Early Chenango NY

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

John C. Wait

Chenango Union, February 14, 1907

....I will offer you something's which may be new to you of our county and its townships.  I have given sometime to historical research in Chenango, and not a little to the derivation of the word under which we exist and by which we pledge out faith in, and allegiance to, one another....

....asking you to associate the dates given with our Declaration of independence (1776) and close of the Revolutionary War (1782), and to also ask you to remember that our county has been in existence only 109 years [in 1907] and the earliest traditions go back only the short period of three centuries.

 

"Chenango" comes from the Iroquois Indian word "O-chenang," which means the place or region of the bull thistle, in other words "Thistle dom."  It was in use as early as September 1763, when a Nanticoke Chief brought messages to Philadelphia from the Nanticokes, Conoys, Onondagoes and Mohikons at Chenango. The tribes were remnants of foreign tribes who had with the Tuscaroras taken up their abode on the Susquehanna River in and about the present city of Binghamton to the lands of the Tuscaroras and Oneidas.

 

Near the forks of the Chenango and Susquehanna, a little north of the site of Binghamton, was an Indian village called Otsiningo. This place comes first to notice in 1756 when a council of 300 Delaware warriors was held to bury the hatchet that had been raised against the English.  In 1771 the place was occupied largely by Nanticokes and was called Chenango, according to Col. Guy Johnson's map of that date, from O-chenang, the bull thistle region.

 

There were numerous Indian villages along the Susquehanna between Unadilla and Owego made up of mixed tribes, who in 1774 were known by the names of the villages they inhabited.  Some of them were "Two tribes at Chenango, the Chughnuts (across the Susquehanna from Binghamton), the Owegos and the Tiogas," being five several nations complained to the British Indian agent, Col. Guy Johnson, about their boundary in February 1775.  The Oquagoe were another tribe with a village at or near Windsor, N.Y.  It was July of this year that King George ordered this Indian Agent "to lose no time in taking such steps as may induce the Six Nations to take up the hatchet" against the Americans, and which led to so much blood shed on the Susquehanna from Cherry Valley to Wyoming.

 

During the Revolutionary war the Susquehanna Valley was the scene of frontier expedition and warfare.  The Indian Mohawk Chief, Brant, raised the British flag at Oquaga near Windsor in November, 1776, and the whites of Unadilla and vicinity hurried east to Cherry Valley.  Gen. Herkimer visited Brant at Unadilla in June, 1777, when Brant had collected 700 Indians at Oquaga, but withdrew without an engagement.

 

In August 1779 Gen. John Sullivan passed down the valley on a flood created by damming Otsego Lake and effectually chastised the Indians, destroying their villages and driving them to the hills and backwoods.  Otsiningo or Chenango were destroyed.  Unadilla and Oquaga had been destroyed in 1778.  The valley was devastated as far as Chemung.

 

So much for the name Chenango, but whether our beautiful river and its bordering hills took their name from the Indian village, or the village and tribe were named from the stream and adjoining country, may never be known.

 

There is little doubt that the name came from the course described, and there seems to be no authority to support the statement that the name came from the famous Oneida Chief, Skenando (meaning great Hemlock), who lived in the valley 1706-1816; however much more elevating it would be to all us to have our country emblem the towering hemlock or Christmas fir tree, than the threatening thistle of our pasture.

 

However the thistle or thrissle as it is called, is the National emblem of Scotland, as well as Chenango, and Chenango may well be called the Scotland of our state.  "Robbie" Burns says to the excise men of England, who were most unwelcome "Paint Scotland's greetin owre her thrissle" and again in political song "our thrissles flourish'd fresh and fair, and bonnie bloom'd our roses."  The thistles thrift being the vegetable barometer indicating good crops and prosperity.

 

Indeed if we had not our thistles we should not have had our "Theophelus Thitsle the successful thistle sifter" who I am told was a scotch resident of our Country. 

 

The southern part of Chenango County was acquired from the Oneida and Tuscarora Indians by Governor George Clinton by a treaty negotiated in 1785 at Fort Herkimer, for $11,000 in goods and money paid to the Indians.  This purchase included the land between the Chenango River, the Susquehanna River and the Unadilla or Tianaderha River, and as far north as Oxford and Rockwells Mills; also of a small triangle bounded by the Susquehanna and a south line through Sidney and an east line through Binghamton.

 

Another portion of the county was acquired from the Oneidas, Tuscaroras and other tribes by Gov. George Clinton in 1788, which was bounded on the east by a line through the villages of Eaton and Woodstock, Madison Co on the west by the Military tract, so called, and on the south by a line passing through Oxford, Smithville and Guilford. By a mistake on the part of the surveyor, the twenty townships surveyed did not go to the Military tract boundary, and this left a gore or neutral strip between, out of which spare strip the towns of Lincklaen, Pitcher and German were made.

 

The County was created by act of the Legislature March 15, 1798, which is the natal day of our County and the one on which I suppose we should celebrate. The description in that act does not differ greatly from the present boundaries.

 

Chenango was the happy hunting ground of the Indians and they buried their dead in the security of its peaceful realm.  Indian cemeteries are found throughout the county, some of them of great antiquity, estimated at from the character of the weapons and ornaments, to be of more than two hundred years ago [in 1907].

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To be continued.