Tompkins County History
Cayuga Lake
Tompkins County is divided by Cayuga Lake, the second longest of the glacially created Finger Lakes. The lake, 435 feet deep at its core, with its headwaters at the southern end, is fed by streams that make their way through gorges cut in the underlying shale and limestone that make up the county’s geologic base. The county today consists of 476.1 square miles; the southern end rugged terrain with Connecticut Hill reaching 2,095.97 feet. The northern portion presents a more gentle and fertile terrain.
Ithaca Conservatory of Music on East Seneca Street
Image Courtesy of The History Center.
Railroad development linked Tompkins County with the markets and destinations beginning in 1832 with the horse-drawn Ithaca-Owego Railroad. By the 1870s, there were four major railway lines running through Ithaca. Lake travel began in 1823 and continued into the twentieth century.
Ithaca College opened in downtown Ithaca buildings in 1892, at first a music academy, then expanding into a number of fields. The college moved to South Hill in 1969. Significant industries in the county include the Ithaca Gun Company, the Thomas-Morse airplane company, and the Groton Iron Bridge Company–all of which are now gone. For a decade, beginning in 1914, movies were made in Ithaca.
Cornell Arts Quad
Population growth in the twentieth century continued only slowly, although the university from 1885 increased yearly in size bringing faculty, hiring local staff, and drawing students in ever-growing numbers. In 1910 there were 33,647 residents in the county. The increase thereafter was slight until 1940 when the total population of Tompkins County was 42,340. In the next ten years the overall population jumped by more than 16,000 residents to 59,122, with the major gain occurring in Ithaca, reflecting the dramatic growth of Cornell University following the second World War. An additional jump by 10,000 residents between 1960 and 1970 brought the county population to 77,064. That decade’s figures reveal a shift in living patterns with a major increase in the Town of Ithaca, especially in the northeast portion and in the areas adjacent to Cornell.
By the 2000 federal census, the population of Tompkins County was 96,501. The ethnic composition of the county had also changed. There had been a major influx of Irish immigrants in the 1830s and ‘40s. Late in the nineteenth-century, Italians and some identified as Hungarians began to arrive. Early in the twentieth century newcomers included Italians, Hungarians, Greeks, and Finns. In 1900 there were two Chinese listed in the Federal Census. By 2000 the County housed a diversified Asian community along with Hispanics, Russians, and a small but significant contingent of Tibetans who founded a monastery, first on North Aurora Street and in 2008 along the Danby Road (route 96 south). The student population at Cornell is nearly twenty thousand.
The major business of the county is education, with Cornell, Ithaca College, the Tompkins Cortland Community College, and six public school systems plus several private schools and the Community School of Music and Art (CSMA). Agriculture continues to be important; there is an active Farmer’s Market featuring food grown in the area. Tompkins County also attracts tourists to its Discovery Trail of important museums: the Museum of the Earth, the Sciencenter, the Johnson Art Museum, the History Center. More than sixty cultural organizations, including historical societies, drama companies, musical groups of all kinds, dance companies and an orchestra and opera society flourish. There is a stunning cycle of events each year that include the Ithaca Festival, which occurs the first weekend of June, the Grassroots Festival each summer, Light in Winter each January, and an Art Trail open all year long with featured weekend events in the spring and fall.
Business Complex
There is a major business complex adjacent to the County Airport. Over 80 companies in the county are here because their founders studied or taught at the university.
Traditionally the county, outside the City of Ithaca, voted Republican. With the increase of population after 1950, the Democratic core increased and in 1993 the County Board for the first time had a Democratic majority.
The county is served daily by The Ithaca Journal, which began in 1814, The [Cornell] Daily Sun [1880], and The Ithaca Times, a weekly news publication.
The county’s history was first treated in H. Hurd, History of Chemung, Schuyler, Tioga and Tompkins Counties, New York (Philadelphia, 1879) and in John Selkreg, Landmarks of Tompkins County (Syracuse, 1894). Horace King wrote an essay about Ithaca in 1847, H. C. Goodwin published Ithaca as it Was, and Ithaca as it Is, in 1853, and Henry Abt published Ithaca, in 1926. Recent treatments include Carol Kammen, Peopling of Tompkins County: A Social History (Interlaken, 1985) and Jane M. Dieckmann, A Short History of Tompkins County (Ithaca, 1986). Also useful is W. Glenn Norris, The Origin of Place Names in Tompkins County (Ithaca, 1951) or the updated Place Names of Tompkins County, published in 2003 by the Municipal Historians of Tompkins County. There is also The Towns of Tompkins County, edited Jane M. Dieckmann (Ithaca, 1998). See also The Architectural Heritage of Tompkins County with photographs by Richard Corth, published in 2002.
The Ithaca Hotel early 1800s
Image Courtesy of The History Center
Histories of Cornell University include Carl Becker, Cornell University: Founders and the Founding (Ithaca, 1941), Morris Bishop, A History of Cornell (Ithaca, 1962) and Carol Kammen, Cornell: Glorious to View (Ithaca, 2003). Major archival repositories include the Tompkins County Archive, Cornell University Archives, and the DeWitt Historical Society of Tompkins County.
Carol Kammen
Tompkins County Historian
2008
Town of Ithaca Landmark
Before European settlement, this was home to the Cayuga Indians, one of the five –and then six–tribes that made up the Iroquois Confederation. They used the land lightly, placing semi-permanent settlements near the sources of fresh water, cultivating patches for produce and orchards. In the eighteenth-century, the Cayugas allowed the Sapony and Tutelo tribes migrating north from the Carolinas to settle on portions of land along the Cayuga Inlet where they built a village called Coreorgonel. In 1779, in the dire days of the American Revolutionary War when the outcome was less than certain, George Washington sent Major General John Sullivan into Iroquoia to drive the Indians west in an attempt to push them out of the conflict raging between the colonies and England. Sullivan directed Colonel Henry Dearborn to march down the west side of the lake, and Lieutenant Colonel William Butler, to go along the east side of Cayuga Lake, to destroy Cayuga villages and crops. Butler’s forces burned Coreorgonel, now the site of the Tutelo Park in the Town of Ithaca.
Simeon Dewitt
Image Courtesy of www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simeon_De_Witt
Following the Revolutionary War, Simeon DeWitt, the State Surveyor General and the man who developed Ithaca, included the northern portion of what became Tompkins County in the New Military Tract, land given to veterans in payment for their military service. The southern portion of what became Tompkins County fell into the Watkins and Flint Purchase, a private land development company with headquarters in Owego.
Exploratory visits to the headwaters of Cayuga Lake began in 1786. Settlement followed the 1790 dispersal of Military Tract lots. Some who came were squatters willing to take a chance on the land—and who eventually lost title to it. Others came seeking their military allotments. Some traveled from the east through the dense forest, or came up on rough roads cut into the wilderness by order of the state.
1802 Simeon Dewitt Map
Those taking up land the southern portion of what became Tompkins County—in today’s towns of Danby and Caroline and Newfield--were eastern New Yorkers, such as John Cantine who received state land in payment for services to the state. There were Southerners, too, looking for new land on which to resettle who bought tracts of land in numbered towns, such as Town #11, which became the Town of Caroline. Following the early settlers came ministers, lawyers, and merchants with goods for sale.
Hamlets grew up where an owner was willing to offer land (at Tremans, now Trumansburg) or where there were opportunities for milling (at Ludlow’s, now Ludlowville). For the land at the lake shore, Simeon Dewitt drew up a map of a village expecting it to become a commercial metropolis. His map of 1803 had placed the name Ithaca on the land, as did his 1807 sketch of streets. His land lay within Military Tract #22, the town of Ulysses. Settlement throughout the county followed these initial events. In 1810 DeWitt Clinton wrote that the “village has several houses, three taverns, and two or three stores, and mills in a ravine or hollow.”
Daniel D. Tompkins
Image Courtesy of www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_D._Tompkins
Following the Embargo Act of 1808 salt and gypsum from Salina, New York, near Syracuse, went south by way of Cayuga Lake and then through Ithaca, enlivening the local economy. In 1810 the state chartered the Ithaca-Owego Turnpike and Ithaca became a trans-shipment point for goods flowing south. To regulate the teamsters, who sometimes numbered up to 400 at any one time, residents, in the absence of any state or federal authority other than the Postmaster, formed a Moral Society that acted to stem their boisterous antics.
The state of New York created Tompkins County on April 7, 1817 and named the new county for Daniel D. Tompkins, governor of the state (1807-17) and Vice President of the United States (1817-25). Tompkins never saw the county named for him. Tompkins County was initially pieced together from the Military Tract town of Dryden, from lots 51 to 100 of the town of Locke (which became Groton), from lots 42 to 100 of Milton (which became Lansing) all formerly within Cayuga County. To these were added lots 43 to 100 of Ovid, renamed Covert, and all of the towns of Ulysses and Hector, taken from Seneca County. In 1817, the small community fostered by Simeon DeWitt was designated county seat. In 1821 the state designated Ithaca a village within the Town of Ithaca, separated from the Town of Ulysses.
East view of Ithaca, N.Y. Taken in September of 1836
Image Courtesy of www.nypl.org
In 1823 the county grew in size with the addition of the towns Caroline, Danby and Cayuta, which became Newfield, all originally from the Watkins and Flint Purchase and formerly within Tioga County. Further adjustments were made when Covert was returned to Seneca County, and again in 1853 when a portion of Newfield and the town of Hector became part of Schuyler County. From that time on, the county’s footprint has remained unaltered.
Early settlers were predominantly native-born farmers seeking new land. Some from eastern New York and the south brought slaves with them and until the abolition of slavery in New York, in 1827, there were both enslaved and free African Americans within the county, although their numbers were small. In the 1820 federal census claimed 72 non-whites and 20,609 white residents. There were also 20 foreign-born aliens. At that time neither Danby nor Caroline (where the largest number of slaves were held) were located in Tompkins County.
Population in Tompkins County rose gradually over the course of the nineteenth century and into the mid-twentieth. A close look at those figures, however, shows that while the Village of Ithaca increased steadily in population, most of the towns of the county reached a peak population before mid-century and then dipped to half that level in the early years of the twentieth century. In 1827, the Rev. J. Perkins wrote that people were moving out of the area while others were moving in. “This is the most fluctuating place I was ever in,” he commented. The town of Newfield declined in population from a high in 1850 of 3,816 residents to a 1910 low of 1,509, and even towns on somewhat better land experienced a dip. Lansing, with over 4,000 residents in 1830, had but 2,676 in 1910; Dryden peaked in 1840 with 5,446 but slipped to 3,590 in 1910. Some of this decline can be attributed to the type of land available for farms, but there was also a strong draw on restless people to the West, and to more urban areas.
Ezra Cornell
Image Courtesy of www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ezra_Cornell
During the early nineteenth century there were a number of small manufacturing companies, including a significant printing industry, a coverlet factory, and mills using the ample waterpower of Fall, Cascadilla, and Six Mile creeks. The opening of the Erie Canal in 1825 and the Seneca Canal connection to it, kept local goods flowing into the eastern markets but they competed with cheaper grains and produce from the Midwest where the flat land produced more per acre and thus could be sold for less.
A few county businesses flourished until the aftermath of the Depression of 1837 when the local economy slowed. There was a development attempt in 1840 to attract industry into the county but it failed. This had involved a group of civic-minded men who sent young Ezra Cornell to the east to seek industries. He was unsuccessful in his attempt to lure established factories to Ithaca.
The people of the county were of a variety of political opinions. Some, but not a majority, were abolitionists who supported a variety of answers to the problem of slavery. A few were involved with the effort to aid the fugitives from southern slavery. In the election of 1860, the voters of Tompkins County supported Abraham Lincoln, even while the village of Ithaca voted the Democratic ticket. When the Civil War began, the residents of the county responded with enthusiasm although their high spirits lagged as the toll of war became known and finding volunteers became more and more difficult. Army recruiters sought African American men to serve in the federal United States Colored Infantry in 1863 and at least two-dozen men from the county enlisted at that time.
Cornell University Overlooking Cayuga Lake
Image Courtesy of University Photography
It was the establishment of Cornell University in 1865 that stabilized the economy of the Tompkins County. The Morrill Land Grant Act of 1862 provided land to states for the support of agricultural and mechanical education, and training in military tactics. It was through his interest in agricultural education and providing education for boys from poor families—reflecting his own background--that Ezra Cornell staked his own newly–made fortune and his Ithaca farm to bring the Morrill Land Grant College in Tompkins County. But Cornell knew little of universities. The school that emerged was the product of the experience and ideas of Andrew Dickson White, who had been born in Homer, grown up in Syracuse, and who had been educated at Hobart and William Smith College, Yale University, and in Europe. Together the two men founded Cornell University attracting students, faculty, and many new residents to the county. Some families even moved to Ithaca while their children attended the university.