THE OLD TOWN OF PAINTED POST
In the summer of 1779, a numerous party
of Tories and Indians, under the command of a
Loyalist named McDonald and Hiakatoo, a renowned
Seneca war-chief, returned to the north by way of
Pine Creek, the Tioga, and the Conhocton, from an
incursion among the settlements on the west branch
of the Susquehanna. They had suffered a severe loss
in a conflict with the borderers, and brought with
them many wounded. Their march was also encumbered
by many prisoners, men, women and children, taken at
Freeling’s Fort. A party of rangers followed them a
few days, journeying into the wilderness, and found
at their abandoned encampment abundant proof of the
manfulness with which the knives and rifles of the
frontier had been used in repelling its foes, in the
heaps of bark and roots which had been pounded or
steeped in preparing draughts and dressing for the
wounded warriors. Under the elms of the confluence
of the Tioga and Conhocton, Captain Montour, a
half-breed, a fine young chief, a gallant warrior
and a favorite with his tribe, died of his wounds.
He was a son of the famous Queen Catharine. His
comrades buried him by the river side, and planted
about his grave a post on which was painted various
symbols and rude devices. This monument was known
throughout the Genesee Forest as the Painted Post.
It was a landmark well known all the Six Nations,
and was often visited by their braves and chieftains.
At the Painted Post, the first habitation of
civilized man erected in Steuben county, was built by
William Harris, an Indian Trader. Harris was a
Pennsylvanian, and not long after the close of the
Revolutionary war pushed up the Chemung with a cargo
of Indian goods, to open a traffic with the hunting
parties of the Six Nations, which resorted at certain
seasons to the north-western of the Susquehanna. A
canoe or a pack-horse sufficed at that time to transport
the yearly merchandise of the citizens of our county.
Sixty-five years afterwards, an armada of canal boats
and a caravan of cars hardly performed this labor. The
precise date of Harris’s arrival is unknown. Judge
Baker, late of Pleasant Valley, found the trader
established at his post in the spring of 1787. On
Christmas night following, he went down to the
Painted Post, and finding the cabin burned and the
trader missing, he inferred that the latter had perhaps
been killed by his customers--a disaster by no means
unlikely to befall a merchant in a region where the
position of debtor was much more pleasant and independent
than that of creditor, especially if the creditor had
the misfortune to be white and civilized. On the
contrary, his intercourse with the Indians was of a
very friendly and confidential character. They rendered
him much valuable assistance in setting up business, not
of course by endorsing his paper, or advancing funds on
personal security; but by helping him to erect his
warehouse, and patronizing him in the handsomest manner
afterwards. They even carried the logs out of which the
cabin was built, on their shoulders, to the proposed site
of the edifice which was after all, to speak with strict
etymology, a species of endorsement.
The savages manifested much zeal in promoting the
establishment of a trading post at the head of the
Chemung, and indeed it was a matter of as much
consequence at that time as the building of a Railroad
Depot is in modern days. Before that, the citizens of the
county were obliged to go to Tioga Point, nearly fifty
miles below, to buy their gunpowder, liquors, knives,
bells, brads, and jews-harps; and the proposal of Harris
to erect a bazaar at the Painted Post, for the sale of
these articles, was of as vital concern to the interests
of the county as at the present day an offer of the
government to establish a university in Tyrone or an
observatory in Troupsburg would be. It was a great day
for the county when the trader’s was finished, and his
wares unpacked. Then the sachem might buy scalping knives
and hatchets on the back of his own river; the ladies of
the wilderness could go shopping without paddling their
canoes to the Susquehanna, and the terrible warriors of
the Six Nations, as they sat of an evening under their
own elm trees, smoking pipes bought at the “People’s
Store,” had by, forgot their cunning; when some renowned
Captain Shiverscull, a grim and truculent giant, steeped
to his elbows in the blood of farmers, and scarred with
bullets and tomahawks like a target, set upon log,
soothing his savage breast with the melodies of a
jews-harp, or winding around that bloody finger, which
had so often been twisted in the flaxen scalp-locks of
Pennsylvanian children, a string of beads, bought for
his own ugly little cub, that lay a sleep in the wigwam
of Genesee.
At the time of Judge Baker’s visit, Harris was only
temporarily absent. He afterwards returned to Painted Post
with his son,, and lived there a few years, when he again
removed to Pennsylvania. One or two others are sometimes
pointed out as the first settlers of the county; but
evidence, which must be regarded as reliable and decisive,
proves that the first civilized resident was William
Harris. It is possible, indeed, that before his advent
some straggling adventurer may have wandered hither, built
him a lodge, perhaps planted corn on the open flats, and
afterwards strayed to parts unknown, leaving no trace of
his existence. There have always been, on the frontiers,
eccentric geniuses, to whom such a line of conduct was no
strange thing. There have always been, on the frontiers,
a few vagabonds, who should have been born wolves, who
forsake civilized homes and join the Indians, and are only
hindered from living with the bears in their hollow trees,
by the refusal of these sensible monsters to fraternize
with such loafers. Hermits, hunters and vagabonds find
their way into strange places, and it is by no means
impossible that some pleasant island or open flat may
have harbored one of these outlaws before any other
wanderer, laying claim to civilization, smote our forests
with the all conquering axe. No such Robinson Crusoe,
however, presents himself as a candidate for historical
honors, and it is, upon the whole, improbable that any
such preceded the trader, or if he did, that he enjoyed
his solitude a great while unmolested. The “Man Friday”
he would have been likely to catch here would most
probably have caught him, and whisked his scalp off
without winking.
Harris was a trader and did not cultivate the
soil. Frederick Calkins, a Vermonter, was the first
farmer of Steuben. He made his settlement near the
head of the Chimney Narrows, in 1788. After living
there alone for a time, he returned to the east for
his family. During this absence, Phelps and Gorham’s
surveyors made head-quarters at Painted Post, which
accounts for the omission of his name in Judge Porter’s
narrative, quoted in the last chapter, George Goodhue
followed Mr. Calkins in a year or two.
Township number two in the second range, was
purchased of Phelps and Gorham, in 1790, by six
proprietors, Frederick Calkins, Justus Wolcott, of
Eastern New York, Ephraim Patterson, of Connecticut,
Silas Wood, Caleb Gardener and Peleg Gorton. The price
paid for the township was eight cents per acre.
The old town of Painted Post comprised the
present towns of Hornby, Campbell, Erwin, Painted Post,
Caton and Lindley. The earliest settlers along the
Chemung and Conhocton were the six proprietors (except
Silas Wood), Eli and Eldad Mead, (1790,) David and
Jonathan Cook, of New Jersey, (1790,) Judge Knox, of
Eastern New York, (1793,) Benjamin Eaton, Elias Williams,
Henry McCormick, Hezekiah Thurber, Bradford Eggleston,
Samuel Colegrove, John Berry and others. John Winters,
famous hunter, settled there at an early day, and families
named Rowan, Waters, Van Wye, Turner, McCullick, etc.
Mr. Eli Mead was the first Supervisor of the town,
and went on foot to Canandaigua, to attend the meeting of
the Board of Supervisors of Ontario county.
Gen. McClure, speaking of the early settlers of
the neighborhood, mentions “a man by the name of Fuller,
who kept the old Painted Post Hotel. That ancient house
of entertainment, or tavern (as such were then called)
was composed of round logs, one story high, and if I
mistake not was divided into two apartments. This house
was well patronized by its neighbors as by travelers from
afar. All necessarily stopped here for refreshment, as
well for themselves as for their horses. Fuller, the
landlord, was a good natured, slow and easy kind of man,
but his better half, Nettie, was a thorough-going, smart,
good-looking woman, and was much admired by gentlemen
generally. To the wearied traveler, nothing can be more
agreeable than a pleasant, obliging landlady. There were
other respectable families settled at Painted Post, not
many years after, (1794,) Thomas McBurney, Esq., Capt.
Samuel Erwin, Frank and Arthur, his brothers, Capt. Howell
Bull, John E. Evans, an Englishman and others.”
A mill was built on the Post Creek, near the
Narrows, by Mr. Payne and Col. Henderson, as early as 1793
or 1794. This mill is described by the few who remember
it, as having been mainly built of logs “so that you could
drive a pig through it.”
The first establishment for the sale of goods,
to civilized men, was kept by Benjamin Eaton. He went for
his first stock to Wattles’ Ferry (now Unadilla village)
by a canoe, with a man and a boy, (Mr. Samuel Cook, of
Campbelltown.) At that place he purchased another canoe,
loaded his fleet with goods and returned to Painted Post.
Col. Arthur Erwin, the ancestor of a large family
bearing his name, emigrated from Ireland before the
Revolution. During the war he served in the American army.
He resided in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, and became the
proprietor of a large landed estate. He was shot dead
through the window of a log house at Tioga Point, in 1792,
by an ejected squatter who escaped.
Hon. William Steele, a well known and highly respected
citizen of Painted Post, removed from New Jersey in 1819.
He served in the war of the Revolution, and was severely
wounded and made prisoner at sea in 1780. In 1785 he was
appointed clerk in the old Board of Treasury, and in 1794,
he commanded a troop of horse and aided in suppressing the
insurrection near Pittsburgh. He died in 1851. (Obituary
notice in Corning Journal.)
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