Friday, December 21, 2012

CENTRAL / WESTERN NEW YORK TIMELINE / 1827


1827

Jan 17                 
The Commissioners for building a New Prison at Sing Sing submit a report to the state legislative committee, detailing expenditures for 1825 of $24,889.21.

February
Harvard student James Wadsworth, of Geneseo, is threatened with expulsion, for illegal dress, for the second time.

Mar 15
Rochesterville High School opens, the city's first.

Apr 4                 
Owego, the county seat of Tioga County, is incorporated.

Apr 7                 
The village of Pittsford is incorporated.

Apr 16                 
The Onondaga County Town of Clay is taken off the Town of Cicero.    **    The Cassadaga Navigation Company is organized, capitalized at $20,000, to improve Cassadaga Creek. It’s never done.   

Apr 22                 
Lawyer, soldier, businessman Augustus Sacket, 59, dies suddenly at Albany, en route from his home in Newburgh to his former property at Sackets Harbor.

May
Alvah Plumb builds the Chautauqua, the first steamboat on the lake of the same name.    **    State representative David E. Evans resigns to become local agent for the Holland Land Company.

May 2                 
Jacob S. Otto, resident agent of the Holland Land Company, dies. He will be succeeded by David S. Evans, nephew of Joseph Ellicott and former accounting clerk at the land office.

May 17
Rochesterville banker John T. Talman, marries Maria Antoinette Livingston, daughter of New York City architect Henry Gilbert Livingston, in Rochesterville's St. Luke's Church.

Jun 30                 
The Chautauqua undergoes trials.

Jul 4                 
New York State officially abolishes slavery. 10,000 slaves are freed. Resistance is strong in agricultural New Utrecht (Brooklyn) and other towns where a large part of the farm laborers are black slaves.    **    The Chautauqua goes into service, with John T. Wills as captain.

Aug 5                 
Onondaga County pioneer, saltmaker and politician Comfort Tyler dies at his home in Montezuma.

Aug 9                 
Nevada congressman William M. Stewart is born in Galen.

Sep 8                 
The Michigan, with live animals aboard, is sent over Niagara Falls as a stunt.

Sep 19
James Wadsworth returns to Harvard.

Sep 22                 
The date that Joseph Smith says he unearthed the Book of Mormon, at Hill Cumorah, near Palmyra.

Oct 1        
Riga’s schoolhouse opens.

Oct 2                 
Harvard president John Thornton Kirkland writes to James Wadsworth's father James advising him that the son is wasting his time at Harvard and should be removed.

Oct 17
James Wadsworth's father writes to him, urging to either apologize to Kirkland and reform or return home in disgrace.

Oct 22                 
The elder Wadsworth once again admonishes his son, in a letter, to knuckle down.

Nov 1
The contract on Riga’s schoolhouse is paid off - $157.50.

December        
The weekly Brockport Free Press - founded by Abiathar M. Harris and Thomas H. Hyatt - begins publication.

State
A tavern is built in Caledonia.    **    The Angelica Republican  is revived as the Allegany Republican, with Samuel P. Hull as its publisher.    **    W. W. Phelps begins publishing the Anti-masonic Canandaigua Phoenix. R. Royce soon buys it and changes the name to the Freeman.    **    Marine and missionary Jonathan Goble is born in Wayne.    **    The steamboat comes to Canandaigua Lake with the launching of the Lady of the Lake.    **    The town of Sennett is taken off of the Cayuga County town of Brutus.    **    Nehemiah Houghton purchases the American Hotel boarding house at Avon's sulphur springs.    **    The Ithaca Journal adds Literary Gazette, and General Advertiser to its title.    **    Over the past 30 years 3,879 people have been incarcerated in state prisons. 1,262 have served their sentences, 3,160 have been pardoned and 25 have escaped. 348 have been moved to other facilities and 765 have died.    **    The Owego Academy is founded.    **     Mehitable Kellogg Fairbank of Williamstown, Massachusetts, travels by Erie Canal to Lyons, and by stage to Sodus, to visit her parents Nathaniel and Mehitable Kellogg. She decides to stay; her husband Stephen and daughter Cordelia arrive soon afterwards.    **    A house is built at 81 Genesee Street in Skaneateles, supposedly by lawyer Freeborn Garrison Jewett.     **    Geneseo's Temple Hill Academy is incorporated under the name Livingston County High School., the county's first.    **    Land speculators begin attempts to wrest more land west of Batavia from the Iroquois.    **    Over 50,000 acres of reservation land owned by the Seneca Indians until last year goes on the market.    **    John Nutt buys 160 acres one mile west of Branchport, part of the Beddoe Tract. He hires Simon Cole to build a road past his property into Pulteney.    **     More steamboats, dubbed the Great White Fleet, begin servicing Chautauqua Lake.    **    Farmer-soldier Hiram Allen is born in Burns.    **    Seventeen-year-old Orson Fowler leaves Cohocton, walks the 400 miles to Heath, Massachusetts, to study under the Reverend Moses Miller of the First Congregational Church.    **    The approximate date Stephen Baldwin builds a mill on the Erie Canal at Baldwinsville.    **     A state law is passed to promote the training of teachers.    **     Combined revenue from the Erie and Champlain canals totals $859,058.    **    The office of Adjutant General is created; military commissions are no longer issued by the Secretary of State.    **    Elija T. Miller takes over the Scottsville public house owned by James Brown – later the Oatka Inn - adds a rear section to the building.    **    Pittsford pioneer, mill owner and school commisioner Jared Barker dies.    **    George Washington Millener and others purchase David Johnson’s dry dock in Port Byron.    **     Cattaraugus County is surveyed. The future Town of Lyndon  is divided into four equal parts – Over North; Down on the Flats;  West of the Center; Over South – the intersection being called Lyndon Center. A general store opens in the Center.

Batavia
Bissell Humphrey, landlord of the Genesee House, buys the site and erects a new tavern.    **     The approximate date Libbeus Fish builds a malt house-brewery.

Buffalo
Businessman Benjamin Rathbun is elected a village trustee.    **    The late Seth Chapin, a member of the Masons, is accused of being implicated in the murder of William Morgan. Nothing is ever proven.    **    Use of the harbor doubles.    **    Peter B. Porter, Reuben Heacock, and other investors organize the Buffalo Hydraulic Association to create power from the three-mile canal between Buffalo Creek and Little Buffalo Creek.    **    Sylvanus Marvin, owner of the local franchise for the failing Old Line mail service to Albany, sells to Auburn inn owner Chauncey H. Coe, who hires Edward L. Stevenson as his local agent, then returns home.    **    Chauncey's brother Bela makes a down payment on the Mansion House.    **    The Buffalo High School Association, organized during a meeting at the Eagle Tavern, begins a campaign to raise funds.

Connewango
 Tavernkeeper James Blanchard builds a hotel in Rutledge, the first frame public-house in the settlement.    **    While their parents are away from their cabin, the children of settler John Towers feed two “black dogs” through the homestead’s fence. The dogs out to be bear cubs. The cubs and their mother are later killed by Towers.    **    Connecticut-born Genesee County resident Nathan Snow arrives. He clears timber, cuts logs and builds a house in a week’s time.    **    Settler Job Gardner arrives from Coxsackie, New York.    **    Settlers Freeborn Fairbanks and Alden Childs arrive.

Le Roy
Pioneer Charles Wilbor moves to Milan, Ohio.

Rochesterville
The population nears 10,000. . There are no adult natives. The oldest person born in the village is 16 years old.    **    A platform is built over the Genesee River to provide space for a farmer's market.   **    The house of hardware merchant Ebenezer Watts is completed.    **    The city has eight boat basins on the Erie Canal - Warehouse, Washington, Fisher's Screw Dock, Fitzhugh's, Ely's, Child's, Hill's (Johnson's) and Gilbert's.    **    An African Methodist Episcopal (AME) church is built at Ford and Spring streets.    **    The village's first directory is published.    **    Miller, banker and speculator James Livingston builds a home in the city's soon-to-be-fashionable Third Ward.    **    Abolitionist bookseller Samuel B. Porter moves here.    **    Alexander Street and Pennsylvania Street (now South Union) are completed from the Erie Canal north to East Avenue. Wadsworth Street (later Howell Street) is laid out on Wadsworth lands.



© 2012     David Minor / Eagles Byte

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