USA > New York > Tompkins County > Dryden > The centennial history of the town of Dryden. 1797-1897 > Part 2
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"To facilitate the settlement of this section of the country, a road was projected connecting Oxford with the Cayuga Lake, to pass through this town [Virgil.] Joseph Chaplin, the first inhabitant, was intrusted with this work. The instrument by which he was author- ized to engage in it was authenticated on the fifth of May, 1792. He spent that season in exploring and surveying the route, the length of which is about sixty miles. He came to Lot No. 50 [of Virgil], which he owned and afterwards settled, erected a house and prosecuted his work, having a woman to keep the house and cook for workmen. The work of cutting and clearing the road was done in 1793-4; so that he moved his family from Oxford over it in the winter of 1794-5, employ- ing six or seven sleighs freighted with family, furniture, provisions, etc."
But it seems that when he had completed the road as far as Virgil he was persuaded by some settlers from Kidder's Ferry (near Ludlow- ville) to continue the road from Virgil through to that point, as it then contained more inhabitants than Ithaca. Having done so he present- ed his bill to the Legislature, which rejected it on the ground that he had not complied with the terms of his contract, which required the road to be built to Ithaca. He then returned and in the year 1795 ent the road through from Virgil to Ithaca known as the "Bridle Road," and thus became entitled to his pay, the first road opened by him being now known as the old State Road, extending between the towns of Dryden and Groton and through Lansing to the Lake.
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HISTORY OF DRYDEN.
The foregoing is the version of this matter which has appeared in the local histories previously published, but it is now claimed, with better reason as it seems to us and more consistently with the con- ditions which are known to have then existed, that the Bridle Road was the trial route first partly opened by Chaplin, and which the state government refused to accept because it did not terminate as required by the contract at a point on Cayuga Lake, the early Ithaca settle- inent being at least a mile from its nearest shore; and that he then fulfilled the letter of his contract by afterwards opening the old State Road to Kidder's Ferry, leaving the first route only a bridle path which Capt. Robertson, as we shall see hereafter, was obliged to widen in order to reach with ox teams by way of Ithaca his site on Lot 53 of Dryden.
We are told that in this work of cutting these new roads through the wilderness, Mr. Chaplin was assisted by his step-son, then a young man, Gideon Messenger by name, who is the ancestor of the present Messenger family of Dryden and the uncle of H. J. Mes- senger, of Cortland. From Bouton's History we learn that this same Gideon Messenger was the first town clerk of Virgil in 1795, after- wards its supervisor, and that he passed over the State Road from State Bridge, in the eastern part of Virgil, to Cayuga Lake, before there was a single habitation in the whole distance. (Bouton's Sup- plement, page 39.)
CHAPTER IV.
THE FIRST SETTLEMENT.
It seems to be conceded that the first actual settler in the town of Dryden was Amos Sweet. Our information upon this subject is de- rived almost entirely from the " Old Man in the Clouds, " the fictitious name of the author of a series of articles published in "Rumsey's Companion, " the first newspaper published at Dryden, in the years 1856 and 1857, and which were, in fact, compiled by the editor from the information afforded by old men, then living, but since dead, and in that way preserved. We quote from the first number as follows :
" It was in the spring of 1797, that a man by the name of Amos Sweet c me from the East somewhere, and, after ascertaining the location of his lot, put up a log house about ten feet square, just back of where now resides Freeman Stebbins [now John Munsey] in this village, where himself, his wife, two children, his mother and brother all lived.
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THE FIRST SETTLEMENT.
This would seem to be a very small and rude habitation to the people of our present gay and beautiful village. It was built of logs about a foot thick ; these were halved together at the ends and the cracks chinked in with split sticks and mud. The house was eight logs high, covered with bark from the elm and basswood. Through one corner an opening was left for the smoke to pass through, there being no chimney or chamber floor. The fire-place was composed of three hardhead stones turned up against the logs for the back, and three or four others of the same stamp formed the hearth, these being laid upon the split logs which formed the floor. Inasmuch as there was no sash or glass in those days in this vicinity, their only window con- sisted of an opening about eighteen inches square cut through the logs, and this, to keep out the inclement weather, was covered with brown paper, greased over to admit the light. The door was also in keeping with the rest of the house, being composed of slabs split from the pine and hewn off as smooth as might be with the common axe. The hinges were of wood and fastened across the door with pins of the same material, serving the double purpose of cleet and hinge. In this house, thus built without nails and with benches fastened to the sides of the house for chairs. eating from wooden trenchers and slab tables much after the fashion of the door, did this little family of pioneers live. "
But the title to the lot upon which Mr. Sweet built seems to have been defective and one Nathaniel Shelden appears to have had the real ownership, for in 1801, he compelled Mr. Sweet and his family to leave it. Elsewhere Mr. Sweet is spoken of as a " squatter, " or one having no title, and Mr. Shelden is represented as using "fraudulent means " to dispossess him, but charity for both of these early pioneers compels us to believe that the difficulty grew out of the great uncer- tainty and confusion which then existed as to the titles derived from the old soldiers of the Revolution, some of whom had undertaken to sell the same lands several times over to different parties. At any rate Sweet was compelled to leave his pioneer home in 1801, and soon after, as the account says, "he sickened and died, and his remains, together with those of his mother and two children, " were buried directly across the road from the Dryden Springs Sanitarium. The house remained for some time after, for we are told that it was used as the first school house for the children of the early settlers in the year 1804.
The new log cabin constructed during the summer of 1897 on the grounds of the Dryden Agricultural Society was built of green
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HISTORY OF DRYDEN.
chestnut logs and modeled after this first pioneer house in Dryden. It is intended to be preserved and it is hoped it will long remain as a relic of that kind of architecture, once so prevalent here, where now only the decaying remains of two or three log houses can be found in the whole township.
The fact that we now find no signs of the graves where Mr. Sweet and his family are said to have been buried, strikes us at first as singular, but a little reflection and an examination of the customs of the early settlers in that regard, supplies us with the explanation. The pioneers had too much to do to spend much time or effort in the burial of their dead and were too poor to go to much expense in such matters. Mr. Bouton, in his History of Virgil, says that the first grave- stone in that town was erected in 1823, although deaths had occurred there from its earliest settlement. He also explains their method of selecting places for the burial of their dead, which seems to us strange. We quote from pages 13 and 14 of the Supplement, where he speaks of a stranger who lost his way and perished in the woods, and mentions that he was buried near where he was found.
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THE FIRST RESIDENT FREEHOLDER.
"Only a few families at this time (1798) resided in the town, which extended over ten miles of territory. There was no public burying ground and it was not possible to know where it would be located.
* * Families buried their dead on their own premises, and others, strangers and transient persons, were permitted to be laid in these family grounds. Ultimately it came to pass that one or more of these grounds came to be considered publie, in a subordinate sense. There were a large number of them which continued in use after the public ground was opened."
Grave-stones as seen in old cemeteries, where any existed at all, were then of the simplest character, many being made of native flag-stones, and the coffin of the pioneer was a coarse wooden box manufactured by the local undertaker, fifteen dollars paying for the very best.
When we come to think of it, a cemetery would not be much of an institution in an early settlement in the woods, especially where the living inhabitants had all they could do to keep soul and body to- gether. Far different is it in a community of a century's growth, where now our cemetery tombstones, many of them imported from Italy and Scotland, represent the expenditure of very many thousands of dollars, and the earth beneath them already envelops the forms of the ever-increasing, yet silent, majority.
CHAPTER V.
THE FIRST RESIDENT FREEHOLDER.
While Amos Sweet was the first man to take up his residence in Dryden, he seems never to have held permanent title to any of its real estate, and, so far as we can learn, he left no relatives or descendants from whom any of the present inhabitants can trace their ancestry. We know not whence he came, except from the "Old Man in the Clouds," who says that he came from " the East somewhere," and our short story of his appearance and residence here is an unsatisfactory aud a tragic one. We have already given all the facts which we can learn of him except the statement derived from an old obituary notice of Seth Stevens, a relative of the early Rummer family in Dryden, which relates that Stevens, while probably residing in Virgil, helped to build the first log house in Dryden, presumably the Amos Sweet house. We have accidentally come across his signature as a witness to an old Dryden deed, which shows that he could write, an accom- plishment at that time none too common.
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HISTORY OF DRYDEN.
The next settlement in the township was made by a man whose life had a permanent influence upon the town, and who well-earned the title which was afterward given him of being the "Father of the Town," having been its first resident freeholder and afterward its first super- visor.
In the year 1797 there lived near Schuylerville, Saratoga county, N. Y., George Robertson, a young carpenter and millwright, who by patient industry had acquired a home and a little property, but whose ambition prompted him to become a pioneer in the undeveloped wil- derness of the Military Tract. His father, Robert Robertson, who had recently died, had in 1769 emigrated with his family, consisting of his wife, Josephine, and two small children, young George and his older sister, Nancy (Mccutcheon), from near Glasgow, Scotland, to Saratoga county, where, upon the breaking out of the Revolu- tion, the father enlisted and gallantly served throughout the struggle for independence. The old flint-lock musket which he carried in the army of Washington under the command of General Philip Schuyler, by and after whom one of his sons was named, is still kept as a treas- ure in the family and was on exhibition at Dryden's Centennial Cele- bration.
Young George Robertson, in 1797, had an opportunity of purchasing Lot No. 53, of Dryden, from a neighbor, Benoni Ballard, the soldier to whom it was allotted, and in the autumn of that year he made a prospecting tour on foot from Saratoga county to Dryden, reaching Lot 53 by way of the Mohawk Valley, Auburn, Cayuga Lake and Itha- ca, returning by way of the Bridle Road through the present site of Dryden village, to Oxford, and thence by way of Utica to his home. Upon this preliminary visit the only habitation which he found in Dryden was that of Amos Sweet, described in the last chapter, where, as he related, there was a clearing of about half an acre which he called a " turnip patch. "
Being pleased with the new country and possessed of a courage which, we fear, would be lacking in these days of luxury and refine- ment, Robertson sold his home and with the proceeds completed the purchase of Lot No. 53 for eight hundred and fifty dollars. He left his wife and two children for the time being and set out in February, 1798, with a sleigh loaded with such implements and provisions as could be carried, drawn by two yoke of oxen, for the long journey. He was accompanied by at least two young men, including his younger brother, Philip S. Robertson, and Jared Benjamin.
Of Philip S. Robertson we shall have occasion to say more here-
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THE FIRST RESIDENT FREEHOLDER.
after as being one of the pioneers of the northwest section of the town, but of Jared Benjamin we shall say here, lest it be omitted hereafter, that he was then a lad sixteen years of age who had been apprenticed to George Robertson to learn the carpenter's trade and who was in- duced to accompany him into the wilderness by the promise of eighty acres of land, and who, during the journey and for the first year of the settlement, served as the housekeeper and cook of the party. He af- terwards served as a soldier from Tompkins county in the War of 1812, after which he journeyed and settled further west, but his son, Charles Benjamin, returned to Dryden and at one time occupied and enlarged the Dryden village tannery and afterwards built a tannery at Harford, one of the old buildings still standing there unoccupied near the railroad station; and his son is Chas. M. Benjamin, now one of the proprietors of the Ithaca Journal. Another of the descendants of this pioneer lad, Jared Benjamin, is Mrs. D. B. Card, of Dryden.
To return to our narrative, it is claimed by some that Walter Yeo- mans, and by others that Moses Snyder also accompanied George Robertson on this pioneer journey, but neither are mentioned in the first account, published forty years ago when the facts were more at- tainable, and either may have come a year or two later, although it is certain that both were early pioneers of Dryden from Saratoga county.
The pioneer party were three weeks on the journey, coming by way of the Mohawk Valley, Utica, Hardenburg's Corners (now Auburn), reaching Ithaca (then called " Markle's Flats,") where there were then three log houses, March 1, 1798. It took the whole of the next day to widen the Bridle Road through from Ithaca to Lot 53, upon which Mott J. Robertson, the youngest son of Captain George Robertson, now resides, so as to admit of the progress of the team and baggage. They arrived towards evening on March 2nd and made hasty prep- arations to spend their first night on the site of their new home. In later years Captain Robertson pointed out to his sons the very spot, now located between the highway and railroad track near the west line of Lot 53, where, on that March evening, on split basswood logs, they ate their first meal and stretched themselves out to spend the night, having provided the oxen with the tops of the basswood trees for a supper of browse. A fall of two inches of snow during the night caused Philip S. to get up and stretch over them a blanket on stakes, to protect them from the storm. The next morning the men set to work to build a log house and make a clearing so as to secure a crop of grain that season. The trees were chopped down, girdled and burned, the seed was dragged in with the aid of a tree top as a har-
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HISTORY OF DRYDEN.
row, and the rich, mellow, new ground yielded abundant harvests in that and the succeeding years. Thus the energy and prudence of young George Robertson enabled him to harvest the first considerable crops in the town, and when the subsequent settlers came to him to obtain seed grain, it is said that he supplied those who had no present means of paying for it, but refused those who had money which would enable them to get it elsewhere, lest he should not have enough to supply all of his poorer neighbors. Whether such a policy of supply- ing only those who had no money could be successfully carried out in these times, may be seriously questioned, but it served to exhibit the unselfish character of Capt. Robertson and entitled him to the grati- tude of his fellow pioneers, as well as to that of their posterity. His wife and children came on, the next season (1799), in care of her broth- er, Wm. Smith, of Saratoga, who, after viewing the uninviting pros- pect of the single log house, surrounded for a short distance with the clearing full of charred stumps and then by the dense wilderness, advised his sister to return with him to his home in Saratoga, but she bravely resolved with her husband to share the hardships and reap the rewards afforded to pioneers in a new country. Their son, Robert R., whose birthday was April 7, 1800, was for a long time supposed to have been the first white child born in the town of Dryden, but we now learn upon reliable authority that Melinda, the daughter of David Foote and the mother of Mrs. Darius Givens, now residing in Dryden village, was born at Willow Glen, on February 21, 1800, and was therefore the first native-born child, while Robert R. was the first native-born male citizen of the town.
The heroic and unselfish conduct of Captain Robertson, and his in- dustrious and prudent life, together with abilities of no common or- der, gave him prominence in our early history and when the town came to be organized as a separate political township in 1803, he was made its first supervisor. Although not the first settler, he was the first resident freeholder of the town, raised the first crop of any ac- count, and, his house being a hospitable refuge for the early settlers perhaps less provident than he had been, he is credited with being the first innkeeper of the town in 1801. These facts well entitled him to be regarded, as he was by the early settlers, the "Father of the Town of Dryden." He was afterward a captain of the State militia and the field opposite the present residence of his son, Mott J. Rob- ertson, upon which this log house was built in 1798, was the training ground for the early yeomanry of Dryden, who were here required to be annually drilled in military tactics. Captain Robertson died April
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SETTLEMENTS OF 1798 AND 1799.
4, 1844, having raised a family of thirteen children, many of whom have held positions of honor and trust in this and other states, at least two of his sons having served as sheriff's of the county of Tomp- kins. His oldest child, Nancy, married Thomas Bishop and she and her oldest brother, Thomas, lived and died in the town of Lansing. Robert died in Chautauqua county, N. Y. Phoebe became the wife of Peter V. Snyder, and Corilla the wife of Wm. Brown, who, with her brothers, John, Theodore, Cyrus and Hiram D., made their home in Albion, Mich. Pauline became the wife of Benjamin F. King, at Par- ma, Mich., and Philip died in Crawford county, Pa. Smith, of whom we shall say more hereafter, resides at Eau Claire, Wis., and Mott J., the only son now residing here, is one of the present Centennial Com- mittee of the town of Dryden.
CHAPTER VI.
OTHER SETTLEMENTS OF 1798 AND 1799.
In the fall of 1798, three families settled at Willow Glen. They con- sisted of Ezekiel Sanford, his wife and one son, David Foote, his wife and four daughters, and Ebenezer Clauson, his wife, one son and two daughters, making m all a party of fourteen persons, who came to Dryden over the new State Road, from the Chenango river, with a sin- gle team of oxen drawing a heavy ox sled of the olden times, which was made with wooden shoes and a heavy split pole. This conveyance carried all of the household furniture of the three families, which we in- fer from that fact could not then have been very rich in housekeeping materials. Sanford located opposite the residence of the late Elias W. Cady, Clauson on the premises now owned and occupied by Moses Rowland. while Foote built his log hut between the two. They are said to have passed a very " comfortable winter," subsisting largely upon the abundant game found in the new country, the oxen being supplied with plenty of browse from the trees. That they were able to live through the winter at all in this way is a mystery to us of the present age, who are supplied with so many of the comforts and lux- uries of life. It seemed to the writer at first impossible that cattle could be wintered on " browse " without hay or grain, but he is as- sured by old men that such is not the case, and that it was not un- common in old times when fodder was scarce to fell trees in the woods, especially maple and basswood, so that cattle could have access to the tops for their subsistence. We are also reminded that wild deer
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HISTORY OF DRYDEN.
wintered in the woods in this locality, when the snow was deep, with- out this assistance of the woodman. These new settlers did survive and seem to have prospered in their new homes, and as proof of these facts we know that our present popular highway commissioner, San- ford E. Smiley, is one of a large number of direct descendants of that same pioneer, Ezekiel Sanford, one of the party who wintered their oxen on browse and themselves on the "abundant game found in the new country " in the winter of the year 1798-9. Like Amos Sweet, who had preceded them one year, they seem to have had, when they came, no permanent title to the land upon which they located, but came empty handed to grow up with the new country as they did, having become the ancestors of many of its now prosperous inhabit- ants.
The writer was at first unable to learn whether any of these three pioneers except Sanford left descendants now residing in the town- ship, and was surprised to learn that both Mrs. Darius Givens and Mrs. Robert Sager are grandchildren of that same David Foote. Clau- son, with all his family, is believed to have moved further west, one of his daughters having married a brother of Wyatt Allen, formerly of Dryden.
Others who settled in 1798, coming here from Lansing, where they had sojourned a short time, were Daniel White and his brother-in-law, Samuel Knapp, a soldier of the Revolution, who was engaged in the battles of Trenton, Princeton, Stony Point, Brandywine and Mon- mouth. Knapp took up his location on Lot No. 14, where he raised a large family and died July 1, 1847, aged 91 years. His remains are buried in the Peruville cemetery. Mr. White gave his attention to the construction of the first grist-mill of the town, which stood about forty rods west of the present grist-mill in Freeville, just north-west of where the highway now crosses Fall Creek. He procured a stone which he found on the Thompson (now Skillings) farm, split it and himself dressed out and took to the mill the first millstones, which answered the purpose and were in constant use until the mill was re- constructed in 1818. His mill was completed in 1802, prior to which time the pioneer was obliged to take his grist to Ludlow's Mill (now Ludlowville) to be ground, or pound it into meal in the hollow of a large stump, as was sometimes done by hand. During the past summer parts of this boulder out of which Mr. White worked these first millstones, were brought to the grounds of the Dryden Agricul- tural Society by Samuel Skillings, a descendant of Samuel Knapp, and left near the new log cabin, where they will remain as a relic and re-
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SETTLEMENTS OF 1798 AND 1799.
minder of the use which Mr. White made in 1802 of a part of this rock. Besides being a practical miller, Mr. White was an ordained deacon of the M. E. church and preached on the Cayuga circuit in 1802, and for several years afterwards. He came to Lansing from Pennsylvania, but was originally from Roxbury, Mass., and died at the age of seventy-eight, leaving a family of fourteen children, of whom the only present survivors are Daniel M. White, of Dryden, secretary of the present Centennial Committee, Mrs. Anna Montfort, of Peru- ville, and Mrs. George F. A. Baker, of West Dryden. Many of his grandchildren and great-grandchildren are now living.
Aaron Lacy, father of the late John R. Lacy, came from New Jersey and settled at Willow Glen early in the year 1799, on the corner since occupied by the Stickles family.
Zephaniah Brown came from Saratoga and settled on Lot 71, ad- joining the town of Ithaca, in the year 1799, cutting the first road from that portion of the town to Ithaca, which was extended two years later by Peleg Ellis to the Ellis Hollow neighborhood. Brown seems to have been the first pioneer in that part of the town and resided for a number of years on the farm since occupied by Chauncey L. Scott. But in about 1830 he and his family moved to Michigan, leaving, so far as we can learn, no descendants in the town.
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