The Old New York Frontier/Part 8/Chapter 2

ON the old frontier, as on those lands westward from the Fort Stanwix line now first open to settlement, a new race was about to plant homes. They were of English ancestry, but had had a far older racial experience in the new world than the Palatines and Scotch-Irish. They came from New England and by them, in the years immediately following the war, was poured forth a tide of migration that completely dominated for long years afterward Central and Western New York. They almost completely submerged the Palatines and Scotch-Irish. Leadership was, in fact, practically wrested by them from those older pioneers.

Under the act of 1779, attainting of treason, and declaring forfeit the lands of settlers who had taken up arms against the colonies, vast tracts on the frontier came to state ownership – for example, almost the entire valley of the Charlotte and extensive holdings along the Mohawk. Out of these tracts and many others, the New Englanders made their purchases. One of the sufferers from that act was Colonel John Butler, and another Colonel Guy Johnson, who at German Flatts had held title to 2,000 acres; but greater losers still were the children of Sir William Johnson, and notably Sir John, whose inherited domain was the largest ever held in the Province by any one man except his father and possibly one or two of the Dutch patroons. These sufferers were mostly the Scotch Highlanders and Irish who had fled to Canada in 1775, the act of forfeiture affecting few, if any, of the Palatines or Scotch-Irish, who almost to a man had been patriots.

Many of the pioneers from New England had served in the Revolution. Some had gone up the Mohawk with Benedict Arnold to Fort Schuyler in 1777; others were at Cherry Valley with Colonel Alden; others went down the Susquehanna with General Clinton, and thence to the fertile lands of the Genesee. Most notable of all the impressions they had carried home were impressions of the fertility of this New York soil and the sparsity of its population. This was strikingly true of the Genesee country, where the ears of corn they had plucked from extensive fields cultivated by Indians awakened astonishment that still survived. Accordingly the history of the re-peopling of this frontier is mainly a history of the migration poured into it from Massachusetts and Connecticut, by a people whom Professor Lounsbury has eulogized as "born levellers of the forest, the greatest wielders of the axe the world has ever known." They brought not only skill with the axe, but certain arts and refinements in domestic life before unknown to the frontier, and with those arts a spirit of enterprise and invention, with an initiatory energy which carried their own fortunes far and which, more perhaps than all other human forces, have made the central and western parts of New York State what they now are.

Owing to delays in concluding the Treaty of Peace, the tide of immigration from New England did not set in until the spring and summer of 1784.[1] Perhaps the earliest man who arrived in the Mohawk Valley from Connecticut was Hugh White, founder of Whitestown, which lies a few miles west of Utica. He came in the spring of 1784, as the leader of a conquering band that was soon to follow him. He ascended the Mohawk in a bateau, passing on the way many abandoned farms with buildings reduced to masses of charred logs and timbers, and with isolated chimneys standing black and grim against northern and southern skies. In the following year, men from Connecticut planted a settlement within gunshot of Fort Schuyler, and between that year and the beginning of the new century so great was the influx to the German Flatts neighborhood that 10,000 settlers are believed to have arrived in Herkimer County alone. Many of these were from Western Massachusetts, where they had found a new impulse to migration from Shays’s Rebellion, in which they had taken part, and in the consequences of the suppression of which they had had an unhappy share.


 * [1] Cornwallis surrendered on October 19, 1781, but the treaty was not signed until September 3, 1783; nor was New York evacuated by the British until November 25, 1783. The treaty was finally ratified by Congress on June 4, 1784.

But it was Connecticut that made the largest contribution to the settlement of the frontier. As Virginia was the mother of Presidents, so has Connecticut been a mother of States. From the Hudson River westward to the Pacific through the line of Northern States, there is hardly a town, says Trumbull, "in which persons may not be found whose ancestral roots dip back into Hartford County." In the New York Constitutional Convention of 1821, a majority of the 127 members were either born in Connecticut or were sons of fathers who were born there. Calhoun declared that, at one time the members of Congress who were either born or reared in Connecticut lacked but five of a majority of that body. The single town of Litchfield nearly forty years ago had given birth to 13 United States Senators, 22 members of Congress from New York, 15 State supreme court judges, 9 presidents of colleges, 18 other college professors, and 11 governors and lieutenant-governors of States.

Aside from the southern and southwestern parts of the State, about all the early settlements in Connecticut sprang from the original river towns of Hartford, Windsor, and Wethersfield, which have been happily described as “strictly speaking, the original cradle of empire.” Family names familiar in the Mohawk and Susquehanna valleys from the earliest times, may be found in the records of those Hartford county towns. All the New England States found representation, but the showing Connecticut makes far surpasses that of the other States.

The beginning of New England interest in the Susquehanna we must assign to the coming of John Sergeant and Elihu Spencer, who, as missionaries, arrived before 1750. Mr. Spencer was a native of Windsor and Gideon Hawley, who followed him, was also from Connecticut. After the visits of these men, no one in New England had his eyes more intently fixed on this valley than Dr. Wheelock, of Lebanon, to whom the labors of both these men had become well known. Dr. Wheelock’s Indian school departed from Lebanon in 1770, but it had been long enough settled there to arouse an interest in this valley in the minds of boys who as men became Susquehanna pioneers.

When John Harper, with Joseph Brant and other Indian boys, attended that school, Sluman Wattles, the Ouleout pioneer, was a lad living in Lebanon, eight or ten years of age, casting more than one eager glance at those dusky children of the western forest lands. In the same period, Daniel Bissell, the Unadilla pioneer, was a boy in Lebanon, twelve or fourteen years of age. He likewise saw these Indian boys, and must have known them well. The same fact is true of Nathaniel Wattles, also from Lebanon, and of James Hughston, his cousin, both of whom came to the Ouleout. It will be remembered that, during the Revolution, the wives and daughters of the Harpers of Harpersfield returned to East Windsor – the place from which the Harpers emigrated before the Revolution – where they remained until the war closed, when they went again to the settlement on the Charlotte. When Sluman Wattles came to the Ouleout, he had an interest in lands which John and Alexander Harper had purchased of the Indians before the Revolution. It is interesting further to recall that Jonathan Edwards, largely through whose influence Gideon Hawley had been sent into the valley, was a native of Windsor. Into this same part of Connecticut, early in the eighteenth century before the settlement of Cherry Valley, had come many Scotch-Irish.

West of the Fort Stanwix line the Susquehanna Valley was invaded by many men from Vermont who were among the "sufferers" in that State – men whose titles to real estate had been lost in the settlement of the disputed New Hampshire Grants, and to whom as compensation were given lands in the