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It
all started at a beech tree at the falls of the
Onondaga
River
, marked by the Surveyor’s notation: N.E. corner/Township No. 1/
Virtuous & Victorious/Military/1789. By the time the initial
survey of the whole Military Tract ended, an area encompassing
1,750,000 acres of land or some 2,734 square miles was divided
into 28 townships of 100 lots each. Each lot was approximately 600
acres, and perhaps because of the winding
Seneca
River
boundary of Township No. 1, the area fell about 400 acres short of
the 60,000 acres. It may not be a coincidence that the short lot,
No. 85, was at a seven-foot-rift in the Seneca Rifer and valuable
for the development of water-powered industry. Upon the
organization of
Onondaga
County
on
March 4, 1794
, which included the whole of the Military Tract, Townships Number
1, 2 and 6, previously named Lysander, Hannibal and Cicero were
incorporated as the Civil Town of Lysander. The size of the Town
was subsequently reduced by the removal of the Townships of
Hannibal in 1806 and Cicero in 1807, and by the removal of the
first 33 lots of the
Township
of
Lysander
upon the formation of the
County
of
Oswego
in 1816.
The allotment of Military Tract lots to the veterans of the
Revolutionary War in 1790 opened the area to pioneer development.
However, few of the soldiers that drew lots ever saw or settled on
their land. There was only one exception for the present area of
Lysander; Jonathan Palmer drew
Lot
36 and settled there.
On his water travels west to Ovid, probably in 1796, Dr.
Jonas C. Baldwin, with his wife and two children, stopped at the
rifts of
Lot
85 while their belongings were portaged around the rapids by John
McHarrie, a settler on the south side of the river (Van Buren
Township).
Lot
85 interested the couple, and on
March 3, 1797
, Dr. Baldwin purchased the whole lot of 197.2 acres for the sum
of 200 British pounds or $888, from the third owner, Jeremiah
Williams of
Rhode Island
. This proved to be the foundation of the
Village
of
Baldwinsville
in 1807 when he returned to develop the waterpower rights he had
obtained from the State. Prior to this time the settlement was
slow. A population census of the 180,000-acre town in 1797 was 15
and by 1800 the United States Census had only 119. The country was
wild, devoid of roads and heavily forested, but the immigration
impetus of the
Erie Canal
had raised the population within the present town limits to a
3,228 by 1830 and 4,306 in 1840.
The settlement period between 1810 and 1840 necessitated
the construction of rural roads within the town and streets within
Baldwinsville
Village
, which in turn further hastened the sales and settlement of land
and the clearing of land for agriculture. Through the enterprise
and financial assets of Dr. Jonas C. Baldwin, the waterpower
potential of the river was exploited by the building of a river
dam and a canal bypass with lift lock. This was the only one west
of
Rome
and years before the advent of the
Erie Canal
. This latter waterway, to some degree, retarded the Village’s
development during its first 50 years, since the
Erie
’s location transferred greater progress to the south of the
Village.
However, this pioneer period saw the clearing of the
surrounding forests that supplied a sawmill industry that
satisfied not only local building interests, but outside markets
as well as fuel for the evaporation kettles of the salt industry
on Onondaga Lake. During this period, the infrastructure of the
Village, including religious and fraternal organizations and all
small businesses associated with the mostly self-sustained small
rural village of the period, also evolved.
The following era produced the maximum utilization of the
waterpower and, in addition, the Village became the center of a
thriving rural tobacco growing industry. Industrially, the
proudest achievement was the development of the centrifugal pump
into a thriving business by Heald & Scisco, later names Morris
Machine Works, and later part of Gould Pumps. In addition to its
pumps, which were sold worldwide, it manufactured steam engines.
One of the local uses was in steam-packet boats employed on the
river, canal and connecting lake transportation services in
Central New York
.
By 1890, the Village’s larger business enterprises
included a paper mill, knitting mill, farm implement factory, five
flourmills, the pump factory, the New Process Rawhide Company
(later New Process Gear Division of Chrysler Corporation). Twelve
tobacco warehouses, and a sash and blind factory Baldwinsville has
its own municipal water system; the streets were lighted by
electricity provided by a local hydroelectric plant.
Transportation to support this business and industrial development
was first provided in 1839 by a river towpath connecting the
Village with the
Oswego
and the
Erie
Canals
. In 1848, a railroad system from
Oswego
to
Syracuse
was utilized and later incorporated into the DL&W System. In
1887 the Syracuse & Baldwinsville Railroad, which connected
with the West Shore Division of the New York Central /Railroad,
was used.
The
bustle of 1890 passed by the time of the construction of the
Erie
Barge
Canal
. With electric power making the need for waterpower obsolete and
the onset of surface transportation improvements by both road and
railroad, many small businesses were eliminated. Business and
industrial development concentrated in the county center of
Syracuse
. The census figures of the Town of
Lysander
, including that area of the
Village
of
Baldwinsville
, reflect the development of the area from pioneer to the present
to be primarily residential. By 1890, the population had increased
to only 5,163, a figure not to be exceeded until 1940 when 5,207
were counted. The last accounting in 1990 showed an improvement to
16,222, or more than one and one-half times the state as a whole,
two-thirds of this increase being in the town’s suburban area
outside of Baldwinsville. Undoubtedly, much of this increase can
be attributed to the Urban Development Corporation’s Industrial
Park, the related Radisson residential community, and to the
Anheuser-Busch brewery, the largest industry in the town.
The
area has seen a lot of history in two centuries and continues to
be an unspoiled section ripe for business and residential
development.
Taken from The
Bicentennial of Onondaga County, New York published in 1994. The
information on the Town of
Lysander
was written by Robert Nostrant
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