Historic Genesse Country: A Guide to Its Lands and Legacies

By Rose O'Keefe

Genesee Country, composed of Allegany, Genesee, Wyoming, Livingston, Monroe and Ontario Counties near the Genesee River in western New York, is rich in local history with national importance. The Seneca and Algonkin nations once called this lush land home, and after the American Revolution, settlers came in hordes to till the soil and raise families. The region later became a hotbed of activity for abolitionists, early supporters of women's rights and religious movements that influenced the entire United States. In this book, author and local historian Rose O'Keefe chronicles the sites where these and other important events took place. Join her on a tour of Genesee Country's legacies.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The History Press
• Release date: Jun 25, 2010
• ISBN: 9781614231295

Rose O'Keefe

Rose O'Keefe grew up in the suburbs of New York City, except for four years spent with her family outside Paris, France. After graduating from SUNY, Postdam, Rose moved to Rochester, New York, and gradually explored the Genesee River Valley on camping outings with family and friends. Since then, she has become a local historian with a specialty in the Frederick Douglass family's years in Rochester. She enjoys presenting slide shows on Rochester's South Wedge, the southeast side of the city and the Douglass family. In order to promote neighborhood pride and area history, Rose has organized five regional history fairs and always looks forward to the next one.

Book preview

expertise.

CHAPTER 1

Casconchiagon

INDIAN LANDING

The most important place in the early history of The Genesee Country, All of whose trails led to Irondequoit Bay, a gateway of the Iroquois Confederacy. Here were scenes of adventure and romance for a period of more than three hundred years involving Indian wars; the struggle for empire between the French and English; and the Revolutionary and Pioneer periods. Religion Commerce and War made this territory a famous battleground bringing here many noted Priests Traders and Soldiers. Across the creek is the site of Schuyler’s Fort and the Lost city of Tryon.

(State Marker at East Bank of Irondequoit Creek in Ellison Park)

Picture a virgin forest stretching one thousand miles from the Atlantic Coast to the Great Lakes, with streams, rivers, waterfalls and lakes teaming with fish, fowl and all kinds of animals. Imagine ancient groups scattered throughout a vast wilderness from the Hudson River to Niagara Falls. Then place the Senecas between Seneca Lake and Casconchiagon, the River of Falls (Genesee River), in a land full of fish, deer, beavers, wild pigeons, ducks, geese, wolves, bears and panthers.

Because it was impossible to take canoes over the Genesee’s rapids and falls, the Senecas used a portage route from the junction of the Genesee River and Red Creek in Genesee Valley Park. Their trail passed along Highland Avenue in Rochester around the Rock and Tree to Indian Landing at Irondequoit Bay. It was the land bridge in an all-water route from the Atlantic Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico.

This print, Lower Cataract on the Casconchiagon, by Thomas Davis was engraved by Morris, London, 1768. Courtesy of Rochester Images: CHPL.

For over three hundred years, water journeys to as far away as the Mississippi Valley began from this most important meeting place in Penfield. Courtesy of Rochester Images: Town of Brighton.

Early European trappers and missionaries explored and mapped the traditional waterways along Lake Ontario and regional rivers and streams that were used more than rough overland trails.

PREEMPTION LINE

Boundary Drawn Between Massachusetts and New York, December 16, 1786. Cause of Long Controversy in Western New York.

(State Marker at U.S. 20 and NYS 5 at Western Edge of Geneva, Ontario County)

New York Colony’s constitution of 1664 was "superceeded [sic] by the first state constitution," which was adopted in April 1777. The Treaty of Fort Stanwix in October 1784 defined the boundaries of the Indian Nations with a western boundary from Buffalo Creek to Pennsylvania, cutting off Seneca lands in the region. It denied Six Nation claims to ancestral lands in Ohio Country.

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, according to Barbara Graymont in Six Nations Indians:

the word savage meant a person who lived in the woods or in a state of nature. By the middle of the eighteenth century there was little difference between the way of life of Indians and White frontier families. Traditional Indian bark houses were still in use, but there were also many log houses and some of hewn planks.

Soldiers who kept diaries on the Sullivan-Clinton Expedition noticed

fine, large fields of corn, beans, squash, pumpkins, melons, cucumbers, potatoes and other vegetables, surrounding the villages. They also found apple and peach orchards, some of which were quite old. The Iroquois also raised horses, cattle and pigs. Some villages also had cut and stacked hay, showing adoption of European ways of feeding cattle.

From 1775 to 1785, Seneca lands were still listed on maps. Courtesy of Rochester Images: RPL, LHD.

After Major General John Sullivan’s soldiers left the area, many Senecas moved to the west side of the Genesee River around Geneseo, Mt. Morris and Avon, at Gardeau, Canadea, Tonawanda, Tuscarora, Buffalo Creek, Cattaraugus and Allegany.

Before the American Revolution, the Genesee Country, like the lands west of Pennsylvania, was either terra incognita (unknown land) or unfamiliar to most easterners. In the decade after the Constitution was passed in 1787, an orgy of land speculation as had never been seen before boomed and burst, leaving stock companies and landowners with large tracts to sell off. Landowners gave pamphlets and brochures about the Genesee Country to returning Revolutionary War soldiers, who faced harsh upland farming in Massachusetts and Connecticut. These farmers matched up with owners who wanted to sell and began a process of selling off lands in smaller parcels. Also, after a taxpayer’s revolt in Massachusetts in 1786 by several hundred farmers, seven hundred families left western Massachusetts, many for the Genesee Valley.

On this map of 1796, western New York was called Genesee Country. Courtesy of Rochester Images: RPL, LHD.

In 1788, all the region west of Utica was the town of Whitestown, according to Orsamus Turner in History of the Pioneer Settlement of Phelps and Gorham’s Purchase and Morris Reserve. The Genesee Country was one of the prizes of the American Revolution. After title fell to Massachusetts and groups of speculators, it went to farmers. In the 1790s, as New Englanders began colonizing the Great Lakes Plain, the Genesee Valley was among their first stops, and the wilderness gave way to tilled fields, pastures and Yankee villages.

CHAPTER 2

Allegany

OIL COUNTRY

THIS IS OIL COUNTRY! The presence of oil in this area of the Allegheny foot-hills has been known by the white men since 1627, when a French missionary reported that the Indians used a good kind of oil for medicinal purposes from the nearby Seneca Oil Spring. Production began in 1879 and reached a peak of more than five million barrels a year by 1885. Then decline began until only 750 thousand barrels were marketed in 1913. After the introduction of the flooding technique—forcing the oil up out of the well by water pressure—production