April 4, 1998
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We left Orange County farmer William Wickham and his family
in 1790, holed up for the winter at Tioga Point in northern Pennsylvania.
As signs of spring began appearing, the family was anxious to
be on the move to York State. Making their way to the north by
a combination of boat, shanks mare and canoe, they arrived on
the east shore of Seneca Lake on May 3rd, and made their way up
the sharply sloping hillside until they reached a level spot toward
the top and set up camp. There they erected the first dwºn
the town of Hector and settled in to begin a farm and a new life.
One lake to the east, on Cayuga Lake, settler Roswell Franklin
had recently lost a wife and his youngest child during a battle
with the Seneca. His wife was dead and his child had disappeared,
a captive. The losses were too much for him. He died, as the records
show us, "under the weight of his misfortune."
Pioneers such as the Wickhams and the Franklins were entering
a geography that was slowly taking political form in 1791. Robert
Morris, who had made a reputation as "The Financier of the
American Revolution" applied to the state of Massachusetts
to purchase land recently recovered from land agents Phelps and
Gorham. For the princely and oddly euphonious sum of $333,333.33
he acquired four million acres of land at the far western end
of the state, which encompassed most of the land west of the Genesee
River. Zebulon Norton settled at a rapids on the river. The site
later became West Mendon, them Honeoye Falls. Albany County was
becoming unwieldy in size and the section on the east bank of
the Hudson became Rensselaer County. To the west Otsego County
was incorporated; William Cooper was named presiding judge by
the governor. With the westward migration beginning to accelerate,
a private company was chartered to make waterway improvements
in the state, but little would be done until the second quarter
of the next century, when the Erie Canal became a reality.
The city of Albany meanwhile was becoming quite civilized. This
year saw the founding of the Society for the Promotion of Agriculture,
Arts and Manufactures, and The Albany Institute of History and
Art. Just across the river, in the new Rensselaer County, editor
Silvester Tiffany began publishing the Lansingburgh American
Spy , a weekly newspaper, in April. In September he launched
another paper, Tiffany's Recorder .
The city on Manhattan Island, no longer the nation's capital,
nevertheless began expanding and new land was needed. Part of
the solution was the commencement of a ten-year project to fill
in the Collect Pond, near today's city hall, a swampy body of
water that was becoming increasingly polluted. Our environment
was endangered, even in back in 1791.
© 1998 David Minor / Eagles Byte