USA > New York > The old New York frontier : its wars with Indians and Tories, its missionary schools, pioneers, and land titles, 1614-1800 > Part 25
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* State Land Papers. t Sluman Wattles's Account Book.
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of Oneonta, emigrated to the upper Ouleout from Colchester, Conn., with his seven brothers. They drove cattle and sheep ahead of them, and consumed eight days in making the journey from the Hudson River. Solomon Martin went over the road in the same year, using Sluman Wattles's oxen, for which he was charged £1, 17s. He went to Catskill, and was gone fifteen days. This road was only twenty- five feet wide. In 1792 a regular weekly mail-route was established over it.
These are among the many roads which were opened in the neighborhood before the century closed-before the Catskill Turnpike, as a turnpike, came into existence. Nearly every part of the town of Unadilla, then embracing one-third of Otsego County, had been made accessible before the year 1800. The pioneers had taken up lands all through the hill country. But the needs of the settlers had not been fully met. All over the State prevailed similar conditions. The demands that poured in upon State and town authorities for road improve- ments became far in excess of what could be satis- fied. Everywhere fertile lands had been cleared and sown to grain, but the crops were so enormous that they could neither be consumed at home nor transported to market elsewhere. Professor McMas- ter says that "the heaviest taxes that could have been laid would not have sufficed to cut out half the roads or build half the bridges" that commerce required.
Out of this condition grew the policy of granting charters to turnpike companies, formed by well-to-do land-owners, who undertook to build roads and maintain them in proper condition for the privilege of imposing tolls. Men owning land and possessed
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of ready money, were everywhere eager to invest in these enterprises. They not only saw the promise of dividends, but ready sales for their lands. At one time an amount of capital almost equal to the domestic debt of the nation when the Revolution closed was thus employed throughout the country. By the year 1811, no fewer than 137 roads had been chartered in New York State alone, with a total length of 4,500 miles and a total capital of $7,500,- ooo. About one-third of this mileage was eventually completed.
Eight turnpikes went out from Albany, and five others joined Catskill, Kingston, and Newburg with the Susquehanna and Delaware rivers. The earliest of these five, and one of the earliest in the State, was the Catskill and Susquehanna turnpike, that sup- planted the primitive State road to Wattles's Ferry. The old course was changed in several localities, the charter permitting the stockholders to choose their route. Among the names in the charter were John Livingston, Caleb Benton (a brother of Stephen Benton), John Kortright, Sluman Wattles, and Solo- mon Martin. The stock was limited to $12,000 in shares of $20 each.
The road ran through lands owned by the stock- holders. Little regard was had for grades, as travel- lers well know. The main purpose was to make the land accessible and marketable. The road was com- pleted in 1802, and soon became a famous highway to Central New York, and the navigable Susque- hanna, and so remained for more than a quarter of a century. It was in operation four years earlier than the Great Western Turnpike, connecting Albany with Buffalo and running through Cherry Valley. Spafford in 1813 described it as "the
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Appian Way turnpike," in which is seen the pride felt in it, likened as it thus was to one of the best roads ever built by man-that Roman highway which still does service after the lapse of more than 2,000 years. In one sense this turnpike was like a Roman road : it followed straight lines from point to point regardless of hills, obstacles being squarely faced and defied by these modern men as by the old Romans.
Ten toll-gates were set up along the line, with the rates as follows : for twenty sheep and hogs, eight cents ; for twenty horses and cattle, twenty cents ; for a horse and rider, five cents; for a horse and chaise, twelve and one-half cents; for a coach or chariot, twenty-five cents; for a stage or wagon, twelve and one-half cents. In 1804, Caleb Benton, who lived in Catskill, was president of the corpora- tion, and in 1805 the stage business of the road was granted as a monopoly to David Bostwick, Stephen Benton, Lemuel Hotchkiss, and Terence Donnelly. Two stages were to be kept regularly on the road, the fare to be five cents per mile. A stage that left Catskill Wednesday morning reached Unadilla Friday night, and one that left Unadilla Sunday reached Catskill Tuesday. The most prosperous period for the road was the ten years from 1820 to 1830.
Two years after the road was built, Dr. Timothy Dwight, President of Yale College, during one of his regular vacation journeys, passed over it and stopped at Unadilla. He has left a full record of the journey. Dr. Dwight, accustomed long to the comforts of life in New England, had no sooner crossed the State line from Massachusetts to New York than he observed a change. The houses be-
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came ordinary and ill repaired, and very many of them were taverns of wretched appearance.
For sixteen or eighteen miles, he saw neither church nor school-house. Catskill contained about 100 houses, and much of the business was done by barter. The turnpike to the Susquehanna he de- scribed as a " branch of the Greenwood turnpike from Hartford to Albany, commencing from Canaan in Connecticut and passing to Wattles's Ferry on the Susquehanna. Thence it is proposed to ex- tend it to the county of Trumbull on the southern shore of Lake Erie." The road he thought " well made."
Connecticut families were found settled along the line. Now he came upon " a few lonely plantations recently begun upon the road," and then " occasion- ally passed a cottage, and heard the distant sound of an axe and of a human voice. All else was grandeur, gloom and solitude." At last after many miles of riding he reached a settlement "for some miles a thinly built village, composed of neat, tidy houses," in which everything "indicated prosperity." This was Franklin. Coming down the Ouleout, the coun- try, he said, " wore a forbidding aspect, the houses being thinly scattered and many of them denoted great poverty."
When Dr. Dwight reached Wattles's Ferry, the more serious trials of his journey began. All the privations of life in a new country which he had met on the road from Catskill at last had overtaxed his patience, and he poured forth his perturbed spirit upon this infant settlement. When he made a sec- ond visit a few years later he liked the place much better. His first impressions are chronicled at some length. He says :
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When we arrived at the Susquehanna we found the only inn-keeper, at the Eastern side of the river, unable to fur- nish us a dinner. To obtain this indispensable article we were obliged therefore to cross the river. The ferry-boat was gone. The inhabitants had been some time employed in building a bridge, but it was unfinished and impassable. There was nothing left us, therefore, but to cross a deep and rapid ford. Happily the bottom was free from rocks and stones.
Dr. Dwight appears to have found no satisfactory stopping-place in Unadilla, and proceeds to say :
About four miles from the ferry we came to an inn kept by a Scotchman named Hanna. Within this distance we called at several others, none of which could furnish us a dinner. I call them inns because this name is given them by the laws of the State, and because each of them hangs out a sign challenging this title. But the law has nick- named them, and the signs are liars.
It is said, and I suppose truly, that in this State any man who will pay for an inn-keeper's license obtains one of course. In consequence of this practice the number of houses which bear the appellation is already enormous. Too many of them are mere dramshops of no other use than to deceive, disappoint and vex travellers and to spread little circles of drunkenness throughout the State. A traveller after passing from inn to inn in a tedious succession finds that he can get nothing for his horse and nothing for himself.
The remedy he prescribed for this was to license " only one inn where there are five or six." The evil was general. In 1810 the people of Meredith made a formal and vigorous protest against the growth of intemperance and crime as caused by public houses. There were ten hotels in that town alone, besides a number of distilleries. Many citizens banded themselves in behalf of order and decency,
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and their protest abounded in an energy of language that would have delighted the soul of Dr. Dwight. Of his further experience at Mr. Hanna's hotel, he says :
We at length procured a dinner and finding no house at a proper distance where we could be lodged concluded to stay where we were. Our fare was indeed bad enough, but we were sheltered from the weather. Our inn-keeper besides furnishing us with such other accommodations as his home afforded, added to it the pleasures of his company and plainly considered himself as doing us no small favor. In that peculiar situation in which the tongue vibrates with its utmost ease and celerity, he repeated to us a series of anec- dotes dull and vulgar in the extreme. Yet they all con- tained a seasoning which was exquisite, for himself was in every case the hero of the tale. To add to our amusement, he called for the poems of Allan Ramsay and read several of them to us in what he declared to be the true Scottish pro- nunciation, laughing incessantly and with great self-compla- cency as he proceeded.
Dr. Dwight remarks that "a new turnpike road is begun from the ferry and intended to join the Great Western road either at Cayuga bridge or Canandaigua. This route will furnish a nearer journey to Niagara than that which is used at pres- ent." We see from this what were the plans of that day, as to the future central highway of New York State. Of Unadilla Dr. Dwight says :
That township in which we now were is named Unadilla and lies in the county of Otsego. It is composed of rough hills and valleys with a handsome collection of intervales along the Susquehanna. On a remarkably ragged eminence immediately north-west of the river, we saw the first oaks and chestnuts after leaving the neighborhood of Catskill. The intervening forests were beach, maple, etc. The
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houses in Unadilla were scattered along the road which runs parallel with the river. The settlement is new and appears like most others of a similar date. Rafts contain- ing each from twenty to twenty-five thousand feet of boards are from this township floated down the Susquehanna to Baltimore. Unadilla contained in 1800 eight hundred and twenty-three inhabitants.
On September 27, 1804, Dr. Dwight left Mr. Hanna's inn and rode through to Oxford. The first two miles of the way along the Susquehanna were " tolerably good and with a little labor capable of being excellent." He continues :
We then crossed the Unadilla, a river somewhat smaller but considerable longer (sic) than the Susquehanna proper, quite as deep and as difficult to be forded. Our course to this river was south-west. We then turned directly north along the banks of the Unadilla, and travelling over a rugged hill, passed through a noble cluster of white pines, some of which though not more than three feet in diameter, were, as I judged, not less than 200 feet in height. No object in the vegetable world can be compared with this.
Eleven years later, Dr. Dwight again passed over the turnpike on his way to Utica. "The road from Catskill to Oxford," he said, " I find generally bad, as having been long neglected. The first twenty miles were tolerable, the last twenty absolutely intolerable." After noting that in Franklin " relig- ion had extensively prevailed," he wrote :
Unadilla is becoming a very pretty village. It is built on a delightful ground along the Susquehanna and the number of houses, particularly of good ones, has much in- creased. A part of the country between this and Oxford is cultivated ; a considerable part of it is still a wilderness. The country is rough and of a high elevation.
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In some reminiscenses which my father wrote in 1890, he described the scenes along this road that were familiar to him in boyhood at Kortright-1825 to 1835. The road was then in its most prosper- ous period. It was not uncommon for one of the hotels, which marked every few miles of the route, to entertain thirty or forty guests at a time. The freight wagons were huge in size, drawn by six and eight horses, and had wheels with wide tires. Stages drawn by four and six horses were continually in use. Not infrequently came families bound for Ohio, where they expected to settle-some of these Con- necticut people, who helped to plant the Western Reserve settlements. This vast traffic brought easy prosperity to the people along the turnpike and built up towns and villages. My father records the success of the Rev. Mr. McAuley's church at Kort- right-a place that has now retrograded so that it is only a small hamlet, just capable of retaining a post- office. But Mr. McAuley's church at one time, more than sixty years ago, had 500 members, and was said to be the largest church society west of the Hudson valley.
A change occurred with the digging of the Erie Canal and the building of the Erie Railway. More- over, in 1834 was built a turnpike from North Kortright through the Charlotte Valley to Oneonta. The white man having tried a route of his own over the hills, reverted to the route which the red man had marked out for him ages before. Much easier was the grade by this river road, and this fact exer- cised a marked influence on the fortunes of the set- tlements along the olden line. Freight wagons were drawn off and sent by the easier way. Stages fol- lowed the new turnpike and the country between
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Wattles's Ferry and Kortright retrograded as rapidly as it had formerly improved .*
The building of the Catskill Turnpike really led to the founding of Unadilla village on its present site. It had confined to this point a growth which otherwise would probably have been distributed among other points along the valley. Here was a stopping-place, with a river to be crossed, horses to be changed, and new stages taken, and here had been established the important market for country produce of Noble & Hayes. Unadilla became what might be called a small but thriving inland river port. Here lumber was sawed and here it came from mills elsewhere for shipment along with farm products to Baltimore. Here grain was ground, and here were three prosperous distilleries.
The building of the turnpike along the Charlotte was not the only blow that came to the western por- tion of the Catskill Road. Another and permanent one came to the whole length of the turnpike when the Erie Canal was built, followed later by the Erie Railroad. Otsego County, in 1832, had reached a population of 52,370, but with the Erie Canal in operation it ceased to grow. At the present time the showing is considerably less than it was in 1832, and yet several villages have made large increases, the increase in Oneonta being probably tenfold.
Contemporary with the Erie Canal was an attempt to provide the Susquehanna with a canal. It became
* A stage line, however, for long years afterward supplied these set- tlements with a means of communication with Unadilla, and it is within the memory of many persons still calling themselves young that for a considerable series of years, trips twice a week were regularly made by Henry S. Woodruff. After Mr. Woodruff's death a large and interest- ing collection of coaches, sleighs, and other stage relics remained upon his premises-the last survivals of coaching times on the Catskill Turn- pike, embracing a period of three-quarters of a century.
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a subject of vast local interest from Cooperstown to the interior of Pennsylvania. The scheme included a railway, or some other method of reaching the Erie Canal from the head of Otsego Lake. Colonel De Witt Clinton, Jr., son of the governor, made a survey as far as Milford, and found that in nine miles there was a fall of thirty feet, and that at Unadilla the fall from the lake was 150 feet, while in IIO miles from the lake it was 350 feet. In 1830 a new survey showed that 144 miles out of 153 were already navigable, the remaining nineteen requiring a canal. Some seventy locks would be needed and sixty-five dams. Judge Page, while a member of Congress, introduced a bill to aid slack-water naviga- tion from Cooperstown to tide-water. It was his opinion that the failure of the bill was due to the spread of railroads.
With the ushering in of the great railroad era, the Susquehanna Valley saw started as early as 1830 many railroad projects which could save it from threatened danger. Their aim was to connect the upper Susquehanna with the Hudson at Catskill, and the Mohawk at Canajoharie. None ever got beyond the charter stage. Strenuous efforts were afterward made to bring the Erie from the ancient Cookoze (Deposit) to the Susquehanna at a point above Oghwaga, but this also failed.
Indeed it was not until after the Civil War that any railroad reached the head-waters of the Susque- hanna ; but it was an agreeable sign of the enterprise which attended the men of 1830 and following years that at the period when the earliest railroad in this State, and one of the earliest on this continent, had just been built from Albany to Schenectady, serious projects existed for opening this valley to the outer
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world. Even the great Erie project languished long in consequence of business depression. It was not until 1845 that it was completed as far as Middle- town, and not until 1851 that it reached Dunkirk.
Not even to the Erie was final supremacy on this frontier assured, but the upper Susquehanna lands, more than those through which the Erie ran, was doomed to a condition of isolation. Nature itself had decreed that the great route of transportation in New York State was to run where the great trail of the Iroquois for centuries had run-through the Mohawk Valley. Along that central trail from Al- bany, " the Eastern door," to Buffalo, " the West- ern door of the Long House," the course of empire westward was to take its way.
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VIII
Economic Facts in Pioneer Life
E ARLY in the century the forces which deter- mined the character of the frontier villages for the next fifty years were well under way. Already had arrived the men upon whom for many years progress was to rest-those who built the grist and saw mills, the store-keepers, the lumber men, the builders of roads, the owners of cloth mills, the heads of potash industries, and those who sent the produce rafts down the rivers to large markets. On the Susquehanna for half a century existed a thriv- ing community distant nearly a hundred miles from Catskill with no other outlet for its products than the great world to which the turnpike or the river opened the way.
The wealth that nature yielded comprised pork, bacon, lard, lumber, grain, wool, furs, and hides. To transport raw material to Catskill or Baltimore was a costly undertaking. The aim always was to send it in the form that involved the least expense for trans- portation, a notable example of which was seen in the numerous distilleries set up for the consumption of surplus grain. Early in the century it cost $1 to transport a barrel of flour from Central New York to Philadelphia. Grain and flour carried more than 1 50 miles could hardly be sold at a profit. Freight on an average cost about $10 a ton for each 100
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miles, or ten cents a mile per ton ; while in excep- tional cases, like the all-land route from Philadel- phia to Pittsburg, a ton cost as high as $125 for the 500 miles, which was $25 for each 100 miles, or twenty-five cents for each mile per ton .*
In all directions the best economy before the days of good roads, canals and railroads advised every pos- sible kind of local manufacturing, and hence came into existence in every community not only distil- leries and grist-mills, but fulling-mills, hat factories, and wagon-shops. Most interesting of all these in- dustries, perhaps, were those for producing home- spun cloth. Mr. Rogers has described them from personal recollections. He says that before 1844 every farmer's wife in the Susquehanna Valley saw that yarn for stockings and mittens, as well as flan- nel for underwear, fulled cloth and pressed flannel were made. Mills to card the wool into rolls, and also to color, full and dress the cloth, were common throughout the country :
After carding, the wool was spun, a wheel and "clock reel " being found in every family. Much spinning was done by hired labor, thirty knots of warp and stocking yarn, or forty of " filling," being a day's work.
Mr. Rogers proceeds to say :
After being spun the yarn was scoured and taken to the weaver's. Here the warp was spooled, run off on warping bars, and thus warped. Then each individual thread was drawn through one or two " harnesses," and all through a reed, after being wound on the warping-beam. The filling or woof was quilled, the quill being a small paper cone of home construction. Both spooling and quilling were done
* It was stated a few years ago by Chauncey M. Depew that the aver- age freight rate by railroad at that time was less than three-quarters of a cent per ton for each mile of distance.
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on a " quill wheel," and the quills were put into a shuttle and thrown by hand. Treadles worked by foot-power pulled down one harness, the reed, hung in a heavy frame, was beaten with one hand, and then the shuttle was thrown back with the other. A good many yards could be woven in a day.
When the cloth was taken from the loom, it went to the dye shop. The colors in common use were snuff brown and butternut. After the dyeing process, the cloth " was fulled, teasled, sheared and pressed, and then sent home to be made up by some woman tailor. As for a " boughten coat," a boy did not get one until he got big enough to "go in company " or work out and earn one.
Mr. Rogers adds that pressed woollen dresses had one great failing-their facility for catching lint and dust-and he tells in illustration of the fact the fol- lowing touching tale :
Dr. Henry Mitchell, of Norwich, a very eminent physi- cian, and at one time a M.C., was called one fearfully cold and blustering day to see a woman, who was largely a hypo- chondriac. The doctor went into the sick-room, where the woman had lain down with one of these pressed dresses on. Her hair was unkempt, and as she raised herself to greet him, her dress showed the effect of contact with feathers and lint. She broke out, " Oh, Doctor, I look dreadfully, I know, but I don't look half as bad as I feel." To which he replied : " Then, by -, you will die."
The prices that were paid for land, farm products, store goods and labor shed light on economic con- ditions. From old diaries, account-books and let- ters one can compile lists of prices and, as he turns the yellow pages, form conclusions as striking as they are interesting. Land values were of course very low, but they were quick to rise. As little as 18 cents per acre was paid in Bainbridge. William
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Cooper in 1786, after a foreclosure sale, obtained his vast tract comprising 29,350 acres for about 50 cents per acre. In 1789 Leonard M. Cutting pur- chased of the State 25,000 acres on the west side of the Unadilla River at 3 shillings and one farthing an acre. Other large tracts in the same region were sold for the same price. Eleven years after William Cooper acquired his tract, he sold off a farm to Levi Pierce for $5 per acre. A pioneer named Jonathan Price leased from Mr. Cooper 180 acres at fourteen cents annually per acre. About the year 1800 Ransom Hunt purchased his several hundred acres in Otego for $1.25 per acre. Values in Schoharie County were much higher. Brown says that as early as 1759 land laid out in lots sold at from $1.00 to $5.00. In 1786 Schoharie land was worth $5.00, and in 1817 from $10 to $25.
The capital required, once a pioneer had arrived with his family and secured his land, was small. A yoke of oxen was valued after the war at about $70; a cow at $15, the farming tools absolutely required at $20, and an ox-cart at $30, or a total of $135. A log-house with two rooms in it, built by hired labor, cost about $100. One with a single room, twenty feet square, could be put up for much less, and when a man did the work himself, the cost went down accordingly.
Solomon Martin in 1797, was charged $25, for two tons of hay, and in 1803, $60, for a yoke of oxen. Sherman Page in 1806 was charged $7.60 for 1,010 feet of panel boards ; Amos Bidwell in 1798, two shillings, two pence for 5& pounds of beef; Hugh Thompson in 1797, 2 shillings for 25 pumpkins ; Daniel Mack in 1793, 4 shillings for one bushel of corn, and 6 shillings for two bushels
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