History in the House

As I've posted before, my house has some history...it was originally a workshop to repair railroad wagons and carts.  The yard has it's own history, too...there's plenty of old junk still strewn around it.  But the house structure itself has some history, too.  In the den at the back of the house, a series of beams provide support.  But these aren't just any beams.  They look quite old, and one of the beams has a large spike sticking out of it:

The spike itself is old and rusted, as if it was exposed to the elements for some time, and the wood is a bit weathered, too, with some cracks in it. 

There are also precisely round holes drilled into the wood.

Given the aged appearance of the wood, the holes, and the spike, I'm inclined to think that these could very well be old railroad ties from one of the two railroad lines that met up in Freeville from the mid 1800s through the early 1900s that were salvaged when they were tearing apart the tracks after the railroads became defunct.  The rails and ties are long gone, but you can still follow the path of the old tracks in parts of town, and I hope to do some exploring there after the weather warms.

When I first moved in, my dad and I wondered how old the wood might be and where it might have come from.  Now that I know something about Freeville's history, I can at least make an educated guess.  It's neat to know that part of what turned Freeville from a tiny hamlet into a small village  - the railroads - is sitting right in my living room.

Freeville History: The Old Mill (Part 2)

(continued from Part 1)

With the success of his grist mill, Daniel White was able to buy land adjoining his property (in what is now the southwestern portion of Freeville).  Daniel White bequeathed this new land to his son, John, who in 1833 built a new dam with a larger, sturdier mill about a quarter of mile upstream of the original mill.  This mill was on the site of the current Mill Dam Park.  This larger mill became an impetus for the growth of Freeville, as it employed more people than the old mill.  John ran the mill for about 20 years.  By 1853, a duo named Ford and Perrigo ran the mill.  It's unknown how large a reach the mill had by this time.

In 1882, a man by the name of Byron Brewer bought the now-near-fifty-year-old mill and modernized it.  The cornerstone of Brewer's mill was a "fancy buckwheat flour" that was known not just locally, but throughout much of the country, including the South and the West.  By sometime before the beginning of World War I, the Ekenberg Company, based in Cortland, bought a signficant supply of the buckwheat flour and other grains from the mill.  From this, they made a new kind of prepared pancake flour known as "Teco" flour.  According to A. B. Genung, "the Ekenbergs arranged with Brewer to install extra machinery in the mill and turn out more raw materials for them.  Finally Mr. Brewer entered into an arrangement with them to manufacture the whole flour here.  This led to an enlargement of the mill and the installation of a new steam boiler and all the necessary machinery for making and packaging Teco flour."  By this time, the mill was employing 30 to 40 people (both men and women).  The railroads brought grain (buckwheat, corn, and wheat) daily to Freeville to be ground at the mill.  Once processsed, the Teco flour was shipped out of Freeville to points across the country by the same railroads.  After the boom of World War I, demand for pancake flour lessened, big mills were built elsewhere, and the Eckebergs went out of business.  The mill returned to grinding grain for local farmers.

But the mill wasn't completely done until July of 1935.  On July 7-8, a series of thunderstorms dumped upwards of 9 inches of rain on the central Finger Lakes region in less than two days.  Fall Creek, and all other streams and creeks across the area, experienced massive flooding, wiping out all dams in its course.  Though this was the final straw for the mill, the dam was repaired in the summer of 1941 - at the same time that the land was acquired for the park.  The grounds were cleaned up, trees were planted, and the area became suitable for the public.  It is believed that in the late 1940s some more cement work was done in the vicinity of the dam.  But as far as I know, the dam as it appears today is very similar to how it looked back in the 1940s.  I'm currently researching the Flood of 1935 - a significant event across much of the Finger Lakes region - and I'll posting about it sometime in the future.

Freeville History: The Old Mill (Part 1)

On our Freeville tour, we've already looked at Mill Dam Park, the site of the old mill dam.  But the Freeville history series hasn't taken a good look at what was Freeville's first and longest-lived industry, the old mill.  Some of the information is gleaned from Albert B. Genung's "Historical Sketch of the Village of Freeville, Tompkins County, New York", and some comes from Freeville's resident village historian, Joan Manning.

Freeville was first settled in 1798, by Daniel White.  Early on, he recognized the need for a grist mill...there were none in the whole town of Dryden.  In the summer of 1800, construction began on the dam.  Two years later, the mill was completed.

According to Genung, "The dam was built of logs anchored with stones, and some of those old logs and stones still lie there in the pasture today, nearly a century and a half later."  [Note: Genung wrote his history in 1942, but I hear that some of those logs and stones are still there to this day.]  The mill was entirely built from local materials. According to Genung, "[t]he mill was built mainly of logs, roofed with boards from Whitney's sawmill on Virgil Creek."  The mill stood outside the modern-day village limits, near the Mill Street bridge over Fall Creek.

Of course, to operate a grist mill, one needs a millstone.  Genung writes: "For a millstone he went up the hill a couple miles northwest and broke out a boulder on the Thompson or later-day Skilling farm.  With ox team and sled he dragged the rock down to the mill and himself split and dressed out the stones which were used to grind grain there for sixteen years.

Now farmers from the Dryden area could bring their grain to a local mill.  This was the beginning of roads around the Freeville area.  "Five ox roads or 'tracks' were early cut through the woods toward the Freeville site; one from West Dryden and Cayuga Lake direction [to the west]; one along the north side of the creek from Etna; one north toward present Groton; one south along Virgil Creek to Willow Glen; one east toward Malloryville.  To the grist mill in those days came all the settlers from miles around, especially in the fall and winter.  It was an important center.  In the miller's tally corner by the fire place men in homespun and home-tanned fur swapped items of news, settled debts, drank a moderate cup of the Elder's wild blackberry cordial, exchanged seed and other products and paid their taxes."


Thanks to Fall Creek and the new grist mill, Freeville (or more accurately, the area was to become Freeville) became a hub of life in our little corner of central New York.  Soon, a few other houses spouted up, and a hamlet was born.  More on the mill tomorrow!

Freeville History: My House

My house lies in the heart of Freeville.  This wasn't always the case, though.  Freeville started at the south end of town, near the location of the old mill (and modern-day Mill Dam Park) and worked its way north through the valley.  My house, according to the realtor's listing, was built in 1930.   If you look at the structure, it somewhat resembles a house, now that a brick porch has been added onto the front and a stone patio onto the back.  But with its triangular roof and long, narrow shape, it also looks a bit like a small airplane hangar or maybe a workshop of some kind.  When I bought the house, I was determined to find out something about the history of the house.  As I got to know my property and saw the lay of the land, I realized that the neighbors' house and property had likely been carved out of my land.  Like the history of the house itself, I wondered if there was any significance to this arrangement.

To learn more, I got in touch with the village historian, who's provided me with plenty of information about the history of Freeville.  She sent me a nice letter (written in cursive, of course) with some information on my home, and we later met to discuss the history of Freeville and of my property.  The property was once owned by a gentleman by the name of George S. Monroe.  Apparently, the middle initial was important in the Monroe family, as there were many generations with the names of George and William.  George S. had two daughters, one of whom (Ruth) lived in the aforementioned house next door with her two children.  George himself lived in Freeville, on Railroad St. (what is today Rt. 38).

George's house burned down, so he moved in with his daughter and grandchildren, next door to the garage where he repaired carts and wagons for the railroad, from 1932 to the mid 1940s - my house!  I pointed out in an earlier post that Freeville was a major railroad hub in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, so much of the town's commerce was linked in one way or another to the railroads.  It's neat to think that my house had as close a link as any.

After some time of living with his daughter and granddaughters, things weren't working out so well, so George decided to move out into his workshop and converted it into a house.  I'm sure the house he lived in and the one that I inhabit today are very different.  Several people have lived in the house since George passed on, including an upholsterer and an electrician.  In the house next door lived a family who ran a car garage repair shop on their property...the large garage is still there.  According to the village historian, they "didn't keep things very neat, so you might find most any thing out back."  And yes, as I've pointed out in other posts, there is still quite a bit of junk in my backyard.

So that's about all I know about the history of my property.  I hope you've enjoyed this look at the history of my little piece of Freeville.  When spring rolls around, I'll get back to searching for junk in the yard, and maybe I'll be able to trace the stories of some of those little pieces of history.


Note: It figures that one of the few days when I plan NOT to post about snow and cold turns out to be the day of our largest snowstorm (potentially) of the winter.  I'll be posting about it tomorrow.

Busy As A....

When I went back to the creek to see how high it was running the other day (going back there for the first time in almost a week), I discovered the scene above.  A tree or shrub had been cut down - presumably by a human with a tool, not by a beaver with its teeth.  At one time, Fall Creek was dammed in several places by ambitious humans with mills, including the one that I've posted about a few times on this blog.  But for centuries or even millennia before that, the creek had been dammed by beavers.  There was lots of life along Fall Creek, and this attracted humans....not as a place to settle permanently, but a place to visit for the hunt.  Long after after the Cayuga had established this as part of their territory, , the French and English fur traders penetrated what is now the Freeville area.  They sought the furs of not only beavers, but also foxes and minks.  Now, the mammals that I see around here are limited to deer, skunks, the occasional dead opossum on the road, and a couple of feral cats.  I know there are foxes in the area (a friend recently spotted one at her home a few miles away), and I've heard coyotes howling in the night just south of Ithaca, not too far away, either.  But the hunters and subsequent settlers seemed to have wiped out the beavers and the minks.  It's a shame they aren't around here any more.

Note: Click on the "history" tag below to read other entries in the Freeville history series.

Freeville History: Come One, Come All

I grew up outside of Philadelphia in the town of Hatboro, so named because local hatmakers made hats for soldiers in the Revolutionary War.  The next town over, site of my high school, is known as Willow Grove.  For much of the 20th century, Willow Grove was a tourist destination - a popular day-trip for the denizens of Philadelphia.  They would take the train and the trolley to Willow Grove Park, an amusement park where John Philip Sousa made occasional appearances with his band.  Up until the early 1970s or so, "Life was a Lark at Willow Grove Park".  The park was eventually torn down, and the location was later turned into a popular shopping mall.

Similarly, believe it or not, my tiny village of Freeville was once a popular day-trip tourist destination for folks as far away as Pennsylvania and Buffalo.  You see, during the railroad era, Freeville sat at the junction of two major rail lines.  One ran roughly north-south, from Pennsylvania to the village of Dryden, through Freeville, up to the village of Groton, and then continued north to Lake Ontario.  A second line ran from Ithaca to Cortland, which is roughly a southwest-to-northeast route.  They met right in Freeville, not far from the current junction between Route 366 and Route 38, the major intersection in town.

If someone came to Freeville for the day, what did they do?  Well, there was a park, Riverside Park, near the current site of Finger Lake Physical Therapy.  This was the age of oration, so one of the highlights of the park was an auditorium where speeches were given on Sundays.  There was also a boardwalk, picnic tables, swings, row boats, and perhaps the highlight, a dock where patrons could board a steamboat that plied the waters of Fall Creek between the old mill dam (the current site of Mill Dam Park), and the old bridge across Fall Creek on the road to Groton, which was north of the current Groton Road, Route 38.  The steamboats would have passed right by my backyard!  This is a bit hard to believe, because this summer when I moved here, the creek appeared to be barely deep enough for a kayak, much less a steam boat.  The village historian thinks that the creek may be a bit lower nowadays because there is a sizable Cornell farm upstream that may be drawing off water from the creek.  Of course, back then, the dam was still in place, and it likely kept the waters higher as well.

Here's an excerpt from a document that I've just obtained, "Life Along Fall Creek in Freeville in the Past", by village historian Joan Manning:

"There was also Harris Rowe's, Riverside Park, with its ticket stand near the street [Main Street] and park on the lots where the Park-It Market [Finger Lakes Physical Therapy] and its parking lot are today.  Along the bank over-looking the creek, pleasant rustic seats and picnic tables under the trees invited those who had come for the day.  There were cinder paths, and board walk.  There was a broad, low-roofed auditorium where there were political and semi-religious talks given on Sundays.  East of these buildings was an oval goldfish pond, and just below it, toward the water was a refreshment stand.  On the higher ground, in the western corner, stood a long scaffold of big steel swings.  A wooden dock stretched along the bank of the creek.  Tied to posts along the dock, were a number of gaily painted rowboats, always in demand on nice Sundays.  Couples would sit on the dock or out on the creek in rowboats.  At the east side of the Park stood a sizable boat-house, home of the steam launch 'Clinton'.  It made regular trips to the mill dam and back to the Brooklyn Street bridge (that bridge crossed Fall Creek from Fall Creek Rd. straight across to Brooklyn Rd.), turning about at each end of the trip by being snubbed to a stout post.  The fare was five cents a trip.  A plume of black smoke rolled out behind [the] steam boat and people waited on the dock for a ride."

Freeville Tour: "Mid-town" Freeville

Freeville's not very big - the village has an area just over one square mile - but right in the middle of it lies the civic heart of town.  During the day it can be bustling - as bustling as a small rural town can be, anyway.

The Freeville elementary school, built in 1936, educates some of the youngest members of the community.  Older students travel a few miles down the road to Dryden for middle and high school.  When the school was built, according to a old newspaper clipping cited on Freeville's town website, it was “the finest one-story school in the State for design and construction.”  So far, the school has resisted any attempts to close it and consolidate with the other Dryden elementary school.

 Behind the school, on property owned by either the school or the church next door (I'm not sure which), sits a playground that the students use for recess (making an awful lot of noise while they're out there, I might add) and a small picnic pavilion. 

The Freeville United Methodist Church is one of two churches in town, but the only one in the heart of Freeville.  Founded in 1848 and re-organized in 1874, the church was moved to its present site in 1891 from its old location down the road.  It has apparently been expanded since then, and the social area around the back is used for all sorts of events, including town dinners and meetings, in addition to religious meetings.  Living right around the church, I've learned that the lights being on outside the rear entrance means that something is going on inside.

The church hosts monthly chicken barbecues during the warmer months; the last one was in November, and they'll resume next March, I believe.  The barbeque pit is located across the street from the church, along Groton Avenue.

Across from the elementary school, and next to the barbeque pit, sits the Freeville post office.  Built...well, sometime after 1936...it sits on the former site of the old Freeville high school.  The post office is the busiest place in town for six days a week, and I've noticed the headlights of cars dropping off their mail in the mailbox out front at all hours of the night.  As the village historian pointed out to me in her letter, some remnants of the old high school remain on the grounds.  Can you see it in the photo below?

Ok, it's a little hard to see, so here's another shot from a different angle:

Yup, it's the walkway that led from the sidewalk (or street) to the front of the school.

The Union School, as it was called, was closed in 1936 as the Freeville and Dryden high schools consolidated, and the building was torn down sometime after that.

Finally, in front of the barbeque pit stands the town's bus stop, which connects Freeville with the Cornell campus and Ithaca.  A relic from what is now an old era hides behind the bus shelter - a payphone.

It's a Small World

I recently received a letter in the mail that's prompted this post.  But first, some backstory.  Freeville's most famous resident, Amy Dickinson, happened to be an acquaintance of mine long before I even considered moving to Freeville.  She's the syndicated advice columnist of Ask Amy, the successor to Ann Landers.  She also appears regularly on National Public Radio as a panelist on the program "Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me!"  She's written a memoir that spent some time on the bestseller lists, "The Mighty Queens of Freeville."  I feel obligated to read it, if only owing to the title.  But I met her, of all places, in Costa Rica.

In January 2010, I was on a performing and outreach tour across Costa Rica with the Cornell University wind ensemble.  We visited music schools that train students from elementary to high school, conducted workshops with the students, performed concerts for them, and donated used instruments to the schools.  Amy Dickinson was a guest for part of the tour at the invitation of our director to do some blogging and hopefully plug the project on NPR.  As far as I could tell, she had a great time.  I can't locate her tour blog on the web, it seems to have been lost over the years...otherwise, I'd point you to it.

But I recently received a letter from someone who seems to be a "mighty queen" of Freeville, and who also happens to be the village's resident historian.  I had sent an email to her via the town's clerk to inquire about the history of my property, but being of a different generation, she replied in her own manner: a handwritten letter (in cursive, of course!).  She can trace her own family back a few generations in Freeville, and she knows the history of the town, including who owned what and what they used it for over time.  My house - the actual structure - was originally a workshop for repairing carts, for example.  Back then, I doubt it had the nice little front porch that serves as the modern-day entryway.  Whoever converted it into a house did a pretty good job.

She shared some more history of the property with me in the letter, but I'll save that for a later post.  She has offered to meet me in person after the holidays...she says she has quite a few old pictures to show me, and I'm sure there are plenty of stories as well.  I'll also have to clarify some of what she wrote in the letter.  With any luck, maybe I'll be permitted to scan some of them and share them here.  In any event, I wanted to share this with my loyal readers of the blog and let you know that there's still much to look forward to on the blog over the long, cold winter!

Freeville History: What's in a Name?

Freeville holds a unique distinction: Freeville, NY is the only incorporated settlement in the U.S. holding that name.  I've just finished reading a spectacular old book about how places in the U.S. got their names, so now is as good a time as ever to share some Freeville yore.

Most towns get their names from but a few ways: a name based on local geography, which was how the Indians named most of their locations...many of these were adopted into English usage.  For example, the city of Chicago was named after the Chicago River, which came from an Indian word for onion, because onions grew near the river in the site that is now a great city.  (There was actually some controversy early on, because a similar-sounding word referred to skunks, and so the new locals were concerned about naming their new settlement, via translation, Skunk Town.)

There's also the approach of taking the name of a place from elsewhere in the world, especially Europe (and particularly early on, England).  New York was so named after the English took over the Dutch New Amsterdam settlement and applied an English city to the name.  More locally, here in central New York, the city of Ithaca was allegedly so-named because the settlement sits on the south side of a lake, with steep hills on the other three sides.  Just as the island of Ithaca was reached only after a long, hazardous journey by Odysseus and his men in Homer's Odyssey, New York's Ithaca required a relatively strenuous journey over the hills.  Even today, Ithaca is about a 45 minute drive over winding two-lane roads from an interstate highway, making it perhaps the most isolated city of its size in New York state.  One other example: the city of Syracuse was named after the city of the same name on the island of Sicily.  Its city fathers noted that the city was being built along the Erie Canal in a swampy area, much as the Old World's Syracuse had been built in a swamp.  They hoped that their new city would eventually approach the stature of the old.

There are places named after people.  The town of Dryden, in which Freeville lies, was named after John Dryden, an English poet and translator of Latin and Greek works: Virgil and Plutarch's Lives.  A story for another time - much of central New York was carved up and parceled out to Revolutionary War veterans as back pay for their service.  The town names, which had to be determined at once by a small committee, often honored Roman and Greek towns and personalities.  At the time, classical culture was adored in America.  And so along with Dryden, we have towns such as Ovid, Virgil, Cincinnatus, and Ulysses, and there's even the city of Rome east of Syracuse.  But communities like Freeville sprung up well after this initial parceling.  Within the town of Dryden, there are small outposts with names such as Hibbards Corners, Howland Corners, Lacy Corners, Smith Corners, and Ellis Hollow, that were likely named after early settlers.  Freeville could easily have taken the name White's Corners or White's Mill, after its first settler.

But some places choose to name themselves after an idea.  There are towns named Independence in Iowa, Kentucky, Ohio, Wisconsin, and, most famously, Missouri.  There are towns named Freedom in Pennsylvania and New Hampshire.  The Penn State campus and State College, PA are often referred to as Happy Valley.  The city of Philadelphia owes its name to the Greek word philadelpheia, which Paul used in his letter to the Romans, meaning "Be kindly affectionate one to another with brotherly love", which traces its origin to a king Attalus Philadelphus, "the brother-loving", after whom a city was named in Asia.  This city found its way into the writings of Strabo and Tacitus, and thanks to William Penn, the name has been passed down to us today.

The founders of Freeville may not have had the lofty ideals of Billy Penn in mind, but they did want a nice name for their town.  The town's website argues that the name came because every man in the new town was a freeholder...it really was a free town.  The suffix -ville, I've learned, was a popular one in the early days after the Revolution, as all things French were held in high esteem for their support in the war.  Thus, while Freeville is one of many -villes in the U.S. and the world, it remains the one and only Freeville.

If you're interested in this gem of a book, it's called "Names on the Land", by George Stewart.  It contains more details about the naming stories that I've touched on here and much more.  I can't recommend it enough.

Freeville History: Pre-History

I started the Freeville history series by looking at its beginnings as a village, using the history section of the Freeville website as a reference, but I've now come across a more complete resource -  a book (unpublished, I believe) written by an historian who lived in Freeville.  So now I can fill in some of the blanks.  I'll start by back-tracking in the history to the time of the Indians - the Cayuga, the Onondaga, the Oneida, and others...the tribes collectively known as the Iriquois.

Of course, "Iriquois" is a name bestowed on them by their enemies, the Algonquins (the Algonkin word was "Iriⁿakhoiw", meaning "real adders"...an adder is a poisonous snake), and the name was mutated (or is that mutilated?) by the French modifying the word to fit their language ("Iriqu") and adding the ending -ois, hence the name "Iriquois".  But those tribes comprising the Iriquois - the Caygua, Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Seneca, and, after 1722, the Tuscarora - referred to themselves as the "Haudenosaunee", or "people of the long house".  They did, after all, live in long houses, which in rare instances measured more than the length of a football field!  I'll save the history of the Iriquois for another winter and stick to the history as it related to Freeville for now.

Freeville sits in a valley (hence the two creeks), and this valley marked the boundary between the Cayugas and the Onondagas.  It was a boundary that extended from Lake Ontario in the north to the site of the present-day city of Owego in the south.  The Freeville area is not thought to have been a residential area for either tribe, as the artifacts found here - such as arrowheads, ornaments, and utensils - suggest that the Indians merely passed through, using the area as a hunting ground and a passage between settlements.  Today, two significant regional roads meet in Freeville.  Route 366 runs from Ithaca towards the northeast to Freeville, and Route 38 runs approximately east-west near Freeville, where it meets Route 366 at the main four-way stop in town.  Similarly, the Freeville area was the site of the meeting of a significant east-west Indian trail with a significant north-south Indian trail.

The early appeal of the Freeville area was as a center for the fur trade.  Fall Creek - known as No-Ga-Ene or Neguena to the Cayuga, is the largest creek in the area, which made it an excellent site for beaver dams (and later for mills).  Both the English and the French strove to control this fur trade, which to them meant control of the land.  The English won that battle after winning the French and Indian war, and after the Revolution it was the Americans who set their eyes on Central New York.  This set the stage for Daniel White and the first true occupants of the town that was to become Freeville.

Related Posts:

Freeville History - Origins

Sources:

Genung's History of Freeville
http://www.ushistory.org/us/1d.asp
http://www.accessgenealogy.com/native/tribes/iroquioi/iroquoishist.htm
http://www.tolatsga.org/iro.html

The Pile of Eyesore

These days, many people move to new developments in the suburbs.  Their houses are built on land that was once farmland or a natural area, and it doesn't have much of a cultural history, at least not that the homeowner can trace.

For me, though, moving into a small town that was first settled over 200 years ago, there's a lot of history on the land, and I mean that quite literally.  Because my property is right in the heart of town and less than half a mile from the site of the first mill, my plot of land has been put to some kind of use for - this is an educated guess - at least 150 years.  I also know that it hasn't been a residential property for all that time, either.  The previous owner mentioned to me that before the house was built, about 80 years ago, this was the site of a...I forget what he called it...not a factory, but something like a workshop.

As I survey the property, and especially now as plants die off with the coming of fall, I notice random junk strewn around the yard.  Some of this junk, for now, I leave in place, and some of it I pick up and move to what I call my pile of eyesore.  The pile of eyesore sits on a pile of broken concrete slabs, which were themselves an eyesore, making it the perfect place to aggregate the junk that I don't know where to put anywhere else.  Right now, the pile includes a concrete block, a piece of wood discovered in the garden, a moss-covered brick, a couple of chains, some string discovered just outside the garden, a plastic tarp, and a rusted piece of metal that appears to be quite old.

That's not all; there's even more junk around the property.  I've seen a few more moss-covered bricks and several more cinder blocks.  There are shards of broken glass (they'll be a pain to clean up!), an empty, overturned glass bowl, smashed beer cans, and discarded wrappers that I have to collect.  And then there is natural "junk" as well - piles of branches, large and small, that have been felled by the wind, and tree trunks that were never removed after the trees were cut down.  I'll eventually get to it, but for now, if it's causing no harm and it's out of the way, I'm not worried about it.

While it's all a bit ugly, the pile of eyesore represents the history of my little patch of land.  That rusty piece of metal, found in the wooded corner of the property, could date to the workshop days, and so could those moss-covered bricks.  The cinder blocks could be of some use in the garden; right now, cinder blocks line the perimeter of the garden, helping to keep the fence in place.  And even if this stuff isn't useful to me, it's interesting to think about where - and when - it might have come from.

Related posts:
Freeville History - Origins 

Freeville History - Origins

I promised some history on this blog.  As some say, there’s no history better than local history.  So here’s a little bit about the origins and early history of my town (current population: 523).

My town began as a mill site.  With Fall Creek (the creek adjoining my property) and Virgil Creek, there’s plenty of flowing water to go around.  The first documented white settler was a Revolutionary War veteran named Daniel White.  He built a cabin about ½ mile downstream of my property in 1798, and followed this with a dam and a grist mill.  Other settlers moved to the area, but the town really started to blossom when a widow named Rhoda Willey moved to a location along Virgil Creek in 1815.  With her came four sons and three daughters, including the enterprising Samuel, who owned “a sawmill on Virgil Creek, the White Gristmill and a sawmill behind that on Fall Creek, a hotel (later known as Shaver’s), the first store just west of the hotel (near the northeast portion of the lower four corners), and a blacksmith shop, and he had farming and dairy interests.”

The first “big business” to be established in the town was a large mill built upstream of Daniel White’s original mill by his son, John, in 1833.  Incredibly successful, the mill employed up to 40 people.  Its staple was Teco pancake flour, which was shipped around the country until after World War I.  The mill finally closed in the 1930s, presumably a casualty of the Great Depression.  Though the mill is gone (with a park in its approximate old location), the dam remains.

This information was taken from my town’s website.  I’ll link to it once I’ve finished posting about the history of the town over the next few weeks.