USA > New York > The old New York frontier : its wars with Indians and Tories, its missionary schools, pioneers, and land titles, 1614-1800 > Part 22
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To Cherry Valley in the spring of 1783, returned Colonel Campbell with his family, to find the set- tlement in a state of utter desolation. He pro- ceeded to erect a log-hut, which, a few months later, sheltered distinguished visitors. In the summer of this year George Washington ascended the Mohawk and passed over to the head waters of the Susque- hanna. In a letter to the Marquis de Chastelleux, dated in October, he says he "traversed the coun- try to the eastern branch of the Susquehanna and viewed the Lake Otsego and the portage between that lake and the Mohawk River at Canajoharie." He was accompanied by Governor Clinton, General Hand and others, and spent a night under Colonel Campbell's roof. On the following morning, he went over to the lake. At the Campbell residence, Auchenbreck, visitors may see to-day the site of an apple-tree beneath which Washington drank tea. Governor Clinton remarked to Mrs. Campbell dur- ing the visit, that her sons would some day make fine soldiers; to which she answered that she " hoped her country never would need their ser- vices." " I hope so, too," said Washington, " for I have seen enough of war."
Washington was much impressed by the oppor- tunity which the valley gave for communication by water with regions scuth and west. The same con- clusions seem to have been reached by him that had been formed by Cadwallader Colden nearly fifty years before when Surveyor-General of the Prov-
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ince. Washington wrote in the letter, already quoted from :
Prompted by these actual observations, I could not help taking more comprehensive and extensive views of the vast inland navigation of these United States, from maps and the information of others, and could not but be struck with the immense diffusion and importance of it, and with the good- ness of that providence which has dealt her favors to us with so profuse a hand. Would to God we may have wis- dom enough to improve them.
To Middlefield soon returned former settlers, and to Springfield several of those who had seen their homes destroyed by Brant, while to Richfield came the Tunnicliffes, and to Harpersfield in 1783, or the next year, the Harpers-John, William, Alex- ander, and Joseph-all but the last named being now military officers, and the women of the family com- ing from Windsor, Conn.
Matthew Cully, in 1783, returned to his lands at the mouth of the Cherry Valley Creek. Below Portlandville in 1788 he built a grist-mill, and four years later his brother built a saw-mill. Following the Cullys in 1784 came Colonel John Moore, a family named Ford, and then Abraham and Jacob Beals.
A contemporary of Peter Collier was John Van Der Werker, who settled on the river near Oneonta Village and built a grist-mill. Van Der Werker had been in the valley with Henry Scramling before the war, and with Scramling returned as soon as the conflict ceased. With Scramling came his two brothers, David and George, and their brothers-in- law, David and John Young. During the war, the father of the Scramlings had been killed by the Ind-
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ians, and David and George had been in Canada as captives. David's wife had also been a prisoner. To Oneonta came Adam Quackenbush and Simeon Walling. Mr. Walling had gone down the valley in 1779 with General Clinton, and now took up lands at the old Indian village since known as the Slade farm. In Oneonta several others settled about 1786 or later, including Aaron Brink, Baltus Him- mel north of the village, and Abraham Houghtal- ing and Peter Schwartz in the north part of the town.
Still further down the river, in what is now Otego, the Ogdens arrived to take up their old lands. One of the family had been made a prisoner by Brant at the siege of Fort Schuyler, and carried to Canada. Traces of Teutonic influence may be found else- where on the Susquehanna. Perhaps one exists in Unadilla in the name of an old mill-race called the Binnekill .* But so much of it as ever existed in Unadilla was soon extinguished by stronger influ- ences from Connecticut. Teutonic folks and the Yankees did not live at peace in those pioneer times. Theirs was a state, sometimes of war, sometimes of armed neutrality ; but seldom one of peace.+
The Johnstons of Sidney, in May, 1784, set out to return from their temporary home in Florida, Montgomery County. In 1783 the father, the Rev. William Johnston, had delivered a sermon on the conclusion of the treaty of peace, and not long afterward breathed his last. Mr. Johnston, after the massacre of Cherry Valley, had gone to Sche- nectady, where he remained two years and then went
* From binnen, meaning inner, and kill, a creek.
t Out of this condition seems to have grown an early colloquial name for what is now the large and thriving town of Oneonta-the largest town in the valley above Binghamton-Klipnockie.
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to Florida. With the widow came back Witter and Hugh Johnston, and the daughters.
It is probable that others came with them, includ- ing David McMaster, whose life the Johnstons had saved at Cherry Valley. On the farm owned in late years by Mr. Deyo the Johnstons spent their first season, reluctant to occupy the lands across the river where it is probable that Indians were still living. On crossing to their old home the next season, they built a log-house on Brant Hill and lived there until they erected a frame dwelling.
On the Unadilla River settled Jonathan Spencer. He had served in the war, and came from Florida bringing with him a son named Orange, who was a surveyor. His household goods were transported by boat from the lake or from Cherry Valley to a farm about one mile below Rockdale. He had six other sons, and his descendants have continued to be numerous in the Susquehanna valley. His wife long survived him. Mr. Rogers well remembered sitting at her knee in boyhood to hear stirring tales of war in the Mohawk Valley. At Fort Plain she had herself stood guard in a block-house while the men were away on duty.
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II
Men Who Came from New England
1783-1800
O N the old frontier, as on those lands west- ward from the Fort Stanwix line now first open to settlement, a new race was about to plant homes. They were of English ancestry, but had had a far older racial experience in the new world than the Palatines and Scotch-Irish. They came from New England and by them, in the years immediately following the war, was poured forth a tide of migration that completely dominated for long years afterward Central and Western New York. They almost completely submerged the Palatines and Scotch-Irish. Leadership was, in fact, practi- cally wrested by them from those older pioneers.
Under the act of 1779, attainting of treason, and declaring forfeit the lands of settlers who had taken up arms against the colonies, vast tracts on the fron- tier came to state ownership-for example, almost the entire valley of the Charlotte and extensive hold- ings along the Mohawk. Out of these tracts and many others, the New Englanders made their pur- chases. One of the sufferers from that act was Col- onel John Butler, and another Colonel Guy John- son, who at German Flatts had held title to 2,000 acres ; but greater losers still were the children of
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Sir William Johnson, and notably Sir John, whose inherited domain was the largest ever held in the Province by any one man except his father and pos- sibly one or two of the Dutch patroons. These suf- ferers were mostly the Scotch Highlanders and Irish who had fled to Canada in 1775, the act of forfeiture affecting few, if any, of the Palatines or Scotch-Irish, who almost to a man had been patriots.
Many of the pioneers from New England had served in the Revolution. Some had gone up the Mohawk with Benedict Arnold to Fort Schuyler in 1777; others were at Cherry Valley with Colonel Alden ; others went down the Susquehanna with General Clinton, and thence to the fertile lands of the Genesee. Most notable of all the impressions they had carried home were impressions of the fer- tility of this New York soil and the sparsity of its population. This was strikingly true of the Gene- see country, where the ears of corn they had plucked from extensive fields cultivated by Indians awakened astonishment that still survived. Accordingly the history of the re-peopling of this frontier is mainly a history of the migration poured into it from Massachusetts and Connecticut, by a people whom Professor Lounsbury has eulogized as "born lev- ellers of the forest, the greatest wielders of the axe the world has ever known." They brought not only skill with the axe, but certain arts and refine- ments in domestic life before unknown to the fron- tier, and with those arts a spirit of enterprise and in- vention, with an initiatory energy which carried their own fortunes far and which, more perhaps than all other human forces, have made the central and west- ern parts of New York State what they now are.
Owing to delays in concluding the Treaty of
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MEN FROM NEW ENGLAND
Peace, the tide of immigration from New England did not set in until the spring and summer of 1784 .* Perhaps the earliest man who arrived in the Mo- hawk Valley from Connecticut was Hugh White, founder of Whitestown, which lies a few miles west of Utica. He came in the spring of 1784, as the leader of a conquering band that was soon to fol- low him. He ascended the Mohawk in a bateau, passing on the way many abandoned farms with buildings reduced to masses of charred logs and timbers, and with isolated chimneys standing black and grim against northern and southern skies. In the following year, men from Connecticut planted a settlement within gunshot of Fort Schuyler, and between that year and the beginning of the new century so great was the influx to the German Flatts neighborhood that 10,000 settlers are believed to have arrived in Herkimer County alone. Many of these were from Western Massachusetts, where they had found a new impulse to migration from Shays's Rebellion, in which they had taken part, and in the consequences of the suppression of which they had had an unhappy share.
But it was Connecticut that made the largest con- tribution to the settlement of the frontier. As Vir- ginia was the mother of Presidents, so has Connec- ticut been a mother of States. From the Hudson River westward to the Pacific through the line of Northern States, there is hardly a town, says Trum- bull, " in which persons may not be found whose ancestral roots dip back into Hartford County." In the New York Constitutional Convention of 1821,
* Cornwallis surrendered on October 19, 1781, but the treaty was not signed until September 3, 1783; nor was New York evacuated by the British until November 25, 1783. The treaty was finally ratified by Congress on June 4, 1784.
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a majority of the 127 members were either born in Connecticut or were sons of fathers who were born there. Calhoun declared that, at one time the mem- bers of Congress who were either born or reared in Connecticut lacked but five of a majority of that body. The single town of Litchfield nearly forty years ago had given birth to 13 United States Sen- ators, 22 members of Congress from New York, 15 State supreme court judges, 9 presidents of colleges, 18 other college professors, and II governors and lieutenant-governors of States.
Aside from the southern and southwestern parts of the State, about all the early settlements in Con- necticut sprang from the original river towns of Hartford, Windsor, and Wethersfield, which have been happily described as "strictly speaking, the original cradle of empire." Family names familiar in the Mohawk and Susquehanna valleys from the earliest times, may be found in the records of those Hartford county towns. All the New England States found representation, but the showing Con- necticut makes far surpasses that of the other States.
The beginning of New England interest in the Susquehanna we must assign to the coming of John Sergeant and Elihu Spencer, who, as missionaries, arrived before 1750. Mr. Spencer was a native of Windsor and Gideon Hawley, who followed him, was also from Connecticut. After the visits of these men, no one in New England had his eyes more intently fixed on this valley than Dr. Wheelock, of Lebanon, to whom the labors of both these men had become well known. Dr. Wheelock's Indian school departed from Lebanon in 1770, but it had been long enough settled there to arouse an interest in
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this valley in the minds of boys who as men became Susquehanna pioneers.
When John Harper, with Joseph Brant and other Indian boys, attended that school, Sluman Wattles, the Ouleout pioneer, was a lad living in Lebanon, eight or ten years of age, casting more than one eager glance at those dusky children of the western forest lands. In the same period, Daniel Bissell, the Una- dilla pioneer, was a boy in Lebanon, twelve or four- teen years of age. He likewise saw these Indian boys, and must have known them well. The same fact is true of Nathaniel Wattles, also from Lebanon, and of James Hughston, his cousin, both of whom came to the Ouleout. It will be remembered that, during the Revolution, the wives and daughters of the Harpers of Harpersfield returned to East Wind- sor-the place from which the Harpers emigrated before the Revolution-where they remained until the war closed, when they went again to the settle- ment on the Charlotte. When Sluman Wattles came to the Ouleout, he had an interest in lands which John and Alexander Harper had purchased of the Indians before the Revolution. It is interest- ing further to recall that Jonathan Edwards, largely through whose influence Gideon Hawley had been sent into the valley, was a native of Windsor. Into this same part of Connecticut, early in the eigh- teenth century before the settlement of Cherry Val- ley, had come many Scotch-Irish.
West of the Fort Stanwix line the Susquehanna Valley was invaded by many men from Vermont who were among the " sufferers " in that State-men whose titles to real estate had been lost in the settle- ment of the disputed New Hampshire Grants, and to whom as compensation were given lands in the
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Susquehanna Valley which New York had purchased from the Oneidas. One payment made to Oneidas and Tuscaroras was $11,500, and another to Onei- das was $5,500, with an annuity of $600 forever. Israel Smith, who settled in Sidney in 1790 on lands west of the Johnston farm, came from Brat- tleboro and received from the State 640 acres. An- other "sufferer " who settled on a large tract in Bainbridge was Colonel Timothy Church. He had had correspondence with Governor Clinton during the Revolution on public affairs, and had taken part in the battle of Bennington. His ancestral line
ran back to Hartford County. Ransom Hunt, of Otego, was also from Vermont, although he did not acquire title from the State, his tract comprising 1,800 acres. George Mumford, who came to the mouth of Cherry Valley Creek with his wife, four sons and five daughters, was from Bennington.
But the main fact is that the upper Susquehanna lands were more indebted to Connecticut than to any other part of the country. From Hebron, a town near Lebanon, men came to Franklin; to Unadilla from Hebron the four brothers Cone, and long after them their nephew, Salmon G. Cone ; and to Delhi a man who was to reach much eminence in the State, Erastus Root. To Laurens from Wind- sor, in 1790, came Jacob Butts; to Unadilla from North Bolton Samuel Rogers and his wife, natives of East Windsor ; to Cherry Valley from Chatham, Dr. Joseph White; to Sidney from Hartford County, Levi Baxter ; to Sidney from Ashford, in 1798, John Avery; to Unadilla from Danbury, William Wilmot ; to Morris, in 1792, from Salis- bury, Jonathan Moore ; to Unadilla from Norwalk, Samuel Betts ; to a farm through which runs the
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MEN FROM NEW ENGLAND
line between Unadilla and Butternuts, in 1810, from Fairfield County, the father of the late Judge Heze- kiah Sturges ; to Unadilla from New Milford, in 1800, Isaac Hayes and Curtis Noble; to Otego from Roxbury, in 1809, David Weller.
From various parts of Connecticut came others- Timothy Beach to the Ouleout, in 1784; Amos Preston and Nathan Newell to Laurens, in 1789; Jared Goodyear to Milford; William Rose to Binghamton, in 1787; Peter Bradley and Gould Bacon to Sidney ; Captain Abel de Forest to Ed- meston, in 1795, and many settlers to Cooperstown before the century closed. The reader who bears in mind how the most of the Connecticut towns here named were settled from the original river towns, will see the intimate relation of this move- ment of pioneers to Otsego County.
A reminder of this debt that will last longer than the names of individuals is found in the names of Otsego towns. Plainfield is a town in Windham County ; Middlefield a town in Middlesex County, while New London County has a town named Lis- bon and one named Exeter. West of the Unadilla River the fact is again to be observed in New Ber- lin, named from Berlin in Hartford County, and in Guilford and Norwich, ancient and well-known Con- necticut names. More obvious still is the name of Windsor, which supplanted the historic name of Oghwaga *- and so might the list be extended until it became wearisome.
To Richfield in 1790 came the father of Levi Beardsley, with his wife, two brothers, and several children, including Levi, who was then four years
* Windsor was settled almost entirely from New England. In 1791 Lincklaen found there thirty families embracing about 300 souls.
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old. Mr. Beardsley had purchased a tract of land of Mr. Banyar for $1.25 per acre, and came from Rensselaer County by the Mohawk Valley and the Continental road. The family settled temporarily on the Herkimer farm, at the foot of Schuyler's Lake, where were still standing "two small log- houses, more properly huts." This farm was re- tained for two years " for the common benefit of the colony to furnish hay and grain till we could clear the land and raise crops in Richfield."
Many persons followed this family into the coun- try, looking for lands, and the Beardsley homes be- came " places of rendezvous for all comers." They generally " slept on the floor before the fire on straw beds, for we had scarcely a spare one of other de- scription at that time." The Beardsleys finally set- tled on the purchase four miles west of Richfield Springs, where the Tunnicliffe family had now a second time taken up a home. One of the Tunni- cliffes built a saw-mill in 1791, and in 1792 a grist- mill; Judge Jedediah Peck being the millwright, an occupation to which he added those of preacher and politician.
Meanwhile to Springfield, from the East, came Captain Samuel Crafts, and, about 1795, Matthew Halsey, who had taken part in the battle of Long Island. He was from Bridgehampton, Long Island, where his family had been settled for 150 years. In the town of Maryland settled Amos Spencer, who with his father had served in the Ninth New York militia regiment, recruited from Albany County. The family seems to have come originally from Connecticut, but afterward lived in Hillsdale, Mass. Descendants settled on the Unadilla River near Sidney, and later went to Unadilla Village.
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MEN FROM NEW ENGLAND
On the Susquehanna, just east of the mouth of the Unadilla, as early as 1787 and probably before that year, land had been occupied by David Baits on what was long known as the Bundy farm. It is recorded of David Baits, that in the year 1787, when the settlement was threatened with famine, he brought a boat-load of flour up the river from North- ampton, Pa. He had served in the war and bore the title of captain. He often held office in the town where he lived.
Gould Bacon settled on Stowell's Island below Afton. His name appears on the official list of those to whom New York State in 1788 gave com- pensation for losses in the Vermont disputes .* Stowell's Island had at least one other settler in 1786. This was Elnathan Bush, who descended the Susquehanna River in a canoe from Cooperstown. Mr. Bush afterward lived in Bainbridge. On the occasion of a freshet, in or about 1786, Mr. Bacon's farm was overflown and he retreated to the top of a tree. It was two or three days before the water re- ceded. He had taken with him into the tree a satchel filled with provisions, but through accident he lost hold of his source of supplies and they went the way of all other things, down the stream. In the hunger that ensued, he subsisted on a raw pump- kin, caught from the flood as it passed along his way. Mr. Bacon afterward came to the Unadilla River, and lived on land since known as the Miller farm. He died a bachelor and his tombstone records that,
He toiled for heirs he knew not whom
And straight was seen no more.
* Another form of compensation was actual money. Out of a fund of $30,000 Gouldsborough Banyar received $7 212.
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The rapidity with which lands on the Susque- hanna were thus occupied is a striking illustration of the volume of immigration which set in all over the frontier and west of it as soon as the war closed. By 1820 Otsego County had a population of 44,800, nearly as large a population as it has ever had since.
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III
Pioneers by Way of Wattles's Ferry
W HEN in the summer of 1784, Tim- othy Beach reached the Scotch Settlement at the mouth of the Ouleout he found five families living within that neighborhood. One was the family of Nathaniel Wattles, and another was named Herrick. The probability is that Nathaniel and Sluman Wattles were the first to start that stream of Connecticut migration which was to pour its tide across the hills from the Hudson at Catskill to the Susquehanna at Wattles's Ferry for the next generation. It was from Nathaniel, however, that this ferry got its name. He lived there for several years, and became an important factor in the settlement of all the country round about. He opened roads and established a hotel, and in 1797 was elected a member of the Assembly, but soon after reaching Albany he suddenly died. James Bacon of Franklin, who preached his funeral sermon eight days later, said of his pioneer work-
He underwent many hardships in making roads and other improvements for the benefit of a new country, and broke the way for a large settlement. He came with a small in- terest in this country, and by honest industry accumulated a good interest and brought up, so far, nine children, the oldest of which is twenty-four and the youngest about 2 years. We cannot ascertain the advantages this benevolent man was to this western country in clearing roads and by his industry bringing many into these parts and feeding the poor.
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Sluman Wattles, afterward county judge, settled on the Ouleout in the town of Franklin .* His im- mediate purpose in coming into the valley in 1784, was to survey and lay out in lots a large tract of land that extended from a line near the Susquehanna -- probably the Wallace Patent line-southward to the Delaware. It was known as the Livingston patent. He had some interest in the tract at that time, and afterward became part owner of it. It was a portion of a tract which Colonel John and Captain Alexander Harper had purchased of the Indians before the war, and was afterward owned by a company including Peter Van Brugh Livings- ton, and one or both of the Harpers.
Judge Wattles and the Harpers had been ac- quainted in Connecticut, Windsor and Lebanon being neighboring towns. Each was of Scotch- Irish descent. As Harper had lived with men of that stock in Cherry Valley, so had Mr. Wattles, before coming to the Ouleout, lived with Scotch- Irish at a settlement near Bloomville on the Dela- ware. Mr. Wattles's wife was Scotch and a mem- ber of his family was married to a man in Cherry
Valley. While it therefore is true that the com- ing of these men marked the beginning of the Con- necticut stream to Wattles's Ferry, their coming was an outcome of influences exerted once more by that Scotch-Irish people who first planted settlements in the Susquehanna Valley.
While engaged in making the survey, Mr. Wat- tles selected a site for his home in Franklin. He
* Franklin was named after William Franklin, the natural son of Ben- jamin Franklin, who owned land in what is now that town. He was one of the colonial governors of New Jersey, and his father's only son. He became a Tory in the Revolution and thus embittered the old age of his father.
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THE SUSQUEHANNA AT UNADILLA VILLAGE (Site of Wattles's Ferry in the middle distance. )
WATTLES'S FERRY
erected a log house with an elm-bark roof, and brought his family from Bloomville in 1785. Be- sides his wife he had three children, his brother John carrying one of the children in his arms. The house- hold goods were transported on the backs of horses, and at night they camped out in the open woods, reaching the Ouleout on the following day.
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