Early Chenango History - 1907

Continued from posting of February 22, 2016

 

Some Things of Early Chenango - Read at the Chenango County Dinner

John C. Wait

Chenango Union, March 28, 1907

 

Oxford, true to history, is the pioneer town in the establishment of an institution of higher learning.  Her old Academy building was erected in 1791 and the school was conducted for eighteen months before a charter was secured.  Uri Tracy, a graduate of Yale and a minister of the gospel, was the first principal.  He received $756.98 for eighteen and two-thirds months' service, in 1794, when the Academy was chartered.

 

The name Chenango has become familiar throughout the agricultural world as being the home of that lovely apple, the Chenango Strawberry. The tree is said to have been a seedling grown at Earlville and afterwards transplanted to the "Frank Farm."  From it and its offsprings the strawberry apple trees of the continent have been grafted.

 

What Chenango has most to be proud of are her sons and daughters. They are not writers of history, they are makers of history.  they are directing the great movements, political, commercial and social, the great governmental institutions, the postoffices, the courts, the great financial institutions of our country, the great newspaper and publishing houses; our hospitals, our universities are here represented.  They are directing the great manufacturing concerns, they are in the great mercantile establishments, in milk industries, the manufacture of Pharmacal goods, hammers, silks, and they are prominently engaged in profession and literary works.  These are the true historians of our society, they manufacture history, Chenango may well be proud of the distinguished men, living and dead, who have gone from her boundaries. While we may not claim by birth Chancellor Kent, Judge Thompson, General Thomas Addis Emmet, Peter B. Guernsey, Elisha Williams, Isaac Foote, General Erastus Foote, yet they belong to us by adoption and had their experiences in our county.  We may claim Senator Daniel S. Dickinson, General Obediah German, John Lincklaen, Colonel E.B. Smith and other great men whose names are perpetuated in our townships.

 

Thurlow Weed, so poor in boyhood that he had not shoes to wear, the maker of Presidents, the friend of Seward and the famous editor, had his experience at Norwich and there founded the newspaper, the Agriculturalist, from which he went to greater things.

 

Gail Borden, the child of poverty, the inventor of foods and the western pioneer, spent his childhood in Chenango on the bank of the O-che-nang.

 

John P. Hubbard, the father of our canal, and Col. Barnes, the Superintendent of Canals, were of our soil.  General Thompson Meade made his home with us for a period of nearly sixty years, and Senator Daniel S. Dickinson grew up with the trees of Guilford.

 

Chenango is and will be known by the works, deeds and accomplishments of its present generation.  Few of the up state counties have seen a generation that has produced so many distinguished men.  Two judges of the United States Court, three of the Supreme Court, a congressman, a state senator, a postmaster of the great City of New York, constitutes part of our contribution to the government.  Physicians, lawyers, minister of the gospel, authors, teachers, merchants, and a thousand more clerks, agents and craftsmen constitute Chenango's contribution to the business industries of this great city, and these are the men and women who are making history.

 

To be continued