Sure Signs: Stories Behind the Historical Markers of Central New York: Central New York

The blue and gold historical markers inform travelers, but only enough to pique their curiosity. In Howard Ford’s SURE SIGNS, Stories Behind the Historical Markers of Central New York, he relates the explorations of the French, Dutch, English, and the rebels and their battling with each other and the Iroquois for control of New York. Setting up homes and shops on the frontier, developing roads, canals, steamboats, and railroads, frontier medicine, colleges and schools, liberalizing laws, the origin of the Mormons, the Oneida Community, the Code of Handsome Lake, the Chautauqua Institute, the long fights for women’s suffrage and the abolition of slavery, are stories which reveal toil and trouble and present our heritage.

During the siege of Fort Stanwix, the rebels raided the British-Indian siege line depleted by those gone to ambush Herkimer at Oriskany. Along with the ruse then sprung on the British by Benedict Arnold, it aided the ensuing victory there and at Saratoga.

When a British ship shelled Sackets Harbor in 1812, the Americans had only twenty-four-pound shot to fire back from a thirty-two-pound caliber cannon, and had to use scraps of carpet as wadding to make a tighter fit to get a better range. But both British and American fire still fell short. When the British fired a thirty-two-pound ball, the Yanks happily retrieved and fired it back, severing the mast of the Admiral’s flagship who declined further embarrassment and sailed away.

Hiram Sibley, of Rochester and Western Union, had strung telegraph line across the US and wanted to extend it to Russia via the Bering Straight. During right-of-way negotiations, the Russians, surprised at the project’s cost, said that all their west coast property was not worth that much. This remark inspired deliberations for the purchase of Alaska after the Civil War.

Three hundred pages of stories are studded with the relevant markers and at book’s end is a complete list of all the markers and their location by county.

Even though he had a happy time growing up in northern New Jersey, Howard Ford became beguiled by the summer Adirondacks, the journey there whether by train or automobile, and the natural charm of New York State. Part of that charm was the historical markers encountered along the highway. They piqued his curiosity, along with books by Walter Edmonds, Kenneth Roberts, and Carl Carmer wherein he learned the fascination of unexpected cogent details of the event or the persons involved. He moved to be on Skaneateles Lake in 1965.

A graduate of the State University of Iowa, where he had earlier been a cadet in the Navy Pre-Flight School, Mr. Ford’s career has been in the financial planning field. He retired in 1988 to pursue his many hobbies including writing Sure Signs, his first book. He has had articles appear in Adirondack Life and WoodenBoat magazine, both on building an Adirondack guide boat.

Sure Signs is the outgrowth of that desire to satisfy his curiosity that we think will stir and please yours. A glance at the bibliographic list will show the range of his literary historical roaming in central New York.

King George's reign endured sixty years, the last ten of which he was determined by doctors to be mad.   But the king had had to contend with Pontiac's Conspiracy, the American Revolution, the French Revolution, Napoleon Bonaparte, and the cruel rebelliousness of his sons.

With the friction between Indians and settlers becoming more aggravated, the king proclaimed the lands west of the Alleghenies closed to immigration in 1763.  Sir William and others in London had suggested this policy to pacify the Indians and to avoid thinly settled and indefensible areas if western expansion continued, in favor of heavier populated, defensible settlements east of the Proclamation Line.  Exclusion of colonists from western settlement was justified, but it was resented by those who had plans for western expansion.  It also defied enforcement.

London was also concerned that governing already unruly colonials far removed from the coastal cities would be difficult and costly.

As Pontiac's rebellion was winding down, people on the frontier began to again migrate into the upper Ohio Valley.  The Indians became agitated and numerous local Indian meetings were held to determine action against this most recent violation of the British promise to restrain whites from settling west of the Line.  Croghan informed Johnson that the Indians were planning a much larger congress to organize resistance but it was postponed until the following spring.  To circumvent such a meeting, Johnson urged the Iroquois that they should preempt the congress and hold it in their home domain since they were universally regarded as the "senior" Indian nation.

In September of 1768, the Fort Stanwix Treaty Conference attracted over 3000 Indians from most of the tribes east of the Mississippi as well as traders, governors, land speculators, and politicians from the colonies.  But Johnson and Croghan, with the Board of Trade and the Iroquois, had already negotiated a sale by the Iroquois of all their subjugated land south of the Ohio, down to the mouth of the Kanawaha River, to the British for ƒ10,000.

The Confederacy wanted to part with this land to divert the white expansion to take place well south of their New York borders.  For the British, owning this land gave them more control over westward expansion even though now the line would extend farther west and south before returning to the crest of the Appalachians.  It was more land than for which London had planned.

PROPERTY LINE
WESTERN BOUNDARY OF
CIVILIZATION FIXED BY
FORT STANWIX TREATY
NOV. 5, 1768. WITNESSED
BY SIR WILLIAM JOHNSON
Oneida County, 65*
NY 12 north of Waterville

The land companies, traders, and frontiersman thought their futures were improved, but the Shawnee, Delawares, and Mingos, who had been allowed to live and hunt on Iroquois land, were again contemptuously treated by the "senior" nation and had to move again to north of the Ohio.  The Iroquois awarded Johnson and Croghan large tracts of land in central New York for past and present services.

GEORGE CROGAN
INDIAN AGENT-LAND SPECULATOR
LIVED IN PIONEER LOG HOME
LOCATED HERE 1769-1770.
GENERAL JAMES CLINTON'S
HEADQUARTERS IN 1779.
Otsego County, 18
On Main Street, Cooperstown

Following the Fort Stanwix Treaty, the line ran from Fort Stanwix along Unadilla Creek south to near the site of Hancock, then to Owego and to Williamsport (settled 1772).  It then ran westward cross-country to the head waters of the West Branch of the Susquehanna to the Delaware-Shawnee town of Kittanning on the Allegheny and down that river and the Ohio to the mouth of the Kanawha River, then back to the Appalachian ridge (near Roanoke).

Within a short time, land companies, with an eye for dividing up the land among themselves, gained influence with the highest levels of government in London, cutting officials in on expected profits to garner grants.  Samuel Wharton and William Trent, traders from Philadelphia, Washington, Franklin, Croghan, and many other top people were on the verge of seeing their efforts fulfilled when the passage of the Quebec Act, in 1774, slammed the gate shut on their prospects.  But by this time, over 30,000 settlers moving west by way of the Forbes and Braddock roads had pre-empted the hopes of the land companies in the Ohio Valley, making moot any legalistic efforts to dislodge them.      The early addition of Kentucky (1792) and Tennessee (1796) to the original thirteen states of the United States were the outgrowth of this resolute migration.

Within a very few years the Royal Proclamation Line became academic.