Auburn, New York: The Entrepreneurs’ Frontier

By Scott W. Anderson

Nestled in the heart of the Finger Lakes region, Auburn, New York, is home to some of the key figures in our nation’s history. Both William Seward and Harriet Tubman lived in Auburn, as did Martha Coffin Wright, a pioneering figure in the struggle for women’s suffrage. Auburn’s significance to American life, however, goes beyond its role in political and social movements. The seeds of American development were sown and bore fruit in small urban centers like Auburn. The town’s early and rapid success secured its place as a cornerstone
of the North American industrial core.

Anderson chronicles the story of Auburn and its inhabitants, individuals with the skills and ingenuity to nurture and sustain an economy of unprecedented growth. He describes the early settlers who capitalized on the rich geographic advantages of the area: abundant water power and access to transportation routes. The entrepreneurs and capital that Auburn attracted built it into a thriving community, one that became a center of invention, manufacturing, and finance in the mid-nineteenth century. Just as the high profits and rapid accumulation of wealth allowed the community to prosper and grow, these factors also initiated its decline. Anderson traces Auburn’s momentous rise and gradual decline, illustrating American capitalism in its rawest form as it played out in small towns across the nation.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Syracuse University Press
• Release date: Oct 13, 2015
• ISBN: 9780815653301

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ISBN: 978-0-8156-1053-3 (cloth)978-0-8156-5330-1 (e-book)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Anderson, Scott W. (Geographer)

Auburn, New York : the entrepreneurs’ frontier / Scott W. Anderson. — First Edition.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8156-1053-3 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8156-5330-1 (e-book) 1. Auburn (N.Y.)—Economic conditions. 2. Entrepreneurship—New York State—Auburn—History. I. Title.

HC108.A93A53 2015

330.9747'68—dc232015024159

Manufactured in the United States of America

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

Preface

Introduction

1. Speculators on the Western Frontier 1789–1815

2. Formation and Integration of an Early Upper Class

3. Seneca Falls and the Perils of Monopoly Capitalism on the Frontier

4. Years of Rapid Growth 1800–1855

5. The Rise of the Industrialists 1848–1880

6. Trickle-Down Economics in the Shaping of Community

7. From an Entrepreneurs’ Frontier to a Best Working-Class Country The Next 130 Years

Conclusion

Appendixes

References

Index

ILLUSTRATIONS

DRAWINGS

1. D. M. Osborne Company, 1900

2. The Pines

3. Cayuga Bridge, 1829

4. Oswego Starch Factory, 1895

PHOTOGRAPHS

1. Skaneateles home of William Vredenburgh, built around 1803

2. Current site of reconstructed Vredenburgh/Kellogg Skaneateles home

3. The Big Dam, 1890

4. Brinkerhoff farm

5. Edwin B. Morgan

6. The Pines, 1906

7. Nineteenth-century residence of the family of Abijah Fitch

8. Western Exchange Hotel

9. Residence built for the family of Dr. Hachaliah Burt

10. Case Memorial Building of the Seymour Library

11. Auburn home of William H. Seward

12. Auburn Prison, 1890

13. Auburn Prison shoe factory

14. Washington Street industrial area, circa 1860s

15. Nineteenth-century residence of the family of George Casey

16. Auburn Woolen Mill

17. Auburn Savings Bank

18. Interior of the Auburn Savings Bank

19. Nineteenth-century residence of the family of John N. Knapp

20. Nineteenth-century residence of the family of Oscar F. Knapp

21. Nineteenth-century residence of the family of Silas Bradley

22. Case Willard Mansion, 1890

23. Thomas Kingsford

24. Package for Kingsford’s Oswego Pure Starch

25. David Munson Osborne

26. William A. Kirby seated on the No. 3 Kirby Mower-Reaper, 1867

27. Osborne No. 8 self-rake reaper, circa 1882

28. Bird’s-eye view of Auburn’s industrial area

29. Nineteenth-century residence of the family of John H. Osborne, 1890

30. Nineteenth-century residence of the family of William Kirby

31. Nineteenth-century residence of the family of Cyrenus Wheeler, 1890

32. Residence of the family of Nelson Beardsley, 1890

33. Nineteenth-century residence of the family of David M. Osborne, 1890

34. Nineteenth-century residence of the family of Charles P. Wood, 1868

35. COLOR PLATE: Nineteenth-century residence of the family of Josiah Barber

36. COLOR PLATE: Nineteenth-century residence built for the family of Samuel Laurie

37. Nineteenth-century residence of the family of F. A. Parker

38. Nineteenth-century residence of the family of Lorenzo Nye

39. Nineteenth-century residence of the family of General MacDougall, 1890

40. Nineteenth-century residence of the family of C. A. McCarthy, 1890

41. Nineteenth-century residence of the family of Fred H. Fay, 1890

42. Nineteenth-century residence of the family of H. D. Noble, 1890

43. Nineteenth-century residence of the family of Mrs. R. F. Smith, 1890

CHARTS

1. Auburn and Seneca Falls comparative population growth, 1820–1960

2. Growth in production in pounds per year, Oswego Starch Factory

3. Growth in population of cities in New York State, 1840–1880

4. Growth in the value of dwellings per capita in cities in New York, 1865–1875

5. Fifty most valuable residences: 1840, 1855, and 1878

6. Total property holdings of the top fifty holders: 1840, 1855, and 1878

7. Average value of residences: 1840, 1855, and 1878

8. Average value of total property holdings: 1840, 1855, and 1878

9. Average property holdings by class: 1840, 1855, and 1878

10. Annual wages for selected occupations: 1875

11. Average annual wages: New York cities, 1880

MAPS

1. Population of Auburn area communities in 1835

2. Source regions of immigrants to the early Auburn area

3. Detail from the first sheet of DeWitt’s state map of New York, 1792

4. New York State land tracts

5. Map of Aurelius Township showing Great Lots, Surveyors’ 50-acre lots, and State’s 100-acre lots

6. Purchase history of the six Great Lots of Auburn

7. Seneca Falls lots purchased or acquired by the Bayard Company

8. Detail from Seneca Falls Village plat, 1815

9. Map of the lots of the Cayuga Reservation

10. Early state-funded highways

11. Cayuga Reservation lots acquired at auction

12. Consolidated holdings of the Cayuga Land Company

13. Total sawmill production, 1835

14. Distillery production, 1835

15. Gristmill production, Auburn area, 1855

16. Total leather product revenues, 1855

17. Largest industry in each community, Auburn area, 1855

18. Metalwork production, 1835

19. Detail from Map of the City of Auburn, 1871

20. COLOR PLATE: Detail from Map of the Village of Auburn, 1835

21. COLOR PLATE: Property held by class, 1840

22. COLOR PLATE: Property held by class, 1855

23. COLOR PLATE: Property held by class, 1878

24. COLOR PLATE: Property held by high-status white-collar persons, 1840

25. COLOR PLATE: Property held by high-status white-collar persons, 1878

26. COLOR PLATE: Property held by low-status white-collar workers, building trade workers, and industrial trade workers, 1840

27. COLOR PLATE: Property held by low-status white-collar workers, building trade workers, and industrial trade workers, 1878

28. COLOR PLATE: Property held by semiskilled and unskilled workers, milliners, dressmakers, and tailors, and persons with occupations unknown, 1840

29. COLOR PLATE: Property held by semiskilled and unskilled workers, milliners, dressmakers, and tailors, and persons with occupations unknown, 1878

TABLES

1. Population Growth, 1800–2011

2. Prices of Soldiers’ Bounties and Patented Lots, 1783–1799

3. Price Variation in Surveyors’ 50s Lots by Township at Auction, July 16–21, 1792

4. Sales of State’s 100s at Auction, September 2–6, 1794

5. Average Price of Lots in the New Military Tract, 1798–1824

6. William Vredenburgh’s Purchase and Sale of Milton 86

7. Auburn Prison Businesses, 1856

8. Subscribers to and Directors of the Auburn Woolen Mill

9. Stockholders in the National Bank of Auburn, 1878

10. Officers and Directors of the Cayuga County Bank, 1833

11. Directors of the Auburn and Owasco Canal Company, 1835

12. Board of Directors of the Auburn & Syracuse Railroad Company, 1834

13. Holders of Stock in Oswego Starch

14. Individuals Owning Approximately 2,000 Shares of Oswego Starch Factory Stock, 1896

15. Growth of D. M. Osborne Company

16. Investors in D. M. Osborne Enterprises

17. Taxed Incomes of Auburn’s 327 Top Earners, 1864

18. Incomes of Auburn Investors in 1864 by Industry

19. Investors in Oswego Starch Factory

20. Auburn Properties Held by Nelson Beardsley, 1840, 1855, 1878

21. New Auburn City Street Names Associated with Successful Families

22. Auburn Property Holdings of David M. Osborne, 1855 and 1878

23. Value of Estates as Examined in Probate

24. James S. Seymour Investment Portfolio, 1875

25. Profile of Families and Households: Auburn, New York, 1850–1875

26. Profile of Auburn Property Holdings, 1840, 1855, and 1878

27. Change in Value of the Dollar, 1840–1880

28. Taxonomy of Class by Occupation

29. Percent Foreign-Born, 1900–1970

30. Foreign-Born Population of the City of Auburn, 1900–1980

PREFACE

This book examines the economic development of a small, prosperous area in central New York from the first American settlement in the 1790s until its commercial and industrial maturation in the 1880s. The Auburn, New York area was both extraordinary and commonplace for its time. It was extraordinary as a place of great talent and entrepreneurial ingenuity, nurturing a prosperous class of businesspersons who experimented with new ways of combining, investing, accumulating, and reinvesting capital. Auburn exhibited landscapes of comfort, wealth, and power, and gave rise to prominent national leaders in commerce, industry, and politics.

Yet, it was commonplace because its landscapes suggest an economic development little different from that of dozens of similar communities in New York State and hundreds of similar communities in the Northeast and Midwest. Beautiful old houses remain, though they are in various stages of maintenance or disrepair. Once-vibrant factories have been demolished or left to decay. Much of the entrepreneurial vitality that built an early prosperity long ago moved on to the larger cities, or simply disappeared.

What makes the Auburn area different from so many other places of similar size—and thus worthy of study—lies not in its landscapes of prosperity and decay but in how early the Auburn area developed and how wide-ranging were the interests of its entrepreneurs. These entrepreneurs arrived with the first settlers and were markedly energetic and flexible in looking for new ways to earn money and invest capital. They may even be seen as prototypes of the growing class of driven and acquisitive capitalists who spread to all the promising communities of the American frontier, exploited the resources of a continent, and eventually built the American economy into the behemoth it was to become.

Processes of economic development that emerged in the Auburn area were early innovations in the evolution of American capitalism. Auburn-area entrepreneurs were inventors or early adopters of innovations as various as community-wide investment in banking, bringing the first cross-state railroad through the area, production of labor-saving agricultural tools and implements, industrial production of an early commodity (cornstarch) with consistent quality and packaging for global markets, the invention of a prison system that engaged inmates in productive (and profitable) labor in a penitentiary environment (and later the reform of this inhumane system), using customer capital to finance a huge shipping corporation (American Express), and a disastrously unsuccessful attempt to establish a silk industry using prison labor.

Many American places where entrepreneurs gathered, schemed, and invested grew so rapidly in size that their processes of economic development became too complex to unravel. Growth of the Auburn area stalled around 1900. Not many new factories replaced old ones; and few new neighborhoods grew up on the foundations of predecessors. Auburn’s landscapes remained much as they were in the late nineteenth century, before trolleys, trains, automobiles, and globalization reshaped urban landscapes. They also remained small.

Yet, this is what makes the area such a fruitful place to study. It gives evidence of a single cycle of growth and decline that can be analyzed and understood. We can identify all the people involved; all the businesses they started; all the employees they hired; all the homes, stores, and factories they built; and how their efforts grew the local economy. More importantly, we can identify how much money these people had, where it came from, and what they did with it. Thus we may come to know the entrepreneurial class that was drawn to the earliest settlements, how they formed and reproduced an upper class as the frontier matured, and how their business interests and investments changed over time. The more we understand these communities, the more we understand the growth and changing behaviors of this entrepreneurial class. And the more we understand this class, the more we understand how economic development occurs in places and what might be done to promote it. Few questions are more pressing to Americans in the dynamically changing twenty-first century.

My research into the early economic development of the Auburn area involved several years of intense investigation of primary documentary materials. I began by reading and analyzing more than 4,000 land transaction records, beginning with the earliest available, so that I could get a better understanding of individuals involved in land speculation and land dealing in the New Military Tract and Cayuga Reservation. Most of these records are available in the Cayuga County Clerk’s Office. Later records are available in the Onondaga County Clerk’s Office, and many for the Cayuga Reservation are available in the Clerk’s Office of Seneca County.

Due to the patience and generosity of Director Peter Jones and Curator Stephanie Przybylec, I read through the entire archive of the Cayuga County Historical Association, which is available in the Cayuga Museum in Auburn.

Cayuga County Historian Thomas Eldred generously gave me access to the resources of the Cayuga County Historian’s Office. This included the opportunity to make copies of rare plat maps of lots along the Owasco Outlet in Auburn that showed sequences of transactions between entrepreneurs. This provided me with a deeper understanding of the differences in behaviors between Auburn’s entrepreneurs and the monopoly capitalists of Seneca Falls, as interpreted in chapter 3.

I found many essential resources in the archives of other historical associations, including the Onondaga Historical Association’s collection on William J. Vredenburgh, the Oswego County Historical Association’s collection on the Oswego Starch Factory, and the Seneca Falls Historical Association’s collections on the Bayard and Cayuga Bridge Companies.

The New York State Archives provided critical documentation on land transactions in the New Military Tract and Cayuga Reservation. I am grateful to Jim Folts, Head of Researcher Services, for helping me acquire a number of records, including full-size photocopies of the original surveyors’ maps of each of the twenty-eight townships in the New Military Tract. I am also grateful to Bernard Corcoran of the Cayuga County Office of Real Property Services for providing digital copies of these maps.

I was able to read and record the wills and probate records for most of the Auburn area’s important nineteenth-century entrepreneurs from the archives of the Cayuga County Surrogate’s Court.

I am grateful to the dedicated staff of the Cayuga County Clerk’s Office for providing photocopies of the property tax records for the City of Auburn for the years 1855 and 1878. These records, along with the 1840 tax book from the archives of the Cayuga County Historical Association, and city directories for the years between 1857 (the earliest available) and 1878 found in the Cayuga County Office of Real Property Services, provided essential documentation for my interpretation of trickle-down economics in chapter 7.

I would like to thank the historical geographer James Lemon, cultural geographer James Duncan, and political scientist Lily Ling for their helpful commentary on early versions of this study. I want to also thank historical geographer Anne Mosher for her many helpful comments and suggestions. And I want to thank political geographer John Agnew, chair of my dissertation committee, for his years of guidance and encouragement.

Most of all, I want to thank my dear friend and mentor, Donald Meinig, for sharing with me his delight with and dedication to the field of historical geography, and for challenging me to rise to his standards.

Introduction

In February 1877, the citizens of Auburn, New York came together to incorporate the Cayuga County Historical Society. In forming the society, they hoped to capture the personal stories of the children of some of their area’s first settlers before they passed away. They also felt pride in their city and area—and equal pride in themselves. In the space of a single lifetime the Auburn area had been transformed from a Native American habitat, which settlers perceived as wilderness, to pioneer outposts on the northwest frontier; then to cities and towns with bustling thoroughfares and prosperous neighborhoods; and finally to a set of urban loci at the very center of the American ecumene. The newly formed historical society came together to celebrate an existence hard and successfully won.

To the citizens of Auburn and the central New York area in the late 1870s, their predecessors had been remarkable people who accomplished remarkable things, spawned remarkable children, and offered an equally remarkable future. Already two local historians had authored books applauding their accomplishments. Henry Hall published his History of Auburn in 1869 and Elliot Storke would publish the History of Cayuga County, New York, with Illustrations and Biographical Sketches of Some of Its Prominent Men and Pioneers in 1879. Cayuga County gave the nation a president: Millard Fillmore was born, raised, and trained in the law near the village of Moravia at the southern end of Owasco Lake. Auburn gave New York State two governors, Enos T. Throop and William H. Seward, who came to Auburn as impecunious but well-trained young lawyers. Throop arrived in 1806 and Seward in 1823, and both men rose to fortune and prominence. Throop eventually became a protégé of Martin Van Buren and took his seat as governor when Van Buren became vice president. Seward served as secretary of state under both Lincoln and Johnson and played instrumental roles in the Civil War, the purchase of Alaska, and the formation of the Republican Party. Seward also became a casualty in one of the country’s moments of tragedy. On the night John Wilkes Booth shot Abraham Lincoln, an accomplice stole into Seward’s bedroom to assassinate him as well. The secretary was stabbed deeply in the face and left disfigured until his death in Auburn in 1872.

The central New York region around Auburn also played a key role in important nineteenth-century social movements. Abolitionism and Republicanism in the region contributed to the political polarization that brought on the Civil War. Harriet Tubman settled in Auburn on a twenty-five-acre South Street lot she bought on easy terms from William H. Seward while engaging in her heroic work on the Underground Railroad (Stahr 2012, 154). Evangelical religious fervor made Auburn, like other small manufacturing centers throughout central New York, part of the Burned-over District in the 1820s and 1830s (Cross 1965). Established in 1819, the Auburn Theological Seminary became one of the leading Presbyterian institutions in the nation, training cadres of missionaries whose influence became global, particularly through proselytizing in places like Hawaii. Soon after its founding in 1819, the Auburn State Penitentiary inaugurated the Auburn System, using forced convict labor in silent workshops. The Auburn System became a national model for prisons throughout much of the nineteenth century, and was a motivating factor bringing both Alexis de Tocqueville and Charles Dickens to the United States in the first half of the nineteenth century. Central New Yorkers like Port Byron physician Lewis Dioclesian promoted temperance movements with missionary zeal.

Central New York was also a core region in the struggle for suffrage and women’s rights. Seneca Falls today holds the title as Women’s Rights Hall of Fame, not only because the first women’s rights convention was held there in 1848 but also because prominent activists lived in the area. Elizabeth Cady Stanton settled in Seneca Falls, and Martha Coffin Wright settled in Auburn. Their homes became important crucibles of the movement and provided a safe haven and hospitality to all the major figures in the women’s rights movement of the time, including Lucretia Mott (Martha Wright’s sister) and Susan B. Anthony, as well as abolitionists like Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison. Garrison’s son, William, married Martha Wright’s daughter, Ellen, in Auburn in 1864 (Penney and Livingston 2004, 166–67).

The importance of the Auburn area to American life, however, went well beyond the sometimes ephemeral consequences of political and social activism. The seeds of American development were sown and bore fruit in small urban centers like Auburn in what was to become the North American industrial core. Significantly, in small manufacturing cities like Auburn, no less than in the larger urban centers, a new class of individuals evolved who were capable of nurturing and sustaining an economy of unprecedented wealth, ingenuity, efficiency, aggressiveness, ruthlessness, and productivity.

Local pride and a sense of destiny inspired a group of investors from Auburn and nearby communities to help create the first cross-state railroad in 1838. Auburn-area lawyers and merchants financed the link from Syracuse to Auburn of the system that evolved into the New York Central and Hudson River Railroad. Local pride no doubt inspirited Henry Wells and William Fargo as well. Wells, who lived in Port Byron for a few years as a young man and retired to Aurora late in life, learned the freight business while working as a hauler for one of the largest gristmills in central New York. He started American Express in 1850. Fargo cut his teeth at the Auburn freight depot of the Auburn and Syracuse Railroad. Together they envisioned new opportunities in the expanding West, and started Wells, Fargo & Co. in 1852 to haul bullion from the California gold fields, creating a mythic and permanent image in Western lore of careening stagecoaches and chests of gold at risk.

Equally enduring was the post–Civil War vision of a group of Auburn-area investors, including William H. Seward Jr., who developed the idea of capitalizing a transcontinental shipping company by involving as investors its own best customers—those merchants across the country whose livelihoods depended on reliable shipments. Merchants Union Express Company, capitalized at $20,000,000 in 1866, merged with Henry Wells’s earlier enterprise in 1868 to make American Express one of the first American companies to both operate and be financed transcontinentally.

Central New Yorkers had their greatest impact, however, in the area of skills and ingenuity. Jethro Wood invented the world’s first cast-iron plow on his farm near Aurora in 1819, and William H. Seward defended his patent. Cyrenus Wheeler invented and manufactured the famous Cayuga Chief drop reaper in the 1850s. William Seward Burroughs, who came to Auburn as a boy in 1871, began inventing the first successful mechanical adding machine during a lengthy convalescence from an illness caught while calculating figures laboriously in Auburn’s Cayuga County Bank. Profits from his invention helped to support his grandson, beat novelist William S. Burroughs, as he wrote books such as The Naked Lunch.

David Munson Osborne had a substantial impact not only on the local economy and landscapes but on the nineteenth-century agricultural revolution, which raised farming productivity throughout the world and made it possible for millions of North Americans to move from farms to the cities. In partnership with local inventors like William Kirby, C. C. Dennis, and Cyrenus Wheeler, Osborne developed dozens of new labor-saving agricultural devices. Established in 1858, D. M. Osborne & Company made Auburn, as boosters claimed, the world’s largest manufacturing center for farm implements in the 1890s. It was absorbed into International Harvester in 1903.

Technical mastery, a mechanically gifted labor pool, entrepreneurial genius, and available capital made the Auburn area a special place of its time. The first side-wheel steamship engine was crafted in Auburn. McIntosh, Seymour & Company built steam engines large enough to power generating plants and locomotives. Later, in 1913, they built the first stationary diesel engine in America. Other companies built tools, skates, sleds, carriages, buttons, gloves, rubber boots, saddles, harnesses, carriage hardware, rope, wool carpets, men’s and women’s clothing, pianos, traction machines, and household appliances such as wash wringers. Dunn & McCarthy set a national standard for ladies’ shoes.

The pride projected by the founders of the historical society was still justified by the turn of the century. By 1900, the city of Auburn contained 350 manufacturing plants employing 6,000 workers. The Osborne company alone employed at least 2,600 of these workers. The population of 30,345 had been growing by as much as 10 percent per year, although it would stall thereafter, reaching a high point of 36,652 in 1930. It would decline to 27,687 by 2010.

Drawing 1. D. M. Osborne...

Drawing 1. D. M. Osborne Company, 1900. Source: Auburn Businessmen’s Association. 1900. City of Auburn, a Souvenir. Reproduced with permission of the Seymour Library, Auburn, New York.

Other communities in the Auburn area experienced similar growth spurts and declines over the same time period. They were tightly interlinked through the investment, finance, and manufacturing strategies of their entrepreneurs.

Table 1

Population Growth, 1800–2011

Table 1

Source: US and New York State Censuses.

Map 1. Population of Auburn...

Map 1. Population of Auburn area communities in 1835. Source: New York State Census, 1835. Map by Scott Anderson.

In the city of Auburn in 1877 there were breweries, starch companies, publishing companies, an opera house, four weekly and two daily newspapers, six banks, a business school, twenty-one churches, two railroads (New York Central and Hudson River Railroad and