Ithaca, New York
Ithaca is a city in the U.S. state of New York. It is situated on the southern shore of Cayuga Lake in the Finger Lakes region of Upstate New York. With a population of 32,108 as of the 2020 census, Ithaca is the largest community in the Ithaca metropolitan statistical area, which includes all 103,558 residents of Tompkins County, of which it is the county seat. The city is named after the Greek island of Ithaca, home of the protagonist Odysseus in Homer's Odyssey.
Ithaca is a college town best known for hosting Cornell University, an Ivy League university founded in 1865, as well as Ithaca College. Until the late 18th century, present-day Ithaca was inhabited by the Cayuga people of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy. In 1789, the federal and state governments began granting land in the area, known as the Central New York Military Tract, to compensate veterans of the American Revolutionary War. Located in the township of Ulysses, or Tract 22, Ithaca was populated by white settlers in 1794 and formally established in 1821.
History
17th century
Native Americans lived in this area for thousands of years. When reached by Europeans, this area was controlled by the Cayuga, one of the five tribes comprising the Iroquois Confederacy. Jesuit missionaries from New France in present-day Quebec had a mission to convert the Cayuga as early as 1657.18th century
and Tutelo peoples, Siouan-speaking tribes, later occupied lands at the south end of Cayuga Lake. Dependent tributaries of the Cayuga, they had been permitted to settle on the tribe's hunting lands at the south end of Cayuga Lake, and in Pony Hollow of present-day Newfield, New York and Cayuta, New York. Remnants of these tribes had been forced from Virginia and North Carolina by tribal conflicts and European colonial settlement. Similarly, the Tuscarora people, an Iroquoian-speaking tribe from the Carolinas, migrated after defeat in the Yamasee War; they settled with the Oneida people and became the sixth nation of the Haudenosaunee, with chiefs stating the migration was complete in 1722.During the American Revolutionary War, four of the then six Iroquois nations helped the British attempt to crush the revolution, although bands made decisions on fighting in a highly decentralized way. Conflict with the rebel colonists was fierce throughout the Mohawk Valley and Western New York. In retaliation for conflicts to the east and resentment at the way in which the Iroquois made war, the 1779 Sullivan Expedition was conducted against the Iroquois in the west of the state, destroying more than 40 villages and stored winter crops and forcing their retreat from the area. It destroyed the Tutelo village of Coreorgonel, located near what is now the junction of state routes 13 and 13A just south of Ithaca. Most Iroquois were forced from the state after the Revolutionary War, but some remnants remained. The state sold off the former Iroquois lands to stimulate development and settlement by non-indigenous Americans; lands were also granted as payment to veterans of the war.
Within the current boundaries of Ithaca, Native Americans maintained a temporary hunting camp at the base of Cascadilla Gorge. In 1788, eleven men from Kingston, New York, came to the area with two Lenape guides, to explore what they considered wilderness. The following year Jacob Yaple, Isaac Dumond, and Peter Hinepaw returned with their families and constructed log cabins. That same year Abraham Bloodgood of Albany obtained a patent from the state for 1,400 acres, which included all of the present downtown west of Tioga Street.
In 1790, the federal government and state began an official program to grant land in the area, known as the Central New York Military Tract, as payment for service to Continental Army soldiers of the Revolutionary War, when the newly established federal government was cash poor. Most local land titles trace back to these Revolutionary war grants. However, the Bloodgood tract was not part of the state bounties to veterans. It was originally granted to a member of the state militia, Martinus Zielie, as a bounty under a different law for recruiting men to enlist in the Continental Army.
As part of this process, the Central New York Military Tract, which included northern Tompkins County, was surveyed under the direction of Simeon De Witt, Bloodgood's son-in-law and the Surveyor General of New York. Simeon commissioned his first cousin, Moses De Witt, after whom DeWitt, New York, is named, to survey the area around the south end of Cayuga Lake. Both Simeon and Moses were first cousins of DeWitt Clinton through his mother, Mary De Witt, who married James Clinton, brother of Governor George Clinton. The Commissioners of Lands of New York State met in 1790. The Military Tract township in which Ithaca is located was named the Town of Ulysses. A few years later De Witt moved to Ithaca, then called variously "The Flats," "The City," or "Sodom"; he renamed it for the Greek island home of Ulysses in the spirit of the multitude of settlement names in the region derived from classical literature, such as Aurelius, Ovid, and especially of Ulysses, New York, the town that contained Ithaca at the time.
Around 1791, De Witt surveyed what is now the downtown area into lots and sold them at modest prices. That same year John Yaple built a grist mill on Cascadilla Creek.
On November 11, 1794, the Treaty of Canandaigua was ratified between approximately 50 Sachems and leaders of the Iroquois and Timothy Pickering on behalf of President George Washington and the United States of America. Among the treaty's numerous provisions, the Cayuga agreed to officially cede their right to all land in present-day Tompkins County in exchange for an approximately 64,000 acre reservation at the north end of Cayuga Lake. Today, the Cayuga Nation of New York, the Cayuga signatories' ancestors, still point to the Treaty of Canandaigua as evidence of their legal sovereignty.
Ithaca's first frame house was erected in 1800 by Abram Markle. In 1804, the village had a postmaster and, in 1805, a tavern.
19th century
Ithaca became a transshipping point for salt from curing beds near Salina, New York, to buyers south and east. This prompted construction in 1810 of the Owego Turnpike. When the War of 1812 cut off access to gypsum in Nova Scotia, which was used for fertilizer, Ithaca became the center of trade in Cayuga gypsum. The Cayuga Steamboat Company was organized in 1819 and, in 1820, launched the first steamboat on Cayuga Lake, the Enterprise. In 1821, the village was incorporated at the same time the Town of Ithaca was organized and separated from the parent Town of Ulysses. In 1834, the Ithaca and Owego Railroad's first horse drawn train began service, connecting traffic on the east–west Erie Canal, which was completed in 1825, with the Susquehanna River to the south to expand the trade network.With the Long Depression of 1837, the Ithaca and Owego Railroad was re-organized as the Cayuga and Susquehanna Railroad. It was re-engineered with switchbacks downhill into Ithaca in the late 1840s. In the late 20th century, a short section of its abandoned right-of-way in the City and Town of Ithaca was used for the South Hill Recreation Way.
However, easier early railroad routes were constructed that bypassed Ithaca, such as that of the Syracuse, Binghamton & New York, built in 1854. In the decade following the American Civil War, railroads were built from Ithaca to Auburn, Geneva, Cayuga, Cortland, Elmira, and Athens, Pennsylvania, mainly with financing from Ezra Cornell. These were all branch-lines, since the city, located on a steep hill by the lake, prevented it from being directly connected to a major transportation artery.
In 1892, when the Bethlehem, Pennsylvania-based Lehigh Valley Railroad built its main, double-track freight line from Van Etten Junction to Geneva and on to Buffalo, New York, it bypassed Ithaca and Auburn to the west, running via Burdett and eastern Schuyler County on easier grades, just as the Delaware, Lackawanna and Western Railroad had done a decade earlier, in 1882, with its own, new Binghamton-Buffalo mainline extension to the south and west, via Owego, Waverly, Bath, and Dansville. Two of three daily New York City-Buffalo roundtrip passenger trains served Ithaca on the older, original Lehigh Valley Ithaca Branch between Van Etten Junction and Geneva, until discontinuance of the Black Diamond daylight train, on May 11, 1959. On May 25, 1959, the overnight "Maple Leaf" train was shifted back to the Ithaca Branch from the main line via Burdett, and operated on this route until the Lehigh Valley Railroad discontinued this last passenger service on February 4, 1961.
In the late 19th century, more industry developed in Ithaca. In 1883, William Henry Baker and his partners founded the Ithaca Gun Company, which manufactured shotguns. The original factory was located in the Fall Creek neighborhood of the city, on a slope later known as Gun Hill, where the nearby waterfall supplied the main source of energy for the plant. The company became an icon in the hunting and shooting world, and its shotguns were known for their fine decorative work. Wooden gunstocks with knots or other imperfections were donated to the high school woodworking shop to be made into lamps. John Philip Sousa and trick-shooter Annie Oakley favored Ithaca Gun Company guns. In 1937, the company began producing the Ithaca 37, based on a 1915 patent by noted firearms designer John Browning. Its 12-gauge shotguns were the standard used for decades by the New York City Police Department and Los Angeles Police Department.
In 1885, Ithaca Children's Home was established on West Seneca Street. The orphanage had two programs at the time: a residential home for both orphaned and destitute children, and a day nursery. The village established its first trolley in 1887. Ithaca developed as a small manufacturing and retail center and was incorporated as a city in 1888. The largest industrial company in the area was Morse Chain, elements of which were absorbed into Emerson Power Transmission on South Hill and Borg Warner Automotive in Lansing, New York.
Ithaca claims to be the birthplace of the ice cream sundae, created in 1892 when fountain shop owner Chester Platt "served his local priest vanilla ice cream covered in cherry syrup with a dark candied cherry on top. The priest suggested the dessert be named after the day, Sunday, although the spelling was later changed out of fear some would find it offensive." The local Unitarian church, where the priest, Rev. John Scott, preached, has an annual "Sundae Sunday" every September in commemoration. Ithaca's claim has long been disputed by Two Rivers, Wisconsin. Also in 1892, the Ithaca Kitty became one of the first mass-produced stuffed animal toys in the United States.