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Saints, Sinners and Reformers
The Burned-Over District Re-Visited
by
Chapter 4
Charles Williamson
The Pulteney Estates in the Genesee Lands
At the end of the Revolutionary War the Iroquois had lost virtually all
of their lands, and they were now restricted to Reservations which did
not permit them to follow their normal way of life. What happened to the
Seneca and their land is indicative how justice had not been done, and
would not be done, to the Indians. New York State had purchased the lands
of the Mohawks, the Oneida, the Onondaga, and the Cayuga for a pittance,
and these lands in the Military Tract east of the Pre-emption Line were
made available to Revolutionary War veterans in lieu of a cash payment
for their wartime service. This was done since the State was practically
insolvent after the war. Some of these veterans were to sell their land
for cash for a greater sum than the native tribes had received.
The State of Massachusetts, which was granted the lands to the west of
the Pre-emption Line in lieu of their claims to the "western lands" under
their 1602 Charter from King James I, was also faced with a serious problem
of solvency after the Revolution. Massachusetts sold some 6,000,000 acres
to a group of New England speculators headed by Oliver Phelps and Nathaniel
Gorham, for one million dollars, but rather on credit for depreciated
Massachusetts' currency.
Although Phelps and Gorham were able to sell 936,000 acres to land hungry
New Englanders and others, they were unable to make the payments due in
three parts to Massachusetts. The lack of any form of roads into this
wilderness, other than narrow Indian trails, precluded the success of
their endeavors. The un-sold remnant reverted to Massachusetts and the
state then sold to Robert Morris of Philadelphia on November 18, 1790,
1,264,000 acres, the eastern part of the tract west of the Pre-emption
Line. Morris had been the financier who had backed the American Revolution
with much of his own funds, but he was rapidly over-extending himself
financially. Before too long he would be in debtor's jail.
Morris' goal was to sell the land quickly as a block so as not only to
recoup his expenditure but to make a profit. The best way to do that was
to approach Europeans who had finances for such a purpose and who sensed
the opportunity for a get-rich-quick scheme by selling the land at a profit
to Americans and Europeans who were desirous for land. William Temple
Franklin, Benjamin Franklin's grandson, was chosen by Morris to act as
his agent, and young Franklin sailed for London in 1791. His father had
been the Tory Governor of New Jersey under the English during the American
Revolution, and thus his father had been alienated from Ben Franklin,
his father. Young Franklin could now benefit from his father's English
ties, as could Morris his employer, in the sales attempt to be made.
Arriving in London in early 1791, Franklin approached Patrick Colquhoun,
a Scottish merchant, statesman, philanthropist, and a friend of his father
with the proposal of finding a buyer for the New York land. Not only could
the land be sold for farming, but it was covered with virgin timber which
could be shipped to timber-starved Britain for sale. One could therefore
make a fortune in land speculation in the new United States. Colquhoun
had worked as a young man in eastern Virginia before the American Revolution,
and he could see the great potential in the untapped lands of the former
English colonies. Colquhoun was a Scot, and the story of the lands in
western New York was to become an initial tale of financial and political
involvement by a group of Scots.
Colquhoun was a friend of Sir William Johnstone Pulteney, one of the
wealthiest men in Britain. Sir William was therefore a likely candidate
who could afford to invest in America. William Johnstone, before he added
Pulteney to his name, was a lawyer from Scotland, a friend of David Hume
and Adam Smith, who had come to London and was a member of Parliament
from Scotland. In London he met Frances Pulteney, the cousin and the heiress
of the Earl of Bath, and in London he courted and married her. When the
Earl of Bath died in 1767, Johnstone's wife came into an enormous inheritance,
and at her request he added the Earl's family name of Pulteney to his,
thus becoming William Johnstone Pulteney. Through his marriage, and then
his wife's untimely death in 1782, he became the owner of vast estates
and a very great fortune. With the help of Robert Adams, the famous architect
of the day, he re-made his wife's native town of Bath. Architecturally
Bath became an attractive neo-classical town with its spa, its gracious
town houses, its public halls, and its shop-lined Pulteney Bridge. (A
portrait of William Johnstone Pulteney is in the Yale Center for British
Art in New Haven, Connecicut.)
William Johnstone Pulteney was knighted, thus becoming Sir William, and
he was active in affairs in both India and America, making investments
in the latter land before the American Revolution and sympathizing with
the American colonists in their unhappiness at being taxed without representation
in Parliament. In March of 1778 he even served as the English emissary
to his friend Benjamin Franklin in Paris to discuss a possible reconciliation
between England and the American colonies. Early in 1791 Colquhoun met
with Sir William Pulteney at his mansion, Bath House in Piccadilly in
London, to interest him in purchasing the land which William Franklin,
the grandson of his American friend Ben Franklin, was offering. Not only
could the land be sold, but there was the industrial potential of the
timber which could be cut and the hemp which could be grown, both necessary
for planks and for cordage for the Royal Navy as well as for mercantile
ships. Sir William was quick to act, and he called a meeting at his London
mansion of Colquhoun and William Hornby, the latter a former Governor
of Bombay, India, to consider Colquhoun's proposal. No time was wasted,
and on February 15, 1791, they signed an agreement to purchase the land
through William Franklin as Morris' agent..
The newly created "London Association," purchased the 1,264,000 acres
for $270,000, almost twenty cents an acre. Pulteney would bear 9/12th
of the cost of the land purchase, Hornby would bear 2/12th while Colquhoun
would hold 1/12th without paying into the purchase price in recognition
of his endeavors in bringing about the project. The Associates retained
certain acreages in the American lands for themselves which they could
sell for their private profit: 55,000 acres for Sir William, 10,000 acres
for Hornby, and 5,000 acres for Colquhoun. Land sold to Americans would
be priced at $1 to $7 an acre.
One major problem remained: under the laws of the new New York State,
aliens could not hold title to property in the new State. Here again Colquhoun
had a solution. He introduced his other two partners in the "London Association"
to the son of an old family friend of his in Scotland, Charles Williamson,
who had been to America as a young man. As a result, on April 26, 1791,
the thirty-four years old Charles Williamson was appointed agent for the
London Association on the understanding that he would obtain American
citizenship on his arrival in the United States. He could then assume
legal ownership of the land until such time as New York State law was
changed and ownership could be conveyed to its proper owners in the Association.
By June, Williamson had been granted legal power of attorney for the London
Association, and he had returned to Scotland to emigrate to America with
his family.
What was Williamson's background or credentials for such a venture? Had
the Association taken too great a chance in this appointment? What kind
of a man was Williamson? As they would discover, Charles Williamson was
a man of grand ideas. Out in the wilderness of New York he would envision
the creation of a new metropolis, a center to which settlers would flow
in an unending stream.
To begin with, Williamson was a Scot who had held a commission as Captain
in the 25th Regiment of Foot in the British Army before he was twenty-four,
a commission which he had resigned in 1781, during the American Revolution,
to sail for America carrying a letter of recommendation to Lord Cornwallis
who headed the forces fighting the American rebels. Williamson's meeting
with Cornwallis was never realized, for the ship on which he was sailing
was captured, and Williamson was taken prisoner first to Newburyport and
then to Boston in Massachusetts. Placed under a generous form of house
arrest with the family of Ebenezer Newall in Roxbury (Boston), he soon
developed confidence in the economic future of the new nation which would
develop after the Revolution. For a time he even considered remaining
in America.
A romance developed between Williamson and Abigail Newall, the daughter
of the family to which he had been assigned, particularly after she cared
for him during an illness. However, when an exchange of prisoners between
the British and the Americans was agreed upon, Williamson decided to return
to Scotland. He left Boston for New York accompanied by Abigail Newall,
and on December 2, 1781, they were married in New London, Connecticut.
Once in New York City, they sailed for Britain. Back in Scotland, Williamson
and his wife settled on one of the Hopetoun Estates, an estate for which
his father was the factor or estate agent. His work as an estate manager
in the ensuing years did not seem to bring Williamson sufficient satisfaction.
As a result, in 1791, ten years after he had sailed for America, he journeyed
to London to see if Patrick Colquhoun, a family friend, could help him
to a more interesting position. His trip could not have occurred at a
more fortunate moment, for it came when Colquhoun had just helped to form
the London Association which had bought the 1,264,000 acres of land in
the New World. The new purchasers needed an agent in America, and Williamson,
with his American experience and an American wife, seemed to be just the
man the Associates needed. Williamson was thus named the Associates' agent.
Meantime, Colquhoun was planning ahead, and he was in Paris obtaining
a European baron as a sales representative to assist on the Continent
in the sale of the Association's American lands. Together, he and the
baron arranged to hire William Berczy, a German, who promised to obtain
German farmers who could earn their land in America by building the first
road into the newly acquired territory. In one sense this was a wise move
since Phelps and Gorham had had difficulty selling land which was in a
completely forested wilderness with no roads as a means of access into
western New York. In another sense, the hiring of Berczy was a major mistake,
for as the American statesman Gouverneur Morris had realized after a tour
of Germany in 1790, German farmers were generally not interested in emigrating,
and, according to him, "None but the scum of Germany" were willing to
emigrate. This agreement with Berczy was to create problems with which
Williamson would have to deal in time.
On July 8, 1791, Williamson at thirty-four, his wife, and their three
children sailed at their own expense to the United States together with
two stalwart aides from Scotland, John Johnstone and Charles Cameron.
These two friends of Williamson were to make an invaluable contribution
to Williamson's project in America while Johnstone was to serve as the
agent for Hornby and Colquhoun in the selling of their lands. Stalled
in the Solway Firth, the ship did not get underway until August 4th, remaining
becalmed for almost a month. Finally under way, three days later the ship
sprang a leak and had to lay up for repairs at the Isle of Man. It was
the 9th of November, four months later, after too many storms and a short
supply of food that the ship reached the United States. Charles Williamson
removed his family from the vessel when it made port in Norfolk, Virginia,
instead of their destination of Philadelphia.
Christy, the oldest of the three children, was very ill on arrival in
America. She was eventually to die in Bath, New York, once they had moved
to the Association's lands, the first burial in the town's new cemetery.
Unhappily, even before the family got to Bath, Christy was preceded in
death by her younger brother Alexander. The journey was not only a disastrous
one, but it had cost Williamson $2,333, a princely sum for that time.
Worse financial news was in store, for the expense of transporting the
family and their belongings from Norfolk to Baltimore, their immediate
destination, cost an additional $1,400.
Baltimore was a thriving city, and here Williamson found friends from
England and Scotland. One was Richard Caton who had married into the notable
Carroll family of Maryland, and another was Thomas Pulteney of the Pulteney
family in Bath, England, as well as other merchants with their ties to
Britain. In Maryland, which in many ways was a Southern state, Williamson
was most impressed by the plantation owners and their slave economy. The
importance of the road into the Associates' new lands from the south was
in time to lead Williamson to hope that a plantation type of economy based
on slave labor might be realized on huge blocks of land he was commissioned
to sell.
After Christmas, Williamson was in Philadelphia where, on January 9,
1792, he took the oath of allegiance which granted him American citizenship,
a status easily accomplished at the time. The sale of the lands in the
Genesee country could now take place since they could be sold by Charles
Williamson, an American citizen, who held the lands by virtue of his agreement
with the London Association. Williamson thus was legally able to consummate
the physical purchase of the land from Robert Morris and to take possession
of some 1,264,000 acres in western New York. By April the land was legally
in Williamson's name. Never one to waste time, he had made the acquaintance
of an American of importance, Alexander Hamilton, from whom he received
letters of introduction to other men of status in New York City and in
Albany.
Thus in February, even before the legalities of ownership were completed,
he determined, despite the winter weather, to make a journey to his new
lands in order to familiarize himself with the territory he would be offering
to settlers. Setting out for the Genesee lands, he reached New York City
where he sailed up the Hudson River to Albany and then by carriage through
the Mohawk Valley. After Whitesboro (just beyond present Utica, New York),
the path became so bad that the carriage he and his guide were using had
to be abandoned for a sledge. Following what had been Indian trails, the
land en route was heavily forested, broken only occasionally by a settler's
hut at a distance of ten to twenty miles from its nearest neighbor. It
took three days to travel the seventy miles over the snow covered land
before Lake Seneca could be reached, the easternmost border of the Pulteney
Estates.
Williamson was delighted by the scene before him at the site of the former
Indian village of Kanadesaga at the head of Lake Seneca. Geneva, as the
town was to be re-named, since it reminded him of the location of the
Swiss city of that name at the head of a lake, already consisted of twenty
log cabins, including a log cabin inn and a frame tavern erected by the
earliest settlers who had purchased land from the original land agents
Phelps and Gorham. Some thirteen miles south on the west bank of the lake
lay "New Jerusalem" (one mile below modern Dresden, New York), the community
of the followers of the religious prophetess Jemima Wilkinson. Here 363
individuals, fired with religious conviction, had been creating a new
civilization in the wilderness since 1788, and they were among the first
settlers in the territory. It was their grain mill which was to make possible
the ultimate success of Williamson's initial settlers in their first years
in the wilderness until other such mills could be developed.
Oliver Phelps contracted for a survey of the Pre-emption Line to mark
the eastern boundary of land granted Massachusetts by the convention held
in Hartford, Connecticut, that settled the conflicting territorial claims
of Massachusetts and New York. The treaty stipulated that the boundary
line ran due north from the 82nd milestone on the New York-Pennsylvania
border to Lake Ontario. During the survey, an error of measurement, willfully
or by accident is not known, had occurred. Robert Morris had another survey
run, Geneva and New Jerusalem lay between the lines and the land titles
of those who had purchased land in the "Gore," as it was called, were
in doubt.
Interestingly, today there are two roads named the "Pre-emption Road"
in New York, one to the north and west of Watkins Glenn and the other
running due north above Lake Seneca, one road located on the original
angling and incorrect line and the other on the corrected line. Because
of the question as to the location of the line, Phelps and Gorham had
located their land office to the west of the disputed sector at the site
of the Indian village of Kanandarque which General Sullivan's troops had
destroyed during the American Revolution. Here at the village which bears
its present name of Canandaigua, the surveyors for Phelps and Gorham began
to lay out the territory in six-square mile townships.
The new town of Canandaigua held forty-three houses on Williamson's arrival
there. In all, according to the first U.S. census, there were 900 whites
living west of Lake Seneca in 1790. Although this village would serve
as one of Williamson's first headquarters, he traveled the additional
twenty-six wintry miles to the Genesee River so as to reach the western
limits of the associates' purchase. The Indian name for the area had been
transliterated as "Genesee" which meant "Beautiful Valley" or "Pleasant
Clear Opening," an appropriate name for the lovely terrain. This land
for a time in the nineteenth century was the breadbasket for the new nation
until a blight ruined the crop of wheat. Thereafter the new lands in the
Western Reserve of Ohio and even further west were to become the breadbasket
for the United States and the world.
Williamson selected a site near the Canaseraga and the Genesee Rivers
for a town to be called Williamsburg in honor of Sir William Pulteney.
This community lasted but a few years before it disappeared. It was too
close to the more successful town of the Wadsworths at the "Big Tree"
where the Indians had given up their title to the lands to the west of
the Genesee River, the future Holland Purchase. The town at the "Big Tree"
was to take the name it still retains of Geneseo.
Back in Philadelphia on April 11, 1792, Williamson received the deed
to the land from Robert Morris, thereby completing the transaction begun
by William Franklin in London a year earlier. The journey to the Pulteney
group's lands had been long and arduous through Albany and along the Mohawk
Indian trail. The route, if improved, however, could provide an entry
to the tract for New Englanders seeking new land. Williamson, however,
had been impressed by the wealth which he had observed in the Baltimore
region, and he was determined to open a route from the south into his
lands so that Southern land purchasers could be enticed into the new territory.
Such purchasers, he hoped, would include wealthy plantation owners and
their slaves. The Southern plantation owners, Williamson felt, were not
only experienced agriculturalists, but they could bring sufficient slaves
with them to work large tracts of land, and thus huge segments of the
purchase might be sold quickly. Unknown to Williamson, the plantation
owners were seeking new land since they had exhausted the southern soil
their slaves were cultivating. The idea of the rotation of crops or the
use of fertilizers was unknown or ignored by them. As with so many settlers,
one used the land, wore it out, and then moved on to newer, still fertile
land—and so continued the cycle of depletion.
It was one thing for the London Association to buy the land, but it was
quite another thing to sell it. The frontier of western New York was covered
with virgin forests with but a few narrow Indian paths and a few large
streams giving access to the land. If settlers were to be enticed into
the new country, roads and other improvements would have to be made. These
improvements would perforce have to be financed by Sir William as the
chief participant in the Association. Williamson therefore determined
to create the necessary roads and to establish a series of inns spaced
at a day's travel distance. These inns would be erected along old Indian
paths which were to become roads. Present day Routes 5 and 20 across western
New York above the Finger Lakes follow the ancient trails, as Route 17/I-86
does the same to the south of the Finger Lakes, while present Route 15
south to Pennsylvania and Maryland had its origin in the Sheshequin Indian
trail. Williamson built his first inn and his initial sales office in
Geneva, New York, at the top of Lake Seneca where the passage of the Mohawk
Valley provided access from the Hudson River in the east to the Genesee
River in the west.
Williamson's desire to bring settlers from the South into his new land
also required the opening of a road through the Appalachian Mountains
from central Pennsylvania into the lands of the Painted Post. He therefore
moved his family from Baltimore to the frontier town of Northumberland,
Pennsylvania, on the Susquehanna River. From there he hoped to create
a road north to the Pulteney land. Northumberland was still a crude frontier
town, and Abigail Williamson was less than happy there. She had grown
up just outside of Boston in New England, then lived just beyond Edinburgh
in Scotland, and now with the loss of her young son and the illness of
her daughter, it is little wonder that her unhappiness set in in this
tiny frontier settlement. The village had none of the amenities or appropriate
companionship for her. It was not until after their departure to New York
State that the English scientist and discoverer of the element oxygen,
Dr. Joseph Priestley, settled in Northumberland. Priestley had had to
leave England because of his unpopular Unitarian beliefs, beliefs which
were also not to be acceptable to the townspeople of this frontier community.
On June 3, 1792, Williamson hired Benjamin Patterson, a local guide,
to lead a party of exploration north along the banks of the Susquehanna
River to what would become Williamsport, Pennsylvania, and then into and
across the range of the Appalachian Mountains between Pennsylvania and
New York State. Following the old Indian Sheshequin Trail, ten days later
the small group arrived at the Cowanesque Creek at the northern border
of Pennsylvania. At that border, the lands of the London Association began.
Another six days beyond this would lead them to Williamson's new, small
hamlet of Williamsburg on the Ontario Plain. At the conclusion of the
sixteen-day journey, Williamson decided that a road from the south and
into the new lands would be feasible.
There were two things Williamson needed to accomplish this goal of a
southern route. First, a natural leader of men, an individual who knew
the wilderness and who could create a path through the thickly forested
mountains into New York State with the help of sufficient laborers. Williamson
found his man in Benjamin Patterson, a cousin of that other frontiersman
of fame, Daniel Boone. As an adolescent, Patterson had served in the American
Revolution, and he was known as a woodsman who could find his way through
any wilderness. In fact, when the French statesman Charles Maurice de
Talleyrand journeyed to the American wilderness, it was Patterson who
had served as his guide, as he served Williamson on that exploratory trip
from Northumberland to Williamsburg.
The second need was for laborers who could create the road through the
forests to the Pulteney properties and who would then settle on their
own land, earned by their labor in creating the road through the mountains.
Colquhoun and his European agent had selected William Berczy as their
man to find German farmers to emigrate for just such a purpose. Unfortunately,
Berczy was unable to convince any farmers of the opportunity awaiting
them in the New World. Instead, in Hamburg, Germany, Berczy recruited
seventy families, some of them former circus workers, and enticed them
into sailing to the New World. On their arrival in the United States,
they would build a new road from Pennsylvania to New York and so earn
their farm land in New York.
Work began in the new road in the autumn of 1792, delayed by the late
arrival of the Germans at a port other than planned. Unpracticed to the
hard labor of cutting down massive trees and clearing a path through the
thick forests, the Germans were reluctant workers and at times even rebellious.
They were fearful they would be attacked by Indians, although Indians
no longer lived in the area, and they thus proved to be malcontents. Work
on clearing a way went on nonetheless, and when the last of the higher
sector of the Appalachian had been passed, at the site of the future town
of Blossburg, Patterson discovered a coal vein. (This vein would later
play its part in the development of industry in a portion of New York
State when the Brooklyn Flint Glass Works was enticed to Corning, New
York, in part because of the nearby supply of coal for its furnaces.)
Running short of food, weary, and growing ever more difficult, in the
valley beyond the mountains the Germans refused to go further, Patterson
had to move ahead to the Painted Post from which he could bring back food
for the group by canoe. At a spot still called Canoe Point in northern
Pennsylvania, he was able to get the Germans to move ahead to Williamsburg,
their ultimate destination. A path, wide enough for a cart, had now been
opened across the mountains and through the valleys, even though one critical
user of the path said it looked as though who it had been created by beavers
who had chewed their way across the hills.
In Williamsburg, disgruntled and cantankerous, the Germans proved even
more unruly. Here they ran up debts and threatened to riot, causing Williamson
untold problems. Eventually they moved on to Canada where Lt. Governor
Simcoe, no friend of the new United States, gave the Germans land in what
is now Toronto. (American accounts of Berczy and the Germans are less
than favorable; on the other hand, their descendents in Toronto today
offer another version of the story which favors the Germans.)
With roads, primitive as they were, leading from the east along the Mohawk
Trail, and from the south along the Sheshequin Trail, Williamson now had
to provide inns at which prospective buyers and travelers could rest.
There were two locations which were obvious sites for two of the major
inns: one would be in Geneva where the Mohawk Trail led into the northernmost
area of the purchase while the other would in the area of the Painted
Post at the head of the road the Germans had created from Pennsylvania.
The construction of inns was begun in Geneva, Painted Post, Bath, and
Sodus Bay, some of them by workmen brought from New England, the one in
Geneva being most noted for its richness in architecture and furnishing.
Obviously meals had to be provided for visitors, and in the case of the
inn in Geneva, Williamson spared no costs, even enticing the reputed former
butler of the Duke of Wellington to serve as host. The inn he established
at the Painted Post is typical of such frontier accommodations, and that
inn still exists today, named in honor of its first inn-keeper Benjamin
Patterson, as a museum of early times in the lands of the Painted Post.
Workmen cut down tall oak trees to use in the building of the Painted
Post Tavern ("Tavern" and "Inn" are synonymous terms; the former was used
in Pennsylvania while the latter was a New England term). The logs from
the felled trees were cut to the appropriate lengths for frame parts of
the building, hewn into square timbers and then fitted together by mortise
and tenon joining. Each unit of the framework was assembled on the ground,
and when all were ready these sections were pulled upright and connected
to form the frame of the new building. The same method was used to create
barns for livestock and for fodder and grain storage.
When the framing was completed, the inn building at Painted Post was
covered with horizontal, tongued-and-grooved planks, and then these planks
were covered on the outside with overlapping horizontal boards called
clapboards. When the men were finished, the new Painted Post Tavern was
two stories tall, and it rose majestically over the one-story log cabins
which were being built in its vicinity. It was the most impressive building
in the area, and it remained so for twenty-five years before another similar
two-story structure was erected. An inn, of course, needed an innkeeper
to run it, and here Williamson turned to Benjamin Patterson once more,
offering him the position of keeper or manager of the inn. Patterson accepted
the challenge, and he and his brother Robert began the slow and difficult
task of poling a Durham boat containing their families and their possessions
from central Pennsylvania up the Susquehanna River and then the Chemung
River to Painted Post, a 160-mile journey.
A Durham boat was a long, narrow boat with a slight draft. In the shallow
rivers a boat should not float deeply since it had to be pushed by poles
upstream against the natural downstream flow of the water. One man stood
on either side of the vessel to push the boat upstream with a pole which
he set in the river bottom and thus propelled the boat forward. One of
the older boys or one of the women on board would steer the boat with
the rudder at the rear of the vessel. When the current of the stream became
too strong, the rest of the family would have to help by getting off the
vessel to assist the men poling the boat by pulling the vessel with a
rope from the side of the river bank. When the Patterson family arrived
at the site of the new inn not too far from the Painted Post, they were
most impressed with the newly constructed two-story building.
Sir William Pulteney, however soon began to realize how grand were the
plans of Charles Williamson as the bills came in for the "improvements"
which Williamson was making to attract buyers of the land. The roads and
the inns which his agent were creating were to cost to some $1,000,000
within a very few years. After four years of preparation, Charles Williamson
had created roads leading into the lands of the Pulteney Estates while
inns provided places for travelers to eat and sleep. In the meantime,
a second land office was opened in the town of Bath.
Williamson was anxious to begin the construction of the great metropolis
which he envisioned for the new territory. Therefore, in 1793 he started
the development of a commercial center in the southern portion of the
Pulteney lands which he named Bath. One of the things which delighted
Charles Williamson in the early years of his residence in western New
York was to stand on the rise of land just to the north of the village
he was planning. For there on that eminence he could look north to the
land sloping to Crooked Lake (later to be called Keuka Lake) whose waters
ran to the north and east and thus to Lake Ontario and the St. Lawrence
River. To the south of the rise on which he stood, the streams ran into
the Conhocton River which flowed to the Susquehanna River and thus to
the Atlantic Ocean at Chesapeake Bay. Even someday there might be a connection
to the Genesee River and beyond another to the Alleghany River, and the
Ohio River so that boats and commerce might go to the Mississippi River
and on to the Gulf of Mexico. It was little wonder, given his expansive
nature, that he saw his new village of Bath as a future hub of transportation
and that he set up his main land office in the center of his new town.
One would have thought that Geneva or Williamsburg would have been the
site of the great metropolis Williamson wished to create, but he had his
reasons for making Bath the central point of the Pulteney holdings. For
one thing, the land to the north along the Ontario plain which sloped
to Lake Ontario contained the better farming land in the purchase. Much
of it had already been sold by Phelps and Gorham and what remained could
readily be sold by the land office in Geneva. In the hillier, less fertile
land adjacent to Bath, a second land office might help to bring settlers
to this area. Perhaps the greatest attraction for Bath in Williamson's
eyes, aside from the natural beauty of the area, was the Conhocton River
at the southern end of the proposed town. Since that river flowed to the
east and then south to the Susquehanna River and to the ocean, it provided
an outlet for the crops and for future industry which he expected to arise.
The rivers in the northern portion of the Pulteney lands had Lake Ontario
and the St. Lawrence River as their outlet, a river which flowed through
English territory in Canada, and therefore these northern waterways held
certain political disadvantages given the residue of distrust which existed
in English Canada for the new United States after the Revolutionary War.
As American lands became settled, Europeans always remarked upon the
differences in village and farm life in the United States as compared
to that in Europe. In Europe, farmers tended to live in villages or towns,
and they went out to farm their land each day. In the United States, the
farmer settled on his land, his house often at a great distance from that
of his nearest neighbor. In the new American nation, the town served the
commercial and craft needs rather than providing homes for farmers and
their families. This American pattern was being followed on Williamson's
frontier land where farms were being carved out of western New York's
wilderness. Bath thus would serve as a center for local farms just as
Geneva and Canandaigua served their farmers to the north of the Finger
Lakes.
When Williamson arrived at the site of Bath on April 17, 1793, the land
on which his new city would arise presented quite a different picture
from that, as a native of Scotland, he was accustomed. A dark and dense
forest of hard woods, some of the trees over one hundred feet tall, covered
the land. Williamson's assistants Cameron and Johnstone, who had accompanied
him from Scotland, arrived by Durham boat from Northumberland, Pennsylvania,
at the same time as Williamson, and they set surveyors to work to lay
out the town which was to begin with fifteen families as the founders
of the new community. At the center of the town they created a town square
or park called Pulteney Square. The huge trees in the square were cleared
with the exception of one tall pine which served as the "Liberty Tree,"
such squares or parks in the early years of nationhood boasting such a
symbolic tree or flagstaff. (A Liberty Tree was replanted in Pulteney
Square in 1993).
The square was created in the town-planning style favored by New England.
As the United States expanded westward its was said that one could always
tell whether a town had been settled by individuals from New England or
from the South. If the town had a New England heritage, the town square
in the center of the community formed a park with grass and trees. If
it were a town of Southern derivation, the courthouse building occupied
the square.
Streets extended from Pulteney Square, and they were given names which
were symbolic, such as Liberty Street, Morris Street (named after Robert
Morris from whom the London Association had purchased their land), and
Steuben Street for the German general who had turned Washington's farmers
into soldiers little more than a decade past. Naturally, there had to
be a Washington Street as well. When in a few years this portion of western
New York was subdivided into counties, the new county was named for General
von Steuben. A log cabin on the south side of the square would serve as
a land office and a temporary home for Williamson and his family when
his wife and remaining two children arrived from Northumberland in July;
young Alexander had died before the move to Bath.
By August 25, 1793, that same year, James Henson erected a saw mill at
the river's edge, and a grist mill would join it before winter set in.
These were important additions to the community, for they provided the
first industries for the area, and, being on the river, they would be
a focal point for the timber and grain which could be shipped to the south.
Thus the location of Bath could serve as a center for the distribution
of materials from the farms of the Ontario Plain. Grain, for example,
could be brought by sledge down to Bath over the course of the winter
and stored until the spring flood time when rafts, or arks, could transport
the grain to the cities to the south. These rafts could be sent down the
Conhocton River which ran through Bath, down to the Painted Post and the
Chemung River, and so into the Susquehanna River at Tioga Point and thus
south to Baltimore and the Atlantic Ocean. In like manner, the trees of
the forest were desired in Britain since that country had virtually denuded
its hills, and the English navy was always in need of timber for its fleet
as were commercial merchant ships. Such timbers could be formed into rafts
which could be sold for their timber when they arrived at the coast, and
they could carry other products, such as grain. Grain could also be turned
into whiskey, which was somewhat easier to ship in barrels than was loose
grain, although given the nature of those who manned the rafts, one could
not guarantee that all of the product would reach its destination intact.
The rocks in the comparatively shallow Susquehanna River proved an ever-threatening
peril, and it is estimated that one in every ten rafts met with catastrophe
en route to Baltimore. A crew of five to six men commanded these
rafts as they rode the spring freshets when the water of the river was
at its height. The trip took one week to the Chesapeake Bay, and upon
selling the goods on the raft and the timbers of the raft itself, the
men had to walk back to Bath. By the 1840s it was said that the rivers
in the Southern Tier of New York State were covered with rafts and arks
in the early spring. This trade was to decline in the 1850s once canals
and railroads began to change the face of New York and Pennsylvania.
John Metcalf opened the first tavern on Morris Street in Bath in 1793,
a log structure which provided the amenities of food, drink, and lodging
needed if prospective buyers were to come to the Bath land office. This
"Metropolis in the West" which Williamson envisioned was described in
less than complimentary terms in 1794 by one commentator who described
Bath a "a few shanties in the woods." Another visitor in the spring of
1794 wrote a less glowing description of Metcalf's tavern, "We put up
at the only house of entertainment in the village—if it could be
called a house. Of pitch pine logs in two apartments, one story high,
the only house in town except for the temporary abode of Captain Williamson—a
log house consisting of a parlor, a dining room, the land office." One
other comment could have been added, that the food at the tavern was coarse,
generally being pork and cornmeal which was washed down with the plentiful
whiskey which was always at hand. Inns were often noisy, dirty, and crowded,
and the bedding left much to be desired. One inn-keeper in the northern
part of the Pulteney purchase is recorded as claiming to have clean sheets—"…since
they were only slept in a few times since last they were washed."
"Genesee Fever" was a constant complaint of those who spent time in or
traveled through these western lands, the local name for ague (malaria)
which was spread by mosquitoes from low lying swamp lands. Others complained
of the ever present rattle snakes, and as late as 1817 the county was
still offering a bounty of $10 for panther scalps. Benjamin Patterson
received a bounty for killing a wolf in the village limits of Painted
Post; the towns of the area by this time were still at the edge of the
wilderness.
Williamson's main land office might be in Bath, but he could be found
in various sectors of his more than one million acres as he set about
developing the tract. In 1794 he established a settlement at Sodus on
Lake Ontario with mills, a storehouse, a wharf, and a tavern. The creation
of this community immediately brought threats from Lord Simcoe, the Governor
General of Upper Canada (Toronto area). Despite the peace settlement of
1783, the British had not given up their forts in New York at Fort Niagara
or at Oswego on Lake Ontario, for there still existed some hope among
English officials in America that some of the lost colonial land could
be re-taken in order to create a neutral Indian territory between Canada
and the United States.
On August 16, 1794, Simcoe sent Lt. Shaeffer and a small detachment of
soldiers by small boat from the fort at Oswego to Sodus to protest the
creation of a new town in an area which Simcoe still hoped to keep from
the Americans. Shaeffer arrived on August 26th with his small troop in
a display of English power. Williamson awaited Shaeffer in a log cabin,
a brace of pistols on the table before him. Shaeffer presented Simcoe's
claim to all the Indian lands in New York, a claim which Williamson refused
to accept. Faced with Williamson's guns and the expectation that other
armed men might ambush him and his group, Shaeffer retreated after making
the appropriate threats. Williamson immediately informed the government
at Washington by post rider of the affair, but, more effectively, he informed
Sir William of the threat. When Williamson's message eventually reached
London after a long sea passage, Sir William Pulteney spoke with his friend
William Pitt, the Prime Minister, and Simcoe received instructions from
Pitt not to pursue the matter any further. This threat led Williamson
to form a local militia, and obviously he was the Colonel in charge of
these defenders of the frontier.
In June of 1795 Williamson entertained a noble guest, the Duc de la Rochefoucault
de Liancourt, one of the many European aristocratic figures who were to
make the requisite journey of the informed upper classes of Europe to
the New World and its frontier over the next seventy years. The Duke remained
for four days as Williamson's guest, but the log house which also served
as an office was certainly not a proper residence for the entertainment
of guests, and Williamson determined to build an appropriate residence
for a land agent of so vast a territory. Serving as his own architect,
he designed a two-story mansion with wings, a building which today is
only known through a sketch which another noble visitor, le Comte de Colbert
Maulevrier, made on his visit to Bath. With its high ceiling, heavy moldings,
fine furniture, and a library (Williamson brought a cabinet maker to Bath),
the mansion with its gardens (cared for by a gardener he had brought from
England) provided an aura of stability and luxury to an otherwise backwoods
wilderness. A store of fine wines would be laid on for toasting distinguished
guests, and a sampling of these graced the sideboard in the dining room.
Springfield House, as the mansion was named at Lake Salubria on the eastern
edge of Bath, stood out like a palace in the woods. All of this was an
expense which was charged against the London Association and not to Williamson's
account.
If Bath were to have the attractions Williamson desired, the town itself
would have to reflect the standards of a metropolis. Thus a town square
was laid out, Pulteney Square (still there today), and at one side was
Williamson's first log cabin home and land sales office. More than a square
and a tavern and a few houses were needed, if prospective land buyers
were to be enticed to the Pulteney lands. Williamson therefore set 1796
as the date for a series of festivities which, he thought, would lure
wealthy aristocrats from the South to the area where they could see and
purchase large tracts of land for their estates. They, with their elegant
manners and cultivated tastes, would then make the village of Bath a sophisticated
center. To this end he advertised that in 1796 Bath would play host to
events worthy of a much more established community than one would expect
to find on the frontier.
Williamson sent messengers throughout New York, New England, Pennsylvania,
New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, and English Canada to plaster
walls with posters touting Pulteney lands and inviting everyone to Bath.
There would be a theater at Steuben and Morris Streets presenting plays
which were popular in Richmond, Philadelphia, and New York. There would
be a race track, there would be a fair, and his chain of inns would be
ready to receive visitors along their way to Bath. Advertisements for
the celebration were placed in New York City and Philadelphia newspapers,
and by September 20, 1796, some 2,000 people arrived from Virginia, Maryland,
New Jersey, Pennsylvania, New York, and even from Canada for the horse
races with the attendant betting which was a major attraction.
Williamson did build his one-half mile long race track and his theater,
albeit the theater was a log structure, and he began a County Fair, the
oldest county fair in the United States and one which is still held every
August in Bath. He created a newspaper, The Bath Gazette, which
issued its first number on October 20, 1796. There were eight hundred
people living within an eight-mile radius of Bath, and in addition to
the theater and other attractions of which he was proud, the area could
claim two schools, one grist mill, as well as five saw mills which were
helping to turn the virgin forests into lumber and farm land. The town
could boast two physicians, and Bath had those two other amenities needed
by any self-respecting town, a courthouse and a jail which were jointly
erected on the east side of Pulteney Square (the Victorian courthouse
now replaces the original structure).
The town's first lawyer settled in Bath in 1795 to handle the ever growing
litigious nature of frontier society. It is almost needless to say that
Williamson served as judge in the courthouse, but then he had served in
this capacity as a judge of the Court of Common Pleas and General Sessions
for Ontario County since 1784. (Ontario County at first encompassed the
Pulteney purchase before it was split into smaller county units.) By 1801
a post office was established, although Williamson had been running a
private mail service between Canada and Philadelphia and Washington with
his own post riders every two weeks.
The Fitzhughs and other plantation owners from the South did purchase
land, and they brought their slaves with them. Despite New York State's
abolishing the purchasing of slaves in the early 1790s, Williamson's record
book shows that he was buying his own slave help beyond this date. Then
in 1803 Captain William Helms came from Virginia bringing his fifty to
one hundred slaves with him, and other settlers from Virginia and Maryland
followed with their slaves. An 1810 census lists one hundred and sixteen
blacks in Bath of whom eighty-eight were slaves. The New York State legislature
passed an act on April 9, 1813, freeing slaves within the State, yet in
1815 a huge covered Conestoga wagon went through Bath supervised by a
man with a whip. Shrieks and cries emanated from the wagon, for Captain
Helms had seized some of his former slaves and their families and was
transporting them to Kentucky for sale. By the time the wagon reached
Olean, most of the former slaves had escaped. Helms was tried and imprisoned
for a short time as a result of his defiance of New York State law. Judge
Thomas McBurney was also tried for a similar offense.
Having had his earlier letters of introduction from Alexander Hamilton
to men of note in New York, it was obvious that Williamson would soon
be the representative of the people of the county to the legislative halls
of the State government in Albany. Meantime, Williamson was off on horseback
to Albany, to the towns of the region, and soon rumors began to reach
Abigail that there were other women in other towns who were of interest
to her husband. Her unhappiness grew. Christy had died soon after their
arrival in Bath, and living in a frontier village was lonely for her—despite
her husband's grandiose plans for the Great Metropolis in the West.
In the long run, the sale of the New York lands did not bring the anticipated
remuneration which the London Association had imagined. Land did sell
in the Ontario Plain region, but the less productive land in the southern
portion of the purchase was not that desirable to settlers. Moreover,
Williamson's hope that Southern plantation owners would flock en masse
to the land did not develop. With the opening of the land of the Western
Reserve, plenty of richer farmland became available at prices competitive
to Pulteney land offerings and land sales grew beyond the western borders
of New York State.
Williamson believed in "internal improvements" in order to attract newcomers
to the Pulteney associates' land, and he had created roads, inns, schools,
courthouses and sold land on the installment basis to settlers. But by
1800 he had spent $1,374,470.10 and had brought in only $147,974.33. Although
Williamson was an excellent promoter, Sir William Pulteney was becoming
more and more concerned over the financial situation. On April 2, 1798,
the New York State legislature had passed an act which permitted aliens
to own land in the State, and thus on March 31, 1800, Sir William had
Williamson transfer the ownership of the land to himself. Williamson was
dismissed as the land agent at this time.
It took five more years before a settlement between Williamson and Sir
William was reached in 1805, and then the former land agent was granted
Springfield and White Hart Farms, and 13,085.5 acres
of land in Steuben County, in all worth a total of $93,298, but there
was no cash for his fourteen years of work. Williamson was replaced by
Robert Troup as agent in order to bring the financial books of the Estate
into balance. Abigail left Williamson as he returned to London. No further
internal improvements were put into service, and by the end of the War
of 1812, which had disrupted communications with London, Robert Troup
had made the Pulteney Estates solvent. The last of the Pulteney lands
were not sold until the beginning of the twentieth century, bringing to
an end this notable enterprise. Sir William died in 1805 at seventy-six
and was buried in Westminster Abbey His daughter succeeded her mother
as Countess of Bath, but she was an invalid and died within a few years.
She is remembered by the town of Henrietta outside of Rochester, New York,
which was named in her honor.
Back in Scotland Williamson was able to obtain various governmental assignments.
By this time his marriage had come to an end. Williamson died of his recurring
malaria (Genesee Fever) on shipboard in 1808 while returning to England
from Havana, Cuba, from an English government assignment. Abigail Williamson
had never been happy on the frontier, and she, along with so many others
of her time, suffered from the Genesee Fever which disabled her. Of her
six children, only two survived to adulthood. She died in Geneva, New
York, on August 31, 1824. Two years later her daughter Ann died at thirty-four.
Charles Alexander, the surviving son, had moved to Scotland, and he lived
until 1849, leaving a son David Robertson Williamson to carry on the family
name on the fifty-square-mile Robertson family estate in Crieff, Scotland.
While Williamson's grandiose plans for the Pulteney Estates never came
to fruition, he did make possible the roads leading into these western
lands of New York State as well as the inns which served new comers on
their arrival. One hundred years after the establishment of the new metropolis
of Bath (now the very small county seat of Steuben County, New York),
Williamson's grandson in Scotland donated a copy of a portrait of his
grandfather which now hangs in the Steuben County Historical Society quarters
not far from Pulteney Square where Williamson held forth.
Williamson's grand inn in Geneva was later turned into an apartment house
which still exists, but his land office in Geneva is remembered only with
an historical marker today. His Painted Post Tavern created in 1796 to
assist in bringing prospective settlers to the great set of festivities
in Bath in that year still stands, restored in 1976 as the Benjamin Patterson
Inn Museum, named after the guide who brought Williamson over the Appalachian
mountains in 1791, who oversaw the Germans constructing the narrow roadway
into the Pulteney lands from the south, and who was the first inn-keeper
of the Painted Post Tavern.
The physical remains of Williamson's achievements on the frontier may
not be many, but his efforts did make possible the settlement and growth
of a major portion of western New York. He is thus remembered for the
magnitude of his vision and the tremendous energy he expended in turning
a wilderness into a cultivated land on which later generations could flourish.
The waves of "enthusiasm" which were to sweep the Pulteney Estates, particularly
in its northern reaches of the Ontario Plain in the decades after his
death, would have amazed and perhaps even appalled Williamson. Perhaps
he had an inkling of what was to come when Jemima Wilkinson established
her semi-religious, semi-celibate community, first on the shores of Lake
Seneca, and then to the west of Lake Keuka, but in no way could he have
imagined the plethora of reform and social movements which would give
the name "The Burned-Over District" to a wide band of land across central
New York State.
Further Readings
Cowan, Helen. Charles Williamson, Genesee Promotor,
Friend of Anglo-American Rapprochment. Rochester Historical Society.
Rochester, New York. 1941.
Cowan, Helen. "Charles Williamson and the Southern Entrance
to the Genesee Country." New York History. Volume XXIII. July
1942.
Cowan, Helen. "Williamsburg, Lost Village on the Genesee."
Rochester History. Volume IV, Number 3.
July 1942 (In the Rochester Public Library)
Johnstone, Jeffrey M. Sir William Johnstone Pulteney
and the Scottish Origins of Western New York. clan
johnstone.org/pulteney.mem.htm.
Martin, John H. and Phyllis G. The Lands of the Painted
Post. Bookmarks. Corning, New York. 1993.
McKelvey, Blake. "Historic Aspects of the Phelps and
Gorham Treaty of July 4-8, 1788." Rochester History. Volume 1,
Number 1. Rochester, New York. January 1939.
McMaster, Guy. History of the Settlement of Steuben
County. Re-printed by the Steuben County Historical Society. Bath,
New York. 1992.
Mulford, Uri. Pioneer Days and Later Times In Corning
and Vicinity, 1789-1920. Uri Mulford. Corning, New York. 1922.
Parker, Arthur C. Charles Williamson, Builder of
Genesee Country. Rochester Historical Society. Volume V. Rochester,
New York. 1926.
Turner, Orsamus. History of the Pioneer Settlements
of Phelps and Gorham Purchase and Morris Reserve. Walling Publisher.
Rochester, New York. 1851.
In addition
Carl Carmer's novel Genesee Fever covers the
early period of settlement in the Genesee country, and it includes vignettes
of Charles Williamson in this fictional account based on history.
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