Schenectady—Canajoharie—Utica—Rome—Wampsville; State 5S. 107.5 m.
Two-lane concrete with short stretches of macadam.
New York Central R.R. parallels route between Schenectady and Rome.
Closely following the south bank of the Mohawk River, State 5S supplements State 5 (see Tour 11) across the river, the main highway through the Mohawk Valley. Twenty-one bridges connect the two riverbanks and join the opposite towns in a close community life. Frequently lifting above the valley floor, State 5S commands expansive views of river, flatlands, and wooded hills.
The south side of the river has its share of old Dutch houses, sites of Indian castles and Colonial forts, shrines to Jesuit missionaries, factories and railroads, Palatine settlements, Revolutionary battlefields, old taverns, and monuments to native sons who made good; but greater than these, though so unobtrusive as to be easily missed altogether, is a wide cattail-choked ditch paralleled by a bank wide enough for a set of automobile tracks—the old Erie Canal bed and towpath. Here and there the bed is filled in; stretches of it are marked by huge steel towers carrying high tension wires; the road runs along it for many miles, crossing and re-crossing it from side to side, with the river stretching away to the right.
Today the canalized river is the main unit of the State’s Barge Canal system, constructed in 1905–18; at intervals of from five to ten miles are huge modern concrete locks that can clear 2,000-ton barges; the 100-ton steel gates, electrically operated, can be opened or closed in 30 seconds. Such are the triumphs of modern engineering. But in the 1820’s, when the first Erie Canal was being built, engineering skill was inadequate to the task of controlling river currents, so that it was necessary to dig an artificial ditch across the State paralleling the natural water courses. The ditch was dug with pickaxe and shovel; most of the laborers were Irish immigrants, three of whom could finish three rods of canal, four feet deep, in five-and-a-half days. Tanned, muscular, they worked bareback, harassed by mosquitoes that ‘could drill through boots.’ The canal offered ‘the first great field of Catholic employment and avenue of Catholic emigration westward’; priests followed the faithful into the wilderness, building altars in the fields and then churches in the towns that sprang up on the sites.
The original Erie was 40 feet wide and 4 feet deep, accommodating boats of about 30 tons; between 1836 and 1862 it was enlarged to accommodate 240-ton boats—not very large, but large enough to be a decisive factor in the development of the Empire State and the Middle West by providing cheap transportation for goods and passengers. Westward-moving emigrants chanted:
Then there’s the State of New York, where some are very rich,
Themselves and a few others have dug a mighty ditch,
To render it more easy for us to find a way
And sail up the water to Michigania . . .
Besides a few choice examples of Dutch, Palatine, and post-Colonial buildings, this route and the one across the river display numerous and varied Greek Revival structures that were the product of the first two decades of canal prosperity. But the valley is noted for its post-Civil War buildings: square, boxlike houses topped by functionless lanterns and ornamented with porches. One historian has called this the ‘Mohawk Valley style.’ Perhaps the State’s noblest and most significant architecture of the mid-nineteenth century appears in the magnificently massive masonry of the aqueducts and locks built during the first enlargement of the canal, 1836–62.
The western half of the route tells the story of the resistance offered to British, Tory, and Indian forces during the Revolution by the farmer sons of the Palatine emigrants. The events, which reach their climax at Oriskany and Fort Stanwix, have been narrated in Harold Frederic’s In the Valley and Walter D. Edmonds’s Drums along the Mohawk.
West of SCHENECTADY, 0 m. (220 alt., 95,692 pop.) (see Schenectady), State 5S skirts the GENERAL ELECTRIC PLANT (L), a compact group of red and gray factory and office buildings stretching away for a mile under radio towers and grimy smokestacks.
The MOHAWK RIVER (R) encircles several large islands, locale of the legend of the passing of the last of the Mohawks. When he was called by the Great Spirit, the old Indian gave his catch of fish to a white friend and refused the usual firewater offered in return, saying, ‘Great Spirit call, Indian no need.’ He sat down in the stern of his canoe, his arms folded, and the craft moved swiftly upstream, pulled by some invisible power into the setting sun. The next day his empty canoe was found floating in the river.
At 1.6 m. the route crosses the ERIE CANAL BED AND TOWPATH; at 2.3 m. are two well-preserved ERIE CANAL LOCKS (R), unusual in that water still flows through them, the old ditch here carrying water to the General Electric power plant. On hot summer days neighborhood boys use the lock as a swimming hole; a hundred years ago 20,000 boats passed through it in one season, an average of one for every 17 minutes night and day. The canal was choked with barges pulled across the State by mules and horses, carrying settlers’ supplies to the West and farm products to the markets of the East. Forty thousand emigrants rode the packets in one year. Packets had priority over freighters; if a freighter neglected to drop its tow rope to let a packet pass by, a sickle-like knife protruding from the packet’s bow cut the rope.
By 1845 the canal had become the State’s biggest employer with 25,000 men, women, and boys working on 4,000 boats and barges and at the canal basins; wages were about $20 a month for steermen, $12 for adult drivers, $10 for boys, and $8 for deckhands. Child labor thrived: an estimated 5,000 boys, ‘specimens of depravity’ who gravitated to the canal from city and country, drove the mules along the towpath; at the end of the season they would ‘haul up at either end and git what you can.’
The ‘canawler,’ half sailor and half landlubber, swore, drank, and fought hard. The boys fought for their turn through the locks and were often joined by captains and crews in knock-down, drag-out brawls. Whisky sold for 6½¢ a pint, applejack 25¢ a gallon. The story is told of a captain who sent a boy ashore for rum and bread; when the boy returned with two loaves of bread and one jug of rum he was thrashed for buying too much bread. At each lock and basin, the latter with coal, grain, and supply warehouses, there was a tavern where boat crews laying by overnight would gather, and ‘the squawk fiddle and the wail of the accor-deen would mingle on the evening air with the rasp of rugged voices raised in song’; they created their own balladry, reflecting their hard, careless, peregrinating life:
’Tis haul in your bowlines,
Stand by that old sorr’ mule;
The cook she’s on a racket,
She acts just like a fool.
For the Erie she’s a-risin’
An’ our gin ’tis gett’n’ low:
An’ I hardly think
We’ll strike a drink,
Till we reach old Buffalo.
At 2.4 m. is the junction with Schermerhorn Rd.
Left on this road 0.3 m. to the BRADT HOUSE (private), a well-preserved example of the type of Dutch farmhouse found in the Capital District. Built in 1735 outside the Schenectady stockade near the river-flat farm of the Bradts, the story-and-a-half house reflects city models in its use of brick and in its steep gable with ‘mouthteeth’ courses. The end wings, dormer, and porch are nineteenth-century additions, but they cannot obscure either the fundamentally Dutch lines of the central mass or the Dutch details like the gable portholes and wrought-iron beam anchors.
At 4.2 m. (R) is a beautifully preserved three-arch aqueduct built about 1840. The road parallels the old Erie ditch and towpath (R).
The JAN MABIE HOUSE (R), 6.3 m., is a characteristic one-and-a-half-story Dutch farmhouse built of local bluestone laid up at random without mortar, pointed and painted on the exterior and plastered on the interior. Only slight alterations mar the quaint Dutch flavor. The interior still retains the large cellar fireplace, the heavy beams—some 14 by 12 inches, and the wide pine floor boards. The first white owner of the land was Daniel Van Antwerpen; in 1705 he deeded half his land to Jan Mabie, who may have built this house.
AMSTERDAM, 16.5 m. (288 alt., 33,640 pop.) (see Tour 11), is at the junction with State 30 (see Tour 24).
At 20.1 m. is the junction with a macadam road.
Right on this road 0.5 m. to FORT HUNTER (300 alt., 700 pop.), a scattering of homes and churches, named for the fort built here by the British Governor Hunter in 1711. It was one of a chain of defenses to protect British gains in this territory against French and Indian aggression and depradations.
At the eastern end of the village is QUEEN ANNE’S PARSONAGE, erected in 1712 as a part of Queen Anne’s Episcopal Chapel. Queen Anne ordered the chapel built at her own expense after the friendly Mohawk had asked for a place to worship the white man’s God.
At the beginning of the Revolution, the remains of Fort Hunter were cleared away and a heavy stockade was erected around the chapel, with a blockhouse bristling with cannon at each corner. In the 1820’s the chapel was razed to make a path for the Erie Canal, but the parsonage remains with but few changes—a new roof, new interior woodwork, and a new door in the south side.
One of the absorbing engineering problems in the construction of the Erie was how to get across transverse streams; the final solution was the aqueduct—a man-made river crossing a natural river over a bridge. On the western edge of the village is the SCHOHARIE CREEK AQUEDUCT, constructed, so runs the inscription on the parapet, by ‘Otis Eddy, bldr., 1841.’ This magnificent cut-limestone structure ranks with the Utica State Hospital as one of the finest pieces of monumental construction in the State preserved from the 1840’s. Thirteen great piers carried the wooden trunk containing the 41½-by-7-foot water section of the canal, and 14 graceful 40-foot arches supported the towpath and braced the piers. It stands 624 feet long, a fitting monument to the confident grandeur of the imperial builders of the Empire State. European engineers came to view the remarkable feat of carrying a canal high above a river; artists sketched this and other Erie Canal aqueducts and carried the pictures back to England to be used for designs on English pottery.
The SHRINE OF OUR LADY OF MARTYRS (L) in AURIESVILLE, 22.5 m. (320 alt., 126 pop.), is a memorial to Father Isaac Jogues, brothers René Goupil and Jean de Lalande, and five mission priests, all of whom met martyrdom at the hands of the Indians and were canonized on June 21, 1925, the first North American Saints of the Roman Catholic Church. Father Jogues (1607–46), a French Jesuit, came to Canada in 1636 to work among the Indians. Captured by Mohawks in August 1642, he refused a chance to escape and saw Goupil chopped down at his feet. Tortured and dragged from village to village, he finally escaped with the help of Domine Megapolensis at Fort Orange (see Albany). After a brief visit to France he was back in America and in September 1646 returned to his charge among the Indians and to certain death. He was killed on October 18, 1646, in the Mohawk village of Osseruenon, on the site of which the shrine now stands.
In 1884 the Society of Jesus bought the land, erected a chapel, and developed the shrine, which now includes a coliseum, an inn, a cafeteria, and a replica of an Indian long house containing an exhibit of Mohawk artifacts. Each Sunday from April 15 to October 15 masses are celebrated, and on the Sunday nearest August 15 thousands of Catholics assemble at this quiet spot in the Mohawk Valley to honor the memory of the Saints who suffered martyrdom three centuries ago.
In KATERI’S GROTTO, adjoining the shrine, is the statue of Kateri Tekakwitha, ‘Lily of the Mohawks.’ Born in 1656 of a Mohawk father and a Christian Algonquian mother, she was left an orphan at the age of four during a smallpox epidemic, which also disfigured her. Withstanding the reproaches and tortures inflicted on her by pagan relatives, she persisted in Christian piety and escaped to a Christian Indian village in Canada, where she carried her religious fervor to such extremes of self-torture that she died in 1680 at the age of 24. Scores of accounts of extraordinary cures professedly achieved through the intercession of this Indian girl have been submitted to the Vatican for possible adjudication as miracles. If she is canonized, she will be the first American-born Saint.
The route continues to parallel the canal bed and towpath (L); an occasional well-hoed vegetable garden flourishes in the rich soil that carried the canal waters. Several major labor-saving devices were invented to meet the needs of the job of clearing the land and digging the ditch: a tree-puller—an endless screw with a cable attached to a tree; a grubbing machine propelled by horses, making possible the removal of 40 stumps a day; a plow with a second cutting blade, for work among roots and underbrush; and, most important, hydraulic cement. The common quicklime mortar first used would not slack; imported cement was too expensive; the canal project hung in the balance until Canvass White burned stone, pulverized it and mixed it with sand, placed the mixture in a bucket of water, and produced a cheap cement that set rigidly.
In October 1775, in a meeting on the river flats (R) at 23.6 m., the Tryon County Committee of Safety, organized by a group of valley patriots to promote the cause of the Revolution, failed to persuade Mohawk chieftains to drop their loyalty to England and remain neutral during the struggle.
In 1666 Alexandre de Tracy, governor of Canada, led a French army against the Mohawk towns to convince the Iroquois of the strength of the French in the north. When he reached Andagoron, middle Mohawk castle of the Bear Clan (1642–66), the site of which is on Stone Ridge (L), 30.1 m., he found the settlement abandoned, the Mohawk having fled to Iconderoga. Tracy left the castle in smoldering ruins and moved on to Iconderoga, where the Mohawk had massed for the attack. Overwhelmed by the number of invaders, the Indians fled without resistance, and de Tracy’s men destroyed the last of the Mohawk towns.
CANAJOHARIE, 37.8 m. (320 alt., 2,573 pop.), a model village of the middle Mohawk Valley, depends for its prosperity chiefly on its food-packing industry, with other food products plants and a paper flour sack factory making their contribution. The name, from the Indian meaning the pot that washes itself, refers to a large pothole at the entrance to CANAJOHARIE GORGE, south of the village, where the water boils endlessly; about a mile up the creek is a waterfall which drops 45 feet into the gorge. The village, settled by Dutch and Germans about 1730, was in 1779 the concentration point for General James Clinton’s army.
The BEECH-NUT PLANT (open; guide service), main office on Church Street, packs bacon, peanut butter, strained baby foods, chewing gum, and candy. The 800 employees, most of them women in white uniforms, watch over complicated automatic machines that process and pack the products. The two-hour inspection tour covers curing, smoking, and packing bacon, making chewing gum, mixing peanut butter, etc.
The CANAJOHARIE LIBRARY and ART GALLERY (open 9–12, 2–6 Mon.–Fri.; 9–12, 2–5 Sat.; 2–5 Sun.), Church St. opposite the main office of the Beech-Nut Packing Company, occupies the Arkell Memorial Building. Erected in 1924 from plans by Tilton & Githens of New York City, it is reminiscent of the gambreled Van Alstyne House, but the scale is unfortunately disturbed by the Greek Revival entrance motive. The Gallery, the first established in the valley, displays more than 100 paintings, including a full-sized copy of Rembrandt’s Night Watch and four originals by Winslow Homer: Watching the Breakers, See-Saw, Boy on the Rocks, and On the Beach.
The VAN ALSTYNE HOUSE (open; apply to steward), Moyer St., now the Fort Rensselaer Club, is a long, low, stone story-and-a-half house built in 1749 by Marte Janse Van Alstyne, an early settler. It contains a large collection of documents and relics relating to Mohawk Valley history. In 1774–5 it served as headquarters for the Tryon County Committee of Safety and was visited by General Washington in 1783.
At the eastern line of FORT PLAIN, 41.4 m. (320 alt., 2,761 pop.), at the confluence of Otsquago Creek and the Mohawk River, a gas station has been swung over the gray walls of an abandoned canal lock, the basin serving as a garage. To the right of the highway bridge are the five well-preserved arches of the Otsquago aqueduct.
On one of the main migratory bird routes, Fort Plain has a bird sanctuary in FISH AND GAME PARK, River Road, where native wild birds are fed in winter and protected during the nesting season. On ABEEL ISLAND, in the Mohawk River at the north end of the village, there is a 50-acre game refuge for water and land birds and wild animals. The island was named for John Abeel, an Indian trader who married the daughter of a Seneca chief after the Indian fashion. Out of this marriage came the famous Indian warrior, Cornplanter.
The PARIS-BLEEKER HOUSE (open), on a private road between upper Main and upper Mohawk Sts., originally the old Paris Trading Post built in 1786 and now a D.A.R. chapter house and museum, contains many Indian and Colonial relics.
West of the village, at 42.5 m., is the SITE OF FORT PLAIN (L), built in 1776 to protect the valley settlements from raiders. It was considered one of the best fortifications in the valley.
On a wooded bluff (L) overlooking Nowadaga (Ind., place of mud turtles) Creek, the INDIAN CASTLE CHURCH, 51.4 m., marks the site of the upper castle inhabited by the Mohawk Bear Clan between 1700 and 1775. Here Sir William Johnson built Fort Hendrick in 1756 and named it for his friend and ally ‘King’ Hendrick, who had been killed the year before in the Lake George campaign; and here Johnson became enamored of Molly, the sister of Joseph Brant. After Johnson’s death Molly returned to the castle and from here sent a warning of General Herkimer’s plans to her brother, Joseph Brant, at Fort Stanwix, resulting in the ambush at Oriskany (see below). In 1779 the last of the Indians were removed from the castle and the land was turned over to white settlers.
The church, the sole surviving structure of all the Mohawk castles, was built in 1769 by Daniel Muller for Johnson, who presented it to his Indian friends. Brant, who had been educated at Eleazer Wheelock’s school, now Dartmouth College, here translated St. Mark’s Gospel into Mohawk. The simple clapboarded frame building originally had the entrance in the middle of the east side, like many other Colonial churches, and the Gothic Revival steeple was originally an open Georgian cupola.
The HERKIMER ESTATE (R), 53.8 m., is a 160-acre tract (picnicking) maintained by the State and containing the old Herkimer homestead, the Herkimer family burial ground, and a 60-foot obelisk erected by the State to the memory of General Nicholas Herkimer (1728–77). The HOMESTEAD (open, adm. 25¢, children under 16 free), built by Herkimer in 1764, is a substantial brick house, next to Johnson Hall (see Tour 13) the most pretentious dwelling in the valley. While the lower floor with its pine paneling remains the same as when Herkimer died in 1777, the exterior was radically disfigured in 1848 by Daniel Connor, the farmer owner, who ‘modernized’ it by replacing the small front stoop (now restored) with a long piazza, raising the roof and changing its form from a gambrel to a low gable, and adding a Greek Revival cornice and eaves windows. The house contains a collection of Colonial and Revolutionary relics and furniture.
This house stands in valley history as the counterpart to Johnson Hall; the latter was the home of the outstanding Loyalist of the valley, the former, the home of its outstanding Patriot. In 1775 the Tryon County Committee of Safety commissioned Nicholas Herkimer brigadier general. Herkimer had learned to fight during the French and Indian War; in those days Sir William Johnson was a close friend, and when Herkimer occupied this house he had as a near neighbor and friend Joseph Brant, who in 1777 led the ambush at Oriskany in which Herkimer was fatally wounded. After the battle the General was moved to the homestead, where his leg was amputated and he died on August 17, 1777. His grave is in the family burial ground close by.
The FORT HERKIMER REFORMED DUTCH CHURCH (R), 60.8 m., was begun about 1730 by Palatine settlers to replace their humble log structure of 1723; but construction lagged, and during the French and Indian War, 1754–63, the walls and a temporary roof formed the center of Colonial Fort Herkimer. The inscription above the abandoned entrance on the north reads ‘JHE (Johan Herkimer erbaut) 1767.’ Johan Herkimer was the father of General Herkimer and 12 other children. He settled here in 1722 and established a trading post.
During the Revolution the church was part of a stockaded fort. On August 1, 1778, Tory-Indian raiders plundered the neighborhood but no lives were lost, thanks to the heroism of Adam Helmer, who ran ahead of the raiding force for 22 miles to Fort Herkimer, warning the settlers and enabling them to reach the safety of the fort before the Indians arrived.
In 1812 the church was altered and enlarged. The original structure came to the sill of the present gallery windows, the steep gable roof surmounted by a conical steeple; the entrance, on the north, led to a simple rectangular interior with the high pulpit and sounding board against the south wall.
MOHAWK, 64 m. (410 alt., 2,835 pop.), originally a Palatine settlement, was ravaged during the French and Indian and Revolutionary wars, but was rebuilt by Palatine descendants and Yankee newcomers. After the opening of the Erie Canal, the settlement boomed; near-by farmers turned to making cheese, an art introduced by the Yankees, and the village was second only to Little Falls (see Tour 11) as a cheese-shipping point. With the incorporation of the Mohawk Valley Knitting Mills in 1887 it became a factory town and today its workers make knit underwear here or across the river in Herkimer (see Tour 11), while others are employed in Ilion.
The GENERAL SPINNER HOUSE (private), corner of E. Main and Fulton Sts., is an example in brick of the Greek Revival style at its best. The central block, with a Greek Doric colonnaded porch and capped by a low pitched roof and square cupola, achieves the one-story effect so favored in this style, but it masks a banal two-story section in the rear.
Francis E. Spinner (1802–90) built the house in 1840. Later he rose to be Major General of the State militia and member of Congress, 1855–61. During the 1860 presidential campaign he was an ardent supporter of Lincoln. As United States Treasurer, 1861–75, appointed by Lincoln, he put his signature on Civil War greenbacks and was the first to employ women in Government service (see Tour 11); Miss Jane Douglass of Ilion, appointed by him, was the first woman to hold a Federal job.
The SHOEMAKER HOUSE (L), W. Main St., a two-story frame house with a hip roof, was once a Revolutionary tavern that catered to loyalists and rebels alike. A few days after the Battle of Oriskany, Walter Butler (see Tour 11) came here, well within the enemy’s lines, with about 15 men, expecting to raise recruits for the Loyalist forces. But he was taken prisoner and kept captive in Albany, whence he escaped to wreak his vengeance at Cherry Valley (see Tour 8).
Mohawk is at the junction with State 28 (see Tour 15).
ILION, 65.8 m. (400 alt., 9,890 pop.), was saved from decay upon the ebb of the Erie Canal by the Remington industries, which still dominate the village. In 1800 Eliphalet Remington, farmer-mechanic, brought his family, including Eliphalet, Jr. (1793–1861), from Connecticut. Young Eliphalet inherited his father’s mechanical bent; when he needed a gun for hunting he fashioned the barrel in his father’s forge at Ilion Gulph and then trudged 15 miles to Utica to have it rifled. When neighbors asked for similar guns, father and son built a new forge and began the manufacture of firearms. Later they built a factory in Ilion, and the village spread over the flatlands along the Mohawk and up the hills to the south. Every war brought a spurt in production, but after the Civil War the industry collapsed because of overexpansion. Remington descendants carried on with new capital and tried to diversify their products by adding farm implements, typewriters, sewing machines, and electrical equipment; but in 1888 Remington control passed to new interests.
The REMINGTON ARMS PLANT, both sides of Main St., a group of brick buildings with third-story bridges crossing the street, is a Du Pont subsidiary, manufacturing guns and ammunition. The REMINGTON-RAND PLANT, Spruce St., making typewriters, office equipment, filing systems, and cash registers, stems from the Remingtons’ first successful production of a commercial typewriter in 1873.
The Remington plants, employing more than 6,000 workers, are the industrial center of the Mohawk-Ilion-Frankfort community with a combined population of 28,000. An Ilion village ordinance prohibiting the sale or lease of property to foreigners, in effect for many years, succeeded in keeping out the recent immigrant groups. During the 1936 Remington-Rand strike the company used a strikebreaking procedure widely publicized as the ‘Mohawk Valley Formula’; after the strike the National Labor Relations Board ordered the reinstatement of the strikers.
Ilion has two large exhibits of guns; one in the Remington Arms plant and the other in RUSSELL PARK, foot of Park Ave., a 160-acre tract on a hill overlooking the village.
FRANKFORT, 68.1 m. (400 alt., 4,203 pop.), a stretch of plain dwellings on the flatlands along the river, with its large foreign population, is more typically industrial American than its neighbors. During the early years of the canal it outgrew Ilion, Mohawk, and Herkimer; the West Shore Railroad brought a railroad roundhouse, a boiler shop, a foundry, and many foreign laborers. Other industries sprang up, but all have disappeared except the manufacture of farm tools, road machinery, and milk products.
Frankfort’s industrial past includes parentage of the American match industry. In 1843 William A. Gates began the manufacture of wooden matches in a tiny village shop and peddled them from house to house along the river. The match sticks were cut by hand from strips of wood three feet long and then dipped into a sulphur composition and allowed to dry. The process was slow and exacting; but later Gates invented a machine, made at the Remington plant in Ilion, that did away with much of the hand labor. After his death in 1877 the plant was merged with the Diamond Match Company and in 1893 was moved to Oswego.
In the 1890’s, on what is called the Balloon farm, near Frankfort, Carl and Carlotta Myers, intrepid pioneer balloonists, equipped a building with laboratory and shop for the manufacture of balloons, including small hydrogen balloons used for Federal weather experiments. In their spare time Myers and his wife toured the country fairs with a balloon, taking awed spectators on flights.
The FOLTS HOMESTEAD (L), built in 1796 by Major Warner Folts, is a two-story structure with low gabled roof, end chimneys, and four-columned porch surmounted by an open balustrade. While extensively remodeled, the house retains the original hand-hewn beams and corner posts.
West of Frankfort State 5S cuts across fertile land to UTICA, 77.8 m. (500 alt., 100,063 pop.) (see Utica), at the junction with State 5 (see Tour 11), State 8 (see Tour 14), and State 12 (see Tour 25).
West of Utica State 5S follows the old Indian trail and military road connecting Fort Schuyler (see Utica) and Fort Stanwix (see below) through the broadening valley of the Mohawk. In YORKVILLE, 80.6 m. (420 alt., 3,406 pop.), a suburban residential community, is the INMAN HOME, corner of W. Oriskany and Whitesboro Sts., the birthplace of Henry Inman (1801–46), portrait and landscape painter. The house was built in 1792 by Inman’s father, a distiller and real estate speculator; in 1812 the family moved to New York. Henry Inman was one of the founders of the National Academy of Design and painted portraits of Wordsworth, Audubon, Hawthorne, Fitz-Greene Halleck, Chief Justice John Marshall, President Martin Van Buren, De Witt Clinton, Clara Barton, and others. Once when he received $500—much less than he had expected—for a group painting ordered by a rich client, he asked that the picture be returned to him, then ‘cut off all the legs and sent it back with $200.’ He is also important for his landscapes and genre paintings, several of which depict scenes in the Catskills.
With its narrow, tree-shaded village green and stately nineteenth-century homes along Main Street, WHITESBORO, 81.7 m. (430 alt., 3,375 pop.), has preserved the flavor of the New England of its first settlers; its industries produce knit goods, furniture, and heaters. Judge Hugh White (1733–1812) left his Middletown, Connecticut, home in 1784, shipped by water to Albany, overland to Schenectady, and up the Mohawk by bateau to this western frontier; his son, driving a yoke of oxen, kept pace by land. The family’s log house, thrown up in a hurry, was the first dwelling west of Utica on the Fort Stanwix military road.
ORISKANY, 85.1 m. (460 alt., 1,142 pop.), occupies the site of the Indian village of Oriska, on Oriskany Creek near its confluence with the Mohawk. In 1810 woolen fabrics were manufactured in the village from raw materials for the first time in the State; present industries produce iron castings and papermaker’s felt. In 1819 the waters of Oriskany Creek were diverted into the newly dug bed of the Erie Canal for the passage of the Chief Engineer, the first boat to ply the canal between Rome and Utica.
Marked by a tall memorial shaft, the ORISKANY BATTLEFIELD (R), 86.8 m., on a hill commanding the Mohawk, was the stage for one of the bloodiest battles of the Revolution. On August 4, 1777, General Nicholas Herkimer led a force of 800 Tryon militiamen out of Fort Dayton (see Tour 11) to march to the relief of Fort Stanwix; on the night of August 5, he camped near the site of present Oriskany village and sent scouts ahead to inform Colonel Gansevoort of their approach and to arrange for the firing of a cannon as a signal that the garrison was ready to join in the attack. But on the morning of the 6th, Herkimer’s officers became impatient with the delay, protesting to the point of mutiny: they called Herkimer a coward and a traitor, throwing up to him the defection of one of his brothers to the Tory side; against his better judgment Herkimer gave the order to march. They advanced about two miles; crossing a marshy ravine, they marched into a Tory-Indian ambuscade with a deadly fire from every side. Herkimer fell with a wound in a leg, but had himself braced in his saddle against a tree, lit his pipe, and directed the defense. For six hours the hand-to-hand fighting went on, neighbor against neighbor, with heavy losses on both sides. But the Americans—what was left of them—held their ground, and the Tories and Indians retired; the exhausted survivors of Herkimer’s force returned to Fort Dayton. Oriskany was the first setback in the threefold campaign of 1777 (see Tours 21 and 22) and has therefore been called the turning point of the Revolution.
On August 6, 1933, the ‘second battle of Oriskany’ was fought. Farmers, revolting against low milk prices, strewed the road near the battlefield with planks bristling with sharp spikes to halt the passage of milk trucks. Twenty-four State troopers, reinforced by deputy sheriffs, ordered the 150 farmers to retreat but were answered with rocks and curses; three times they charged the rebels, and three times were forced to fall back. Again the embattled farmers won at Oriskany, though this time milk instead of blood was shed.
Covering the site of Fort Stanwix, ROME, 93.3 m. (440 alt., 34,217 pop.), extends over the flat, broad basin of the upper Mohawk River where in the ‘horse-and-buggy days’ school teachers ‘used an ant hill as an illustration of what a hill looked like.’ East and West Parks, facing James St., are flanked by several old public buildings, the new post office, the cathedral-like St. Peter’s Catholic Church, the junior high school, the city hall, and a number of old homes. South of Dominick Street is Canal Village, where descendants of the city’s first German inhabitants live; west of the village is a Polish settlement. The eastern section of the city is dominated by huge copper and brass mills. Within sound of the roar of industry are two communities of mill hands: the model town of Riverdale, with its attractive English-type residential cottages, community store, and athletic field, and the drab Factory Village, originally settled by Irish but now occupied by Italians.
Long before Rome was settled, its site, De-o-wain-sta (Ind., lifting or setting down the boat), the one-mile portage or ‘carry’ between the upper reaches of the Mohawk and Wood Creek, formed an important link in the water route connecting the Great Lakes region with the Atlantic seaboard. Beginning in 1725 the English kept the place fortified; in 1758 Fort Stanwix replaced two earlier forts.
The first settlement, a huddle of fur traders’ huts outside the wall of Fort Stanwix, was destroyed by the American garrison before the siege of 1777. The first permanent settlers after the Revolution were New Englanders. In 1786 Dominick Lynch, whom George Washington called ‘the handsome Irishman,’ purchased 2,397 acres at Fort Stanwix, parceled out his land in village lots, and founded a settlement that he called Lynchville. Most of these lots were sold under a clause requiring the payment of a tax upon each transfer of title, which is still collected by Lynch’s descendants. Dominick and Lynch Streets were named for the founder; James, Jane, Louisa, Jasper, and Depeyster Streets were named for his sons and daughters. Completion of a canal in 1797 connecting the Mohawk and Wood Creek started a new era of progress. In 1819 Lynchville was incorporated as the village of Rome, the name being in tribute to the ‘heroic defense of the Republic made here.’
The Erie Canal was first run south of the village, but the route was later relocated and the Black River Canal was added. Rome bustled with the surge of transportation: canal boats carried farm implements west and grain and potatoes east; lusty ‘canawlers’ crowded the dock-lined basin with their craft, and taverns shook with their rough talk and loud laughter. Railroads followed the canals, the Rome Iron Works was established, and in 1870 the city was chartered. In 1891 the Rome Brass and Copper Company was incorporated and eventually evolved into the Revere Copper and Brass Company. Canals, railroads, and industries attracted Irish, Italians, and Polish immigrants. Today Rome processes one-tenth of all the copper ore mined in the United States; other industrial products include iron and steel, lumber, and sport and knit goods.
The SITE OF FORT STANWIX is bounded by Dominick, Willett, Liberty, and Spring Sts. The fort was built in 1758 by Brigadier General John Stanwix to guard the portage between the Mohawk and Wood Creek. In 1760, the French menace removed, the British abandoned the fort. A giant conclave staged by Sir William Johnson brought 2,000 Indians here and resulted in the Fort Stanwix Treaty of 1768 by which the English strengthened their Iroquois alliance and for $50,600 got possession of lands that now are part of New York, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Kentucky.
In 1776 the fort was garrisoned by Continental troops and named Fort Schuyler after General Philip Schuyler, but the old name stuck. In August 1777, Colonel Peter Gansevoort and a force of 550 successfully defended Stanwix against a three weeks’ siege by Colonel Barry St. Leger’s 1,400 British, Tories, Hessians, and Indians. General Herkimer’s relieving force was stopped at Oriskany; but while that battle was waging, Colonel Marinus Willett made a successful sally from the fort, killing 50 British and taking much plunder.
After the battle John Butler (see Tour 11) and two officers entered the fort under the flag of truce and sat down with Colonel Gansevoort at a table spread with crackers, cheese, and wine to exchange neighborly greetings before turning to the business of demanding the surrender of the fort; to St. Leger’s written message Gansevoort replied ‘that it is my determined resolution, with the forces under my command, to defend this fort at every hazard, to the last extremity, in behalf of the United American States, who have placed me here to defend it against all their enemies.’ That night Willett slipped out and made his way to Schuyler at Stillwater (see Tour 22) to request aid, and immediately Benedict Arnold was sent out with 800 men. On August 21 from Fort Dayton Arnold used a successful ruse, sending Tory and Indian ‘fugitives’ as messengers to Brant that he was approaching with ‘an army as numerous as the leaves of the trees’; immediately the British Indians began to desert, and St. Leger raised the siege on the 22nd, abandoning supplies and, according to legend, dumping a large amount of gold bullion into Wood Creek, whence it is still to be fished up.
According to local tradition, the Stars and Stripes were for the first time flown in battle during the siege of Fort Stanwix; the flag was fashioned from a woman’s red petticoat, a soldier’s white shirt, and a captain’s blue military cloak.
The REVERE COPPER AND BRASS PLANT (open by appointment), Seneca St., traces its origin to the Rome Iron Works, which was founded in 1866. Originally rolling iron rails, it began to roll brass in 1878 and added sheet copper in 1887. After several mergers, the present name, honoring the memory of Paul Revere, Revolutionary sentinel and first in the country to roll copper, was adopted in 1929. The local plant, one of six units, includes the largest copper rolling mill in the world, employs 4,000 skilled workmen, and produces brass and copper sheets, rods, tubing, cable, and screening.
The JERVIS LIBRARY (open 10–9 weekdays), corner of N. Washington and Elm Sts., was formerly the home of John B. Jervis, one of the chief engineers of the Erie Canal and builder of early railroads in the State. It contains a large painting by the Belgian-American artist, Edward P. Buyck, representing the siege of Fort Stanwix and the raising of the American flag for the first time.
Right from Rome on State 46 to the ROME STATE FISH HATCHERY, 4.1 m., established in 1906 and taken over by the State in 1932, where brook, brown, and rainbow trout are raised by the State Conservation Department for restocking of streams. Trout propagation is unusually successful at this hatchery because of the relatively high temperature of the water, eggs hatching early and wintering fish attaining a good size before March.
ONEIDA, 105.3 m. (437 alt., 10,264 pop.), geographic center of the State, a city of broad, shaded streets and well-kept homes, produces caskets, period furniture, container caps, and canned goods. The establishment and early growth of Oneida resulted from a shrewd bargain made by Sands Higinbotham, owner of the city site, with the railroad whereby it received free right of way across his land, plus ample ground for a station, on the condition that it stop every passenger train at the depot ten minutes for refreshments. Higinbotham then built the Railroad House to serve meals to passengers. Settlers came in increasing numbers to this important stop, and Oneida became a thriving village. COTTAGE LAKE, Main St., the Higinbotham home, now houses the Madison County Historical Society.
WAMPSVILLE, 107.5 m. (480 alt., 280 pop.), is at the junction with State 5 (see Tour 11).