|
|
|
History of Town of Lysander
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
|
