It Happened Here-- "E tu Brute?! Naming the Towns

                                                                       of New York's  Military Tract  [1]  [2]

                                                                       Rte 31 1n3 West Brutus Rd., Weedsport
If someone were to look at the names of towns, villages and cities  of central New York State  they might reasonably expect to find a mix of names reflecting physical features, the names of early settlers and entrepreneurs, a few famous Americans, and of course, many Native American place names, the heritage the western Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga and Seneca peoples who inhabited this area for centuries.  But instead we find a map dominated by towns  and cities  named after Greek and Roman Cities and Greek and Roman leaders and notables, plus a few classical scholars and a couple English enlightenment writers thrown in.  How did this come about?

Fairly early in the course of the American Revolution,  American generals, and George Washington in particular, realized Americans could not defeat  the British army and force Great Britain to recognize American independence with militias alone. While militias were formed for local defense and local volunteer armies were formed for to respond to some  regional threat,  regular professional armies that could operate overtime, anywhere in the United States were needed that could counter and defeat British Armies.  But  patriotism alone would  not be a sufficient motive to encourage large numbers of men to leave their homes and families for years,  for a life of privation and perhaps early death.  And New York, not to mention the other states, was in no position to offer cash bounties for enlistment, a situation that would only worsen as time went on and continental money became virtually worthless. But though cash poor, New York was, potentially, land rich.  Initially, New York was expected to provide four battalions, but recruitment lagged until Congress offered a 100 acre bounty of land in the Ohio Country and New York added a bounty of 500 acres of N.Y. land, per recruit, with higher bounties for commissioned officers.  Though generous,   these offers were not strictly warrantable, (ie. legal!) as the land being given was Indian land, occupied for centuries by Native Americans,  and certified as such by the Ft. Stanwix treaty of 1763.  But fortunately for the American Revolutionary cause events of the war would weaken Indigenous claims.   Though the Iroquois initial impulse was to stay neutral in this fight between their European neighbors, by the third year (1777) of the conflict most of the Iroquois had been drawn into the fight with the majority of the Iroquois  (except the Oneida) supporting the British.  By the fifth year, (1779) the Americans struck back against Iroquois, invading their home territories, leveling their towns, burning their crops and cutting down their orchards, driving them as refugees into the hands of the British who were ill prepared to support them. Disease, cold and famine killed large numbers.  In the peace talks at the end of the war the British ignored their native allies leaving them to diplomatically fend for themselves!   After the war only a fraction of them filtered back to their former homelands to try to rebuild their lives. 

                                                                              NYS Rte. 90, Union Springs (may be missing)

 In the summer of 1782, while the peace negotiations dragged on with the British, New York began to develop a plan for paying the promised bonty to its Continental veterans.   State Surveyor General Simeon  DeWitt was tasked by the New York Legislature of coming up with a plan to allocate "wilderness" land running from Lake Ontario and East of Seneca Lake in 600 acre blocks. (An arrangement was made with Congress to compensate New     York for the 100 acre parcels offered in the Ohio territory to soldiers). A rough rectangle of land in central New York was designated and divided into twenty-five numbered townships, each with  100 land parcels, as well as lands set aside for public use, schools and churches. 

                                                      U.S. 11, Main St. ,Homer
An unanticipated consequence of the Sullivan/Clinton and  Van Schaik  campaigns were that hundreds of New Yorkers and other would-be settlers got see the rich farmlands of the Finger Lakes region and Ontario plateau.  Between veterans and speculators interest was high. Two thousand, ninety veterans were eligible.

                                                                                NYS Rte 34 Scipio Center

Grapes growing along one of the 

Finger Lakes (Keuka)

Three more  townships would be added to accommodate all of the eligible veterans.  When the plan to allot the land became known, not surprisingly, the Cayuga and Onondaga Iroquois tribes, whose land it had been, objected .  It was seven long years before their cases were settled by treaties, which specified the payment of cash awards, annuities and the establishment of much smaller reservations on which returned Cayugas and Onondagas could live.  [3].  Subsequent treaties would reduce Indian lands further with the land adjacent to Lake Onondaga becoming the city of Syracuse and the Cayuga Reservation disappearing altogether.                                                                  

                                                                                                                                                                                                                      NYS Rte 89 near  Canoga                

But the fact that New York State negotiated the latter treaties without the authority of the United States would open challenges to them that continued  into the twenty-first century.

On July 3, 1790 a lottery was held with two barrels, one containing the names of  eligible veterans, the other containing  the numbers of land parcels with the names of the township in which they were located.  Names for the townships had been assigned by Robert Harpur, a clerk in DeWitt's office.  Harpur was versed in the classics and a teacher at King's College  (the only instructor  of fifteen professors at the college to support the Revolution).  He had been a New York Assemblyman and served in a number of administrative posts. He became a land speculator in the upper Susquehanna Valley, moving there and founding the village of Harpursville.

                         NYS Rte 79, Harpursville

Harpur's list was made up of famous real and mythical figures from antiquity plus five English and Scottish enlightenment  figures:

Homer, Ulysses, Lysander, Salon, Hector, Aurelius, Brutus, Camillus, Cato, Cicero, Cincinnatus. Fabius, Galen, Hannibal, Manlius, Marcellus, Ovid, Pompey, Romulus, Scipio, Sempronius, Tully, Virgil, Dryden, Junius, Locke, Milton, and Stirling (Sterling)

            5617 Highland Ave., NYS Rte. 14, Millport

                   Cayuga St., NYS Rte 38, Monrovia

      

NYS 90  Aurora

                                                                                                   Rte 414, south of Hazlitt Rd. Hector

NYS. 89 and Swick Rd., Romulus

NYS Rte 5, Elbridge

Many of the early townships would be broken up with new townships added in response to differing interests and burgeoning populations. There would be problems with land frauds, bogus titles, squatters, and Indian claims but before the end of 1790 settlement would be well under way.

Cor. NYS Rte 31 and Main St., Jordan

[1] "You too Brutus?!"  Is a famous line in Shakespeare's Tragedy of Julius Caesar  when the Roman emperor realizes his friend Brutus has joined the Senators come to assassinate him.

[2]  The word "Town" has several different meanings, which can be confusing. Commonly it refers to an area where there are a bunch of houses in close proximity, as opposed to a rural area where any dwellings are spread apart.  In the New England and New York traditions  it can also be  an administrative or governing unit which usually (but not necessarily)  has one or more groups of houses in it, and the lands surrounding it. It differs from an incorporated village which is a self-governing unit with relatively restricted land around it. New Englanders often call these towns-with-surrounding-lands. "townships" which distinguish them from mere clusters of dwellings.  New Yorkers, unfortunately, don't. For clarity, I prefer to use  the word "township, " even though New Yorkers typically use the word "town".

[3] I am struck by  the legal language of the disposition of the Native  Americans' cases and the historical  pieces  written about them.  Legal claims of Native Americans were not "settled", "negotiated", "satisfied", or even "adjudicated".  They were "extinguished".

--All the usual suspects.  For this post I found the articles by the county historians of the  different counties that were part of the Military tract interesting to compare.   "Names of Townships Used in the Military Tract Compiled by D.G. Rossiter"   (www.swampstomper.nl/history/military.html )        provides short bios of all twenty eight ancient  and  enlightenment people whose names were used in naming the townships, if you are curious.

 Marker of the Week  Fortnight -- Degory Prowtt

Yes, again!  Degory's  story is at the same time exceptional in the variety and number of both adventures and misfortunes that befell him and emblematic of the kinds of disasters and misfortune that could confront a young man in colonial/revolutionary times. The National Park Service has an excellent bio of his life, that I can't improve on--Take a look!

nps.gov/people/degory-prowtt.htm

           It Happened Here-- Charles Williamson:  Covert Agent/       

                                                 Grandiose Promoter of the New York Frontier                                                                    

Covert communications, private deals, handshake negotiations and gentleman's agreements are often the engine of history, but the  bane of the historians existence, (or at least it certainly seems so from the observations of this non-historian-"historical tourist".)  Charles Williamson's biography is rife with unreported details and speculative "facts".

Charles Williamson  was born in  Scotland in 1757, the son of   Alexander  Williamson, the secretary to Lord  James Hope Johnstone into a class of  people who, though  not nobility,  enabled the aristocracy to function.  They were the managers, the secretaries, the keepers of the social calendar, the master gardeners, the mid-level diplomats.  In the army, they were the mid-level officers;  in Europe, the courtiers.  At the beginning of  the American Revolution the younger Williamson bought a commission in the 25th Regiment of Foot becoming a captain after three years, without serving in America.   He resigned his commission and was journeying to America with a letter of introduction to General Cornwallis when his ship was captured by a French privateer.  As a private citizen he was not sent to a prisoner of war camp but placed under house arrest in Boston, quartered in the house of Ebenezer Newell. There he fell in love with,  and eloped with Newell's daughter, Abigail.  After a prisoner exchange the couple returned to Scotland for nearly a decade where Williamson managed a farm/estate.  Bored with farming, Williamson secured a position in the government as part of a fact-finding mission that journeyed through Marseilles into the Balkans, Russia and Turkey.  Back in Scotland, his father arranged for him an introduction to Sir William Johnstone-- Pulteney.  Sir William had married  Frances Pulteney, heiress and cousin to the Earl of Bath, one of the riches men in all of Britain and when the Earl died Sir William (who took the last name of his wife) inherited a vast fortune.
                                                                                                    NYS 12, north of Waterville           

Meanwhile, in America the defeat of the British and their Iroquois allies and dependent tribes at the close of the Revolution had opened the possibility for American/European settlement.  Lands east of the 1763 Fort Stanwix Treaty line were designated the Military Tract and given to military veterans in lieu of cash payments owed them for their military services. In western New York, however,  the situation was much more murky.  There, the native peoples still claimed  the land. Complicating things were the claims several states made to Western lands based on grants British kings had given colonies in the early colonial period. Cavalierly ignoring any  rights native  peoples had to their  own land, Charles I and II had granted Massachusetts, Connecticut and William Penn's colony in Pennsylvania wide swaths of land defined, not  by any physical features but by lines of latitude, often contradicting one another or straight lines between poorly defined or even non-existent (!) landmarks.  Thus Massachusetts was given a swath of territory running from the undefined western border  of Dutch New Netherlands  to the Pacific.  Connecticut was given a similar swath of land spanning the latitudes of Connecticut, excluding Dutch Territory, running across the continent--a claim that would spawn conflict between Pennsylvania and Connecticut settlers in the Wyoming Valley in Pennsylvania before and during the Revolution.  And settlers from New York's Orange and New Jersey's Suffolk Counties would engage in similar but less deadly confrontations, on their shared border[1] 

                Co.Rte 42 and Canning Rd., Victor NY

The Hartford Conference of 1786 would settle the New York, Massachusetts dispute by establishing  a "Preemption Line."  Under this treaty a line would be established from the eighty second mile marker on the Pennsylvania border due North to Lake Ontario.  East of the line would be  governed (and taxed) by New York and west of the line would  also be governed (and taxed) by NewYork but Massachusetts would have the sole"right of preemption," the power to determine who could negotiate with Native Americans to buy that land from them--a right they could give, or sell!  The Preemption line was surveyed and and a group of New England investors headed by Oliver Phelps and Nathaniel Gorham bought this right for $1,000,000 to be paid to                                                                                                   Massachusetts in three installments.  

                

              Preemption Line

         Boundary Drawn Between

     Massachusetts and New York

              December 16,1786

        Cause of Long Controversy

               In Western New York
             

                         NYS Hist. Marker

                            US 20 and NY 5

                     (Long reported missing)

But the Seneca Indians who lived on most of these lands agreed to sell only the easternmost third of the land for $5000 and a perpetual  annuity of $500 per year. The lack of roads, and general remoteness of the areas made the homestead  plots  difficult to sell so by the second installment Gorham and Phelps defaulted on their payment to Massachusetts.  A wealthy investor, who had helped  finance the American Revolution, Robert Morris, stepped in to buy up Gorham and Phelps investment in hopes he could use his international and diplomatic contacts to find European buyers to turn a quick profit.  Morris turned to William Temple Franklin [2], grandson of Benjamin Franklin who hooked him up with Sir William Pulteney who joined with two other partners to form Pulteney Associates. After expanding the Genesee Tract , as it became to be known, and reserving a piece for his own future investment, by negotiating a second treaty with the Senecas (The Treaty of Big Tree), Morris prepared to sell his property to them.  But there was an obstacle.  At the time, a New York law forbade non-citizens from buying New York property!

Upon meeting Charles Williamson,  William Pulteney and his two associates must have been impressed because they made the young man a remarkable offer. Williamson was to become his principal sales agent for selling  the  1,264,000  acres of the Genesee Tract that Pulteney Associates were intending to buy, but first, he needed to go to America and become a United States citizen (not a difficult task given his previous "residency" in America, and being married to an American wife), then as the company's agent he could finalize the sale and begin making plans for the development and sale of the property.

After a long grueling crossing of the Atlantic, Williamson and his family were landed in Norfolk, Virginia instead of Philadelphia and while he and his family were recovering he got to know people of the Southern Plantation-owner class. The idea occurred to him that if he could market to these people instead of hardscrabble New England farmers he could sell larger parcels of land, faster.

The notion of large wheat growing plantations, worked by dozens--scores of black slaves and of  rafts of timber cut by negro lumberman  sent down  to Baltimore to supply Britain's chronic timber shortage stirred his imagination. But how to attract southern plantation-class owners?   

First,  he needed to improve the roads leading into the Genesee Tract.  Williamson realized the major reason Gorham and Phelps had failed was the obvious inaccessibility of their purchase,

         Williamson Rd.

Built in 1782--1796 by Land

agent Charles Williamson

to open the Genesee Lands                --Pennsylvania  Historical and Museum Commission

in N,Y.  from Trout Run. It                  Lycoming Creek Rd. (Old U.S. 15) and

cut through the Wilderness                  Dekman Hollow Rd.--Williamsport, PA

to Lawrenceville by the 

same general route as

the present highway

Pulteney Associates employed a  recruitment agent to hire German farmers to come to America to build or improve roads into the Genesee Tract in exchange for homesteads on the tract.  But few German farmers were willing to give up their farms for the rigors and uncertainties of developing farms in the American wilderness.  The recruiter was forced to recruit among  poor and underemployed townsmen, including a troop of  unemployed circus performers.  Woefully unprepared for what was probably one of the most difficult jobs in early America, road building in the wilderness, the Pulteney  Associates contract laborers  improved the Mohawk Trail through the Mohawk Valley developing what was little more than a foot path at the western end, into a carriage road leading to the former Seneca town of Kandesegea at the north end of Seneca Lake.   Williamson, impressed by the picturesque beauty of the handful of cabins tucked along the northern end of the scenic lake renamed the town Geneva, after the Swiss town. [3]

                                                                                                                  Abele Rd.,  2 miles  East of  NYS 63, Mt. Morris

A large project would be to develop a road from Williamsport, on East Branch of the Susquehanna River in Pennsylvania into the Genesee Tract, from the south, following the Sheshequin Indian trail.  The work proceeded slowly here with the immigrant disgruntled workers  often refusing to work and fearful of Indian attack, although by now there were few Indians in the area and their fears were largely baseless.  Meanwhile, Williamson laid out a town for them  to settle in,  he named Williamsburgh.  Eventually the road was completed and some of the road builders settled there but others left for Canada, becoming some of the founders of Toronto. Along the western side of the Tract,  not located on a lake, Williamsburgh struggled  on for  decades before being completely  abandoned in 1915.

                112 Washington St., Geneva

Land offices were built in Geneva and Bath. Next, if Williamson were going to host perspective buyers for his tracts of land he needed suitable places for them to stay,  so Williamson built inns/hotels at Geneva, Painted Post [4], near the southern end of the Genesee tract, Sodus Bay on the shore of Lake Ontario at the Northern extreme of the Pulteney lands and Bath, a town he founded south of Crooked Lake (Keuka), around which he hoped to attract southern planters.

Built by New England carpenters, the Geneva Inn displayed an unexpected richness for the frontier with guests welcomed by a former butler to the Duke of Wellington.

.

Williamson's main efforts were reserved for the southern part of the Genesee Tract.  More hilly and less fertile than the northern sections, on the Ontario Plain,  large tracts remained unsold but the new road and its connection to the Susquehanna  river system offered the dream of wheat shipments being loaded on flat boats, "arks" or rafts being floated annually to Baltimore.  There, their cargoes  could be loaded on ships for transport overseas, with the rafts, themselves, broken up for the valujable timber they contained. 

Washington St. and Park Place, Geneva

                                                                                                                                        Pulteney Park, Bath

Williamson  laid out Bath with a central square and streets radiating from it.  Within a few years Williamson had constructed  Pultney's Land Office, a court house , a jail,  and private post office with service to Canada, Philadelphia and Washington.  Nearby was  Metcalf'e's Tavern  offering food and lodging. Williamson himself, built a palatial  two story home with two attached wings  and formal gardens that Williamson used to entertain  important clients.   A grist mill,  five sawmills, and two schools  were located in the area.   Another feature of the town would be a proper cemetery laid out by Williamson.  One of its first occupants was Williamson's  young daughter, struck down by "Genesee fever", a                 mosquito borne type of malaria once prevalent along the boggy backwaters of the Genesee valley                                                                                                                                                                  E. Morris St. and Lackawanna St., Bath

                                                               cor. Morris St. and Ark St., Bath

                                                        West Steuben St., west of Exchange St., Bath

With this host of "improvements" in place the year 1796 became a year of festivities and events touting the properties available on the Genesee Tract.  Bath got its first newspaper that year and hundreds of broadside posters were printed and put up inviting people from across New York, New England, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Maryland,Virginia, and English speaking Canada to come to Bath .  Bath held a fair, virtually the first in the United States.  Williamson built a half-mile track and  horse races were held.  (Williamson knew members of the southern planter class were especially fond of horse-racing!)  And he even built a theater (albeit made of logs) that put on some of the most popular current plays.  Some 2000 visitors flocked to the Genesee Tract, and Bath, in particular.

                                                                                        cor. W. Morris St and W. Steuben St., Bath

                                                                                                                                (sign now missing)

All of these "improvements" were tremendously expensive, however, but Sir William  Pulteney and his partners remained remarkably patient as a constant stream of bills and receipts for expenditures flowed to their desks in Britain.  Only after changes in the legal environment occurred were they led to re-examine their situation.  First, in 1798 the New York legislature revoked the law forbidding aliens from owning property in New York.  Second,  in 1799 the legislature began the phased-in gradual abolition of slavery.  Though it would not be until 1817 that all enslaved New Yorkers would be freed, the handwriting was on the wall.  No southern planation owners  would be investing in New York  large scale   plantations powered by enslaved men and women.  Much of Williamson's efforts were frustrated!  Sir William ordered an audit.  It revealed that Williamson had spent $1, 374.470 but had taken in only $147.974.  (Exact figures are difficult to determine because many properties were sold, but returned, as the result of defaulted mortgages or otherwise tied up in legal limbo.)  In  March 1800 Sir William had his American land agent transfer ownership  of his property to himself and Charles Williamson was dismissed.  After five years Williamson received compensation for his efforts, being given his Bath Mansion and other property, but no cash settlement.

Williamson returned to Britain.  In Britain he became involved in the British diplomatic service and participated in quasi-governmental plans to increase British influence along the Louisiana-Floridian coast by organizing militias amongst British settlers in that area which could be mobilized in the event Spain became involved in open warfare with Britain.  He also became a liaison to  Aaron Burr whom he had met in his previous business in New York State and appeared to be making some sort of colonization effort in that area.  (Burr would later  be tried  unsuccessfully for treason for his activities. The cases were dismissed for lack of evidence).  A few years later Williamson would deliver a packet of secret correspondence to the Governor of Jamaica, and then be dispatched to Cuba.  He would die suddenly in 1808 on his way home to Britain, of yellow fever, aggravated by the "Genesee Fever" he had contracted years earlier.

[1] See NYSHMs: It Happened Here.  Sept. 3 2018.  "The NewYork, New Jersey  Line War."

[2] William Temple Franklin was a brilliant choice for Morris' agent.  Benjamin Franklin as a U.S. diplomat had gained widespread respect and esteem both in Europe during the war and in Britain during the protracted peace negotiations at the war's end.  William Franklin had gained  respect as a a royal governor of New Jersey an as a steadfast loyalist.

[3] Undoubtedly, he also wanted to divorce the town from its Indian/wilderness association.

                                     *****

---the usual internet suspects

--- John H. Martin. "Charles Williamson, The Pulteney Estates in the Genesee Lands"  Chapter IV. in 

    Saints, Sinners and Reformers, The Burned Over District Revisited.  serialized in The Cooked Lake Review.  Fall 2005  An excellent review of the Williamson-Pulteney story.

----DAHs (Danville Area Historical Museum). "Charles Williamson"   dansvilleareahistoricalsociety.org/ charles-williamson/.    This short biopic gives a compact summary of Williamson's rather mysterious life post-Pulteney

 Marker of the Week  Fortnight -- Colonies?

                                                                 co. rte 14, Montour Falls
Most of the solders involved in the Sullivan/Clinton Campaign in the summer/fall 1779 might have objected to their states being referred to as "colonies" a full year after they had declared their independence.  In fact, the Second Continental Congress had begun acting as a national government  from nearly the start of the Revolution, raising a continental army, appointing generals, signing treaties, appointing ambassadors, allocating funds and issuing paper money.   On September 9, 1776 they had formally adopted the name "United State of America " to replace the "United Colonies."