastern part of what is now Monroe county, except the present towns of Rush and Mendon, was organised into the district of North- field. In 1794 the same territory, without change of name, was made a town, and a school was established in the present Pittsford ; in 1796 the first town meeting was held there, at which Silas Nye was chosen supervisor and John Ray town clerk. The west side of the river was

LANDMARKS OF MONROE COUNTY.

not far behind in this matter. All the state of New York between the Genesee and Lake Erie was made, at an early day, into the town of Northampton-so called because six of the seven grantees of the Twenty-thousand-acre tract lived at Northampton, Mass., the seventh, Justin Ely, residing at Springfield, in that state-and on April 4, 1797, the first town meeting was held at the house of Peter Sheffer, at which Josiah Fish was elected supervisor and Eli Granger town clerk. Thus the nominal extent of the town was greater than that of many indepen- dent sovereignties in the old world, and the actual jurisdiction of its officers was by no means confined to the limited area of the Genesee valley, for the town records of 1802 show that one of the pathmasters was stationed at Buffalo, another at Niagara Falls, another at LeRoy. In that year the contraction of the territorial scope of the town began, when the legislature, by an act passed March 30, constituted the whole region Genesee county and divided Northampton into four towns, one of which, under the name of Batavia, took in the whole of the Hol- land Purchase. As different village communities sprang up in various sections other townships were stricken off from it, so that by 1808 it had shrunk within the limits of what is now Monroe county. The first voting west of the Genesee, at any general election, was in 1800, when Thomas Morris was elected member of Congress from this district, which then comprised almost half of the state; Lemuel Chipman and Nathaniel Norton were chosen members of Assembly for a district al- most equally large.

Education was not neglected in the new settlements, and the school- house came before the church. The first school was, unquestionably, located in the present village of Pittsford, the commercial center of Northfield, and it was taught by Mr. Burrows in 1794. A school- house was built at Irondequoit landing in 1802, and in 1804 little classes were taught by Miss Willey in the present town of Ogden, that being, probably, the first academical instruction on the west side. It is more difficult to determine the time of the erection of the first church, or the formation of the first congregation, in Monroe county. At Pittsford a missionary from Virginia preached at some time toward the close of the last century, and in 1799 a log house was built, which served as a town hall and a place of worship, the Rev. J. H. Hotchkin preaching there

SETTLEMENT OF THE WHITES.

for six Sundays two years later. In 1809 a Congregational church was organised there, under the Rev. Samuel Allen. On the west side there was a great deal of preaching by the circuit-riders of the Methodist denomination, George W. Willey's log house, in Ogden, being used generally for their ministrations, and one of them, the Rev. Ebenezer Everett, became the first settled minister in that neighborhood.

The roads in this part of the country were not made, in every case, at once, but often were merely Indian trails, widened in some places, leveled a little, here and there, in some spots and filled up in others. One of the very earliest, on the west side, went from King's Landing, ascending the bank and keeping near the edge till it got to Deep Hol- low, when it turned, wound around the bend of that creek and con- tinued in a southwesterly course to the Sheffer settlement. The next, perhaps, was from the landing a mile south of King's and just below the lower falls to the landing-place at the rapids. This was soon ex- tended on the north to the mouth of the river, making the present Lake avenue, and a little later on the south to Avon, for the purpose of in- tersecting the road from the east that crossed the river there on its way to Niagara. Possibly constructed before that road was one from Brad- dock's bay to the high falls, and at that point it met, though without any connecting bridge, the old road which, some time before 1798 (be- cause it is on a map of that date) came from Canandaigua.

It was by the first mentioned road, with its branches, that the first mail service was maintained in the county, when Dr. Levi Ward, in the early part of 1812, obtained a contract to transport the mails once a week from Caledonia to Charlotte, which had been settled a few years before that and received its name from the daughter of Robert Troup, the agent of the Pulteney estate. Later in the same year a route from Canandaigua was established, the mail being brought on horseback and a part of the time by a woman. The service was only once a week till 1815, when Samuel Hildreth, of Pittsford, began running a stage and carrying the mail twice a week. In the following year the four- horse coach carried the same mails every alternate secular day, and by 1821 there was a daily service, not only to Canandaigua on the east but to Lewiston on the west, beyond which post-riders were employed by the department. The first public conveyance in the county was drawn by

LANDMARKS OF MONROE COUNTY.

an ox-team, driven by Gideon Cobb, who, in 1814, opened this means of transportation for passengers and freight between Rochester and the mouth of the river. In 1813 the legislature granted $5,000 for bridg- ing the streams and clearing the path on the Ridge road between Roch- ester and Lewiston; the Buffalo road was surveyed and laid out as far as Batavia in 1816.

No one doubted in those early days that at some time in the future there would be some large city in this locality, but just where it would be was a matter of doubt, and the various experiments based on differ- ences of opinion were productive of disaster. At first the dominant belief was in favor of a spot on Irondequoit creek, three miles above the bay, where Judge Tryon, of Lebanon Springs, built in 1799 the first store in the county, goods being brought to it from Schenectady. A tavern was soon afterward opened by Asa Dayton, a tannery was erected, and a local court was established, independent of any higher judicial authority. Things went well for a few years, but the tide of shipping flowed to the river and away from Irondequoit bay, and by 1818, when the storehouse was demolished, " Tryon Town," for which so much was hoped, had become a thing of the past. Castleton, or " Castle Town," named after Isaac Castle, who had a tavern there, was the next venture. It was located on the west side of the river, near the rapids, at the foot of navigation on the upper Genesee and at the head of the portage from the navigable water below the lower falls. This advantageous position induced the belief that the future metropolis might have its center there, but the vision was dispelled when the village at the falls began to grow. Then came Hanford's Landing, mentioned above, and the arguments for its appreciation were the counterparts of those in favor of Castleton, while the reason for its swift decay was pre- cisely the same.

More durable than any of these, and succeeding all of them, was Carthage, on the east bank of the river, and its proximity to the lower falls, with the mill power thus granted, was supposed to settle its claims as against all competitors below, while its comparative nearness to the Ridge road, which had then become a highway of travel, was considered to give it pre-eminence over Rochester. To span the river at this point a remarkable wooden bridge was built in 1819, which excited justly the

SETTLEMENT OF THE WHITES.

admiration of all who saw it. It consisted of a single arch, the chord of which was over three hundred and fifty-two feet, the entire length of the bridge resting upon this being seven hundred and eighteen feet in length and thirty in width and the roadway being one hundred and ninety-six feet above the surface of the water. Its span was longer than that of any other bridge in the world at the time, and, though it was built in less than nine months, its strength had been so carefully tested that it was expected to last for ages, but there was fault in its construction, for in a year and three months it was destroyed by the springing upward of the arch. It was succeeded immediately by a bridge built on piers a little further down the river, and that by still another, which stood till 1835. In 1856 a suspension bridge, held by wire cables, was erected on the site of the first, but it fell in seven months after its completion, carried down by the weight of snow upon it. The present bridge will be described elsewhere. A year after the fall of the first bridge the establishment of the county court at Roches- ter settled the question of predominance, and Carthage was content to be absorbed within the larger community.

An incident occurred during the second war with Great Britain which produced much excitement at the time, and has been made the subject of numerous descriptions in prose and verse and dramatic representa- tions from that day to this. At different times during 1813 the British fleet on Lake Ontario, under the command of Sir James Yeo, had been cruising off the mouth of the river, and in June of that year a small party had landed from the vessels and had seized some provisions at Charlotte. No resistance was made and everything was done quietly, but some fear was created lest the next visit of the enemy should be of a more formal charaeter, and include a devastating march into the interior. A part of a militia regiment from the eastern district marched down there shortly after that, but it does not seem to have stayed long, and the alarm subsided. It was renewed, however, the next year, and the precautions for defense were taken none too soon.

The commander of the forces in this part of the state was General Peter B. Porter, and by his direction a company of dragoons was raised and placed under the command of Isaac W. Stone as captain. The enlist- ment was not large, for only fifty men were obtained in the villages of

LANDMARKS OF MONROE COUNTY.

Rochester and Brighton, but enthusiasm seems to have been considered a substitute for numerical strength, as Captain Stone was raised to the rank of major, Francis Brown and Elisha Ely being chosen captains. Marching to Charlotte they found already there a company from Gates and Greece, under Captain Rowe, while a part of a regiment under Colonel Atkinson came in shortly afterward. They had not long to wait, for within a day or two the British fleet appeared and cast anchor, a boat was sent ashore with a flag of truce, and a demand was made upon the volunteers for a surrender of all provisions and military stores, with the promise to spare the settlements from destruction if this were done. "Will you comply with this offer ?" said the British officer to Captain Brown, who had been deputed with a guard to receive the flag of truce. " Blood knee deep first," was the sanguinary reply.

That is the story as it is told by some writers, with ornamental par- ticulars, and of course it has always been generally accepted, as pleasing to local pride and taste. But other authorities say that it was Major Stone (not Captain Brown), who made the more moderate and sensible reply, that the public property was in the hands of those who would defend it. General Porter, who arrived on the following day and took command, made a similar response to a second demand. Convinced that nothing could be obtained without fighting for it, Admiral Yeo raised his anchors and sailed away, firing, before he left, a few heavy balls that fell harmless on the shore. Why he should have retired with- out making an invasion is quite uncertain, for he had with him a force that could have overpowered, easily, the volunteers who were opposed to it. He may have been deceived into thinking that the number of the defenders was greater than it really was, or he may have thought that the plunder was not worth fighting for. That was the last alarm of the war, in this region, and the next struggle of our people was of a more peaceful character,

FORMATION OF THE COUNTY.

CHAPTER X.

FORMATION OF THE COUNTY.

Original Counties of the State-The Evolution of Monroe-Struggle Over its Form- ation -- First Board of Supervisors -- Derivation of the Towns -- The First Court House -- Population of the County -- The County Treasurers -- Representatives in Congress -- State Senators -- Collectors of the Port.

New York had originally twelve counties, which were erected in 1683, to take the place of the three "ridings," as they were called. The counties were Albany, Cornwall, Dukes, Dutchess, Kings, New York, Orange, Queens, Richmond, Suffolk, Ulster and Westchester. Corn- wall, which embraced the present state of Maine east of the Kennebec, and Dukes, which consisted of the islands off the Massachusetts coast, were detached by King William's charter of 1691. Of the remaining ten. Albany was by far the largest, so large, in fact, that four additional counties were carved of it-Cumberland in 1766, Gloucester in 1770, Charlotte 1 and Tryon in 1772, making fourteen at the time of the Rev- olution. The severity againtst the patriots exercised by Governor Tryon, the last of the royalist rulers of the province, caused his name to be so detested that the title of the county which was called after him was changed to Montgomery in 1784. Beyond the western limit of this county lay the Indian territory, the debatable land, but, when the Hartford commissioners, at the close of 1786, gave the sovereignty over that region to New York, the western confine of Montgomery expanded to the Niagara river. In 1789 the whole of the original Phelps and Gorham Purchase-that is, all of the state west of the pre-emption line -was formed into Ontario county ; in 1796 the southern half of Ontario was made into Steuben, and in 1802 the county of Genesee was taken

1 These three names, as well as Tryon, have become extinct as county titles, the appellation of Charlotte being changed to Washington in 1784, and a portion of that county, together with all of Cumberland and Gloucester, going to form the state of Vermont in 1790.

LANDMARKS OF MONROE COUNTY

from those two, embracing all of the state west of the Genesee river and a line drawn south from the mouth of the Canaseraga creek.

As the settlements on the river and for a dozen miles on each side of it increased in population and in prosperity, it was felt to be a great hardship that the inhabitants should be without the facilities for trans- acting business that are provided by the presence of county officers and of permanent courts of justice. Canandaigua, on one side, and Batavia on the other, were each some twenty-five miles away from this imme- diate region, and in those days, when travel was slow at its best and precarious at its worst, the injustice of having to journey all that dis- tance to record a deed, to pay taxes or to attend court was manifest to those interested. By 1816 the desirability of the erection of a new county became so great that in Rochester, small as it was and not even a village then, a subscription of nearly seven thousand dollars was raised to secure that result, and a petition to that end was signed by all the prominent citizens, not only in Rochester but in the adjacent towns and villages. Sufficient opposition of a selfish character was evoked, how- ever, to nullify the efforts of Colonel Nathaniel Rochester and Dr. Mat- thew Brown, junior, who went down to Albany to lay the matter before the legislature in 1817. Little was done in the following year, but in the spring of 1819 another committee went to the capital, only to meet defeat again, the opposing political parties of Clintonians and Anti- Clintonians being so nearly balanced that each was fearful of giving some advantage to the other side by the addition of new members of the legislature.

Hope deferred only increased the determination to suceeed, and all through the rest of that year meetings were held to stimulate enthusi- asm and to gather facts that should be convincing to the law-makers, the interest culminating in a convention of delegates from all the towns concerned that met at Ensworth's tavern in Rochester on the 2d of December. A committee then appointed went to Albany in January, 1820, carrying a petition showing the shipments by the warehouses on the Genesee and stating that the proposed limits of the county em- braced between twenty-five and thirty thousand persons "and a very flourishing village of upward of fifteen hundred inhabitants doing much more business than any other in the state west of Utica." Another

FORMATION OF THE COUNTY.

failure ensued, politics again being largely answerable for the dismal result and the Assembly voting to defer the matter to the next legisla- ture. The members of that body were to choose the presidential electors, so the party leaders were unwilling to complicate matters by introducing factors on which they could not reckon with some degree of certainty.

The final attempt, for which the most careful preparations were made, succeeded. Nathaniel Rochester and Elisha B. Strong were the agents who went to Albany this time, and the petition was presented first to the Senate, which gave a unanimous vote in favor of the bill. In the Assembly the struggle was very bitter, for, though a majority of the members were in favor of it from the beginning, the principal oppo- nents of the measure resorted to every parliamentary trick and device to prevent the inevitable result. John C. Spencer, then one of the members from Ontario, and Samuel M. Hopkins, from Genesee, disre- garding every principle of right and anxious only to preserve the rela- tive importance of the two little villages of Canandaigua and Batavia, in which they lived, made themselves conspicuous by their frantic resistance. In spite of them the bill was passed by a vote of 73 to 27 and became a law on the 23d of February, 1821. The new county, which was named after James Monroe, then president of the United States, contained about six hundred and seventy five square miles or four hundred and thirty thousand acres. Its dimensions have not been changed since then.

When the first board of supervisors met on the 8th of May, 1821, there were fourteen towns in Monroe county, represented in the board as follows, Rochester being then and for thirteen years afterward in the two towns of Brighton and Gates: Brighton, Ezekiel Morse ; Clarkson, Aretas Haskell; Gates, Matthew Brown, junior ; Henrietta, Elijah Lit- tle ; Mendon, James Smith ; Ogden, James Baldwin ; Parma, Gibbons Jewett ; Penfield, Henry Fellows; Perinton, Reuben Willey ; Pittsford, Simon Stone, second; Riga, Joseph Sibley; Rush, Peter Price ; Swe- den, Silas Judson; Wheatland, John Garbutt. Five towns have beeu added since then, making nineteen in all.

It may be as well to give in this place a statement of the derivation of all the towns, which, it is believed, has never before been presented

LANDMARKS OF MONROE COUNTY.

in compact form. On the east side, as previously stated, Northfield embraced, at first, most of the territory, being organised as a town in 1794. Some time later-authorities differ as to whether it was 1798 or 1808-its name was changed to Boyle. Penfield was taken out of Boyle March 30, 1810, and Perinton May 26, 1812. The name of what was left of Boyle was changed to Smallwood April 12, 1813. Small- wood was divided into Brighton and Pittsford March 25, 1814. Henrietta was taken out of Pittsford March 27, 1818 ; Irondequoit out of Brighton March 27, 1839, and Webster out of Penfield February 6, 1840. Men- don was a part of Bloomfield, Ontario county, till May 26, 1812, and Rush was detached from Avon-then in that county, now in Living- ston-March 13, 1818.

On the west side Northampton, as we have seen, organised in 1797, was reduced to the limits of the present county by 1808, if not before. On April 8 of that year Parma and Riga were separated from it. The remainder continued to be called Northampton till June 10, 1813, when the name was changed to Gates, and Greece was taken out of Gates March 22, 1822. Ogden was taken out of Parma January 27, 1817, and Chili out of Riga February 22, 1822. Wheatland, under the name of Inverness, was taken from Caledonia, now in Livingston county, February 23, 1821, receiving its present name April 3 of that year. All of the above mentioned towns belonged in the true Phelps and Gorham Purchase as indicated by the lines of Augustus Porter in 1792. The land of the remaining towns was also included in the erro- neous survey of Hugh Maxwell in 1789, but it was afterward stricken out and sold to Robert Morris, when it became a part of the Triangle tract, in the Morris Reserve. Of these towns Sweden was taken from Murray, now in Orleans county, April 2, 1813, and Clarkson, also from Murray, April 2, 1819. Union was taken from Clarkson October II, 1852, and its name changed to Hamlin February 28, 1861.

For the county building for courts and offices a lot was given by Rochester, Fitzhugh and Carroll on the site of the present structure. The corner-stone was laid on the 4th of September, 1821, and in the following year the building was completed. Instead of the slope which is there now, the land was leveled back for about seventy-five feet from Buffalo street (now West Main) and there a terrace was made six feet

FORMATION OF THE COUNTY.

higher than the first level. On the line between the two platforms ran the front of the court house, which was built mainly of blue stone with red sandstone trimmings and was forty-four feet wide by fifty-four long, with two wing walls, nearly flush with the main part It had two parts, each with a projecting portico supported by four Ionic col- umns, the south part, which was upon the upper level and faced the First Presbyterian church, having two stories and a base, while the low- est story of the north part was a full basement. That part was event- ually used as the county jail, though at first criminals were confined in building on the west side of Hughes street (now North Fitzhugh), which was afterward used as a barracks.

As to the population, the United States census of 1790 gave that of Ontario county, which then embraced about half of the state, at nine hundred and sixty, of which perhaps twenty-five or thirty were within our limits. It would be impossible to make an exact statement of our proportion of subsequent enumerations till that of 1820, when it was 26,855. From that time it was as follows, the United States census being given for the decimal years, the state enumeration for the others: 1830-49,862 ; 1840-62,902 ; 1845 -- 70,899 ; 1850-87,650; 1855- 96,324 ; 1860-100,648; 1865-104,235 ; 1870-117,988; 1875-134,- 534; 1880-144,903. There was no state census in 1885, owing to a disa- greement between the legislature and the governor. The United States census of 1890 gave our population as 189,815, but the enumeration was manifestly defective, and a state census taken in 1892 showed that Monroe county had 200,059 inhabitants. There are probably ten thousand more than that now.

At the first meeting of the board of supervisors Samuel Melancton Smith was appointed county treasurer and was rechosen annually by that body for some time, it is not known how long, for the records of proceedings are lacking for some years and in some others no attention was paid to the matter. The office was filled, after Mr. Smith, by Frederick Whittlesey, William S. Whittlesey. William McKnight and William Kidd, the last of whom held it for at least six years previous to 1849, when Lewis Selye, the first to be elected by the people, entered upon it, after which the list is as follows : William H. Perkins, 1852; Lewis Selye again, 1855 ; Jason Baker, 1858; Samuel Schofield, 1864;

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Landmarks of Monroe County, New York : containing followed by brief historical sketches of the towns of the county with biography and family history, Part 8

Author: Peck, William F. (William Farley), b. 1840; Raines, Thomas; Fairchild, Herman LeRoy Publication date: 1895 Publisher: Boston : Boston History Co. Number of Pages: 1160

Author: Peck, William F. (William Farley), b. 1840; Raines, Thomas; Fairchild, Herman LeRoy
Publication date: 1895
Publisher: Boston : Boston History Co.
Number of Pages: 1160