Saturday, August 4, 2012

CENTRAL / WESTERN NEW YORK TIMELINE / 1825


1825

Jan 29
New York State merchant Jeremiah Van Rensselaer dies in Canandaigua at
the age of 57.

February
A Rochesterville village census shows a population of 4,274. Another source sets the number at 5,273,

Feb 15                       
The Allegany County town of Bolivar is formed out of Friendship.    **    The Wayne County town of Arcadia is formed from Lyons. Its central village, Newark, is made from Lockville and Miller's Basin.

Mar 14                       
The Auburn Company, incorporated to provide insurance, is capitalized at $150,000, in Auburn.

Mar 21                       
A dinner is given at New York's City Hotel to celebrate South America's independence from Spain.

Apr 5
Orleans County annexes the Genesee County Town of Shelby.

Apr 13                       
Joshua Forman helps incorporate Syracuse as a village in the Onondaga County town of Salina, with himself as president.

Apr 18                       
The Wayne County Town of Winchester is established.

Apr 20                       
New York authorizes construction of a connection between the Erie Canal and
Cayuga Lake. A free bridge will be built later in the year over the northern end of
Cayuga Lake, replacing the wooden toll structure linking Bridgeport and Cayuga villages.

May                       
Batavia newspaper owner Oran Follett moves to Buffalo, leaving his younger brother Frederick as publisher of the Spirit of the Times.     **    Bricklayer William Morgan is made a Royal Arch Mason, in Le Roy.

June                       
Lafayette visits Geneva, lunches at the new Franklin Hotel. Mendon Revolutionary War veterans headed by Timothy Barnard, who had known the marquis during the war, are on hand to greet his coach in Mendon. He reportedly speaks before Pittsford’s Phoenix Hotel.

Jun 7                       
Lafayette visits Buffalo, arriving from Dunkirk on the steam brig Superior. The general is reunited with Seneca Chief Red Jacket. He's also taken to view Niagara Falls, before heading for Rochesterville.

Jun 17
Brothers Nelson, Israel and Isaac Thayer are publicly hanged in Buffalo for murdering lake sailor John Love in nearby North Boston. Sheriff Wray F. Littleton and the local militia accompany the condemned from jail to the gibbet in front of the courthouse. Among the spectators is Israel Thayer, Sr., father of the three, being held as an accessory.

Jul 25                       
Charlotte Moore Rathbun, second wife of businessman Moses Rathbun, dies in Batavia, in her mid-forties.

Sep 4                       
Rochesterville's St. Luke's Episcopal Church holds its first services today, using the city's first church organ. The church is built on South Fitzhugh Street land recently donated by Nathaniel Rochester.

Sep 22
Genesee Valley pioneer David Piffard marries Ann Matilda Haight, daughter of a New York City merchant at the Reformed Dutch Church in Manhattan.

Oct 10                       
Geneva lawyer Charles Butler marries Eliza A. Ogden of Walton. They will buy water lot 21 this year.    

Oct 14                       
Moses Rathbun is married for the third time, to 32-year-old Buffalo widow Roxanna Bates.

Oct 15                       
De Witt Clinton's party leaves Albany on the Erie Canal.

Oct 25                       
Clinton's party arrives in Buffalo.    **    The first Erie Canal boats leave Buffalo - destination New York City.

Oct 26                       
Clinton officially opens the 83-lock Erie Canal and departs from Buffalo aboard the Seneca Chief. A series of 32-pounder cannon from Perry’s victory on Lake Erie, spaced along the entire route fire in relay. The message running from Buffalo to New York, takes an hour and twenty minutes to arrive and then is repeated in reverse. The Seneca Chief, heading  to Black Rock, is nearly wrecked when part of the towpath gives way. A ball at the Eagle Hotel ends the day's festivities.  

Oct 27                       
Clinton's party is welcomed in Rochesterville. Local dignitaries join the flotilla aboard the canal boat The Young Lion of the West. The city throws a grand ball this evening.

Nov 2                       
The Clinton flotilla reaches Albany.

Nov 4                       
The flotilla reaches New York City.

Nov 7                       
De Witt Clinton, aboard the warship Washington, performs the Wedding of the Waters ceremony, off Sandy Hook, New Jersey.

Nov 23
The original flotilla returns to Buffalo.

Nov 29
Palmer Cleveland is appointed postmaster of Tonawanda

Dec 1
Deerfield, Michigan, mill owner Nelson Higbee is born in Broome County, New York.

Dec 31                       
U.S. teetotaler and grape juice pioneer Thomas Bramwell Welch is born in Glastonbury, England, to Abraham and Mary Fussel Welch.


State
Gypsum is discovered in Oakfield.    **    Proprietors of the settlement of Dunkirk sell half their interest to Fredonia entrepreneur Walter Smith    **    Syracuse pioneer Ephraim Webster dies in Tuscarora at the age of 72.    **    Black Rock's 6500-foot-long Bird Island Pier into the Niagara River is completed. Winter storms severely damage the harbor.    **     Brockport novelist Mary Jane Holmes is born in Massachusetts.   **    Le Roy's Eagle Hotel opens.   **    Population: Buffalo – 2,412; Batavia - 3,352 ; Lockport - 2500 Mendon - 1,922.    ** A house is built on Perry Avenue in Warsaw. It will be home to Deacon Seth Gates and his abolitionist son congressman Seth M. Gates, and will become the headquarters of the Warsaw Historical Society.    **     James Seymour, the first (appointed) sheriff of Monroe County, is elected to succeed outgoing Sheriff John T. Patterson.    **    Lockport’s Courthouse/Jail is built.    **    This year state ports clear 259,525 tons of domestic goods and 20,655 tons of foreign goods.    **     Massachusetts radical Daniel Shays dies on a farm in Sparta, all but forgotten.    **    A new Ontario County Court House is built in Canandaigua.    **    Publisher Horatio Gates Spafford brings out a second edition of his gazetteer of the state, after a lengthy period spent writing to postmasters and town officials, traveling across the state and hiring assistants to cover areas he was unable to. He also publishes The New York Pocket Book, brought out by William S. Parker of Troy.    **    The schooner Mink replaces Chautauqua Lake’s horse-boat passenger scow.    **     A U. S. Post Office is opened at Bliven's Corners and its name changed to North Cohocton.    **    Cornelius Treat buys land at Cheese Factory and West Bloomfield roads in Mendon, names it Treat's Corners.    **    Physicist Joseph Henry assists on a survey to build a Great State Road across the southern tier. The project is never realized.    **     Stage line partner Chauncey Coe leaves Buffalo to live in Canandaigua; his partner and brother Bela D. Coe arrives in Buffalo from Canandaigua, bringing employees Isaac T. Hathaway and Edward L. Stevenson. Bela and his wife buy a Main Street house near the Eagle Tavern from merchant Ebenezer Walton.    **    A parcel of land northwest of Keuka Lake - the Beddoe Tract- goes on the market for farm land. About this time John Beddoe moves his family west across the west branch of Keuka Lake.    **    The approximate date William  Stowe opens an insurance office in Clyde.    **    The approximate date a red schoolhouse is built in Avon.    **    The Cataract House hotel at Niagara Falls opens.    **     Auburn Academy in the Military Tract at Homer (Onondaga County, later Cayuga County) is given Lot 88 of Township 28; Ithaca Academy (Onondaga County, later Tompkins County) is given Lot 24 of Township 22.    **    The Lake House inn in Skaneateles is completed.    **    Monroe County lawyer Daniel Dewey Barnard becomes county prosecuting attorney.    **    James Tanner completes a state-ordered survey of the Niagara River islands, having taken over the job from Silas D. Kellogg, recently deceased.    **    Stockbridge, Massachusetts, farmer Barnabus Curtis arrives in the Rochester area and purchases a 50 acre farm at Allyns (Allens) Creek settlement.    **    Marshield Parsons arrives in the Allens Creek area of Monroe County from Massachusetts to join his brother Ezra and work with him in the wool business.

Buffalo
John Scott conducts the city's first freight forwarding business out of the Old Red Warehouse, on the waterfront.    **    Thaddeus Joy and George B. Webster form the shipping company Joy & Webster, building a warehouse on the east side of Commercial Slip.    **    359 vessels use the port.    **    The approximate date Benjamin Rathbun, his brother Lyman, and his father Moses set up Lyman Rathbun & Company, a retail operation, at an office close to Benjamin's Eagle Hotel.    **    146,805 men are currently enrolled in the state militia.

Connewango
Peter Blanchard dies, the fourth adult death in the town.    **    Charles McGlashen arrives, joining his brothers Robert and James here. Windsor, Vermont, native Henry L. Gardner and Elias Carpenter of  Onondaga County, New York, also settle here.

Canals
Combined revenue from the Erie and Chanplain canals totals $500,000.    **    The Seneca Lock Navigation Company petitions the New York State legislature to purchase the canal. The state will do so. **     Cadwallader Colden's Memoir, Prepared at the Request of a Committee of the Common Council of the City of New York and Presented to the Mayor of the City, at the Celebration of the Completion of the New York Canals.    **     Seventeen canal surveys, authorized by the omnibus canal bill, are performed throughout the state.    **    The state's canals bring in $566,279 in revenue, carrying 218,00 tons of goods.    **    Engineer James Geddes surveys the route for a Chemung, to connect the Southern Tier, at Elmira, with the Erie Canal via Seneca Lake.

Erie Canal
John Rutherford's Facts and observations in relation to the origin and completion of the Erie canal, is published by N. B. Holmes in New York City.    **    After citizens of Oswego lobby to have an Oswego River branch built, the state authorizes $160,000 to construct the Oswego Canal.    **    The poem "The Meeting of the Waters of the Hudson and Erie" is published, to the folk tune of "Old Head of Dennis".    **    The Kennedy-Hatch agreement allows the state to receive $200 a year for use by industry of surplus water in a spillway at Lockport.   **     Two entrepreneurs buy the remains of  Silver Creek's giant tree, take it on a tour via the Erie Canal.    **    The cost of the newly-completed canal - $7,143,789.86.

Geneva
A Federal-style home is built at 543 South Main Street in Geneva.    **    Pultney Park, the town square, is conveyed to the village.    **    Hobart and William Smith academy is chartered as a college.    **    The Franklin Hotel opens down by Seneca Lake, at the corner of Water (later Exchange) and Seneca streets.

Lockport
The courthouse/jail is built.    **    Artist George Catlin sketches work on the Erie Canal deep cut.   

Rochesterville
The Marquis de Lafayette visits the city and is entertained at the Mansion House (Christopher's Tavern).   **    Construction begins on a house for hardware merchant Ebenezer Watts.    **    Elisha Johnson, Josiah Bissell and others found the Rochesterville Canal and Railway Company.    **    William Fitzhugh and Charles Carroll file a quit claim for Mason (Front) Street, with lawyer John Mastick, to facilitate the construction of a retaining wall along the Genesee River. The street is moved to the west.    **    Merchant A. V. T. Leavitt becomes a silent partner in Leavitt & Hill, while his partner Charles J. Hill takes over the business.    **    Shoemaker Jesse Hatch visits Brown's Custom Mill at Frankfort to have his grist milled, views the river and the falls.    **   Area farmer, judge and Civil War officer William Henry Benjamin is born.    **    The Reverend F. H. Cuming, rector of St. Luke's Church, preaches the sermon "The Church Perfect and Entire". The sermon will be printed this year in Canandaigua.

©  2012   David Minor / Eagles Byte   

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