Eaton

By Mary E. Messere

Once touted as the sparkling jewel of Madison County because of its many scenic lakes and reservoirs built to feed the great Chenango Canal, the town and hamlet of Eaton have played an important role in the history of Madison County. From within its boundaries have come such luminaries as Emily Chubbuck Judson, early women s writer; humorist Melville Landon, better known to the world as Eli Perkins; and Samuel Chubbuck, inventor and the maker of the early telegraph equipment for Samuel Morse s telegraph. Eaton captures the history of this once-thriving community through pictures and stories of the Chenango Canal, early turnpikes, and steam engines made famous by Wood, Taber and Morse s Steam Engine Works. Many of these pictures are kept for the future in the Old Town of Eaton Museum, located in one of Eaton s oldest stone buildings.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Arcadia Publishing
• Release date: Apr 27, 2009
• ISBN: 9781439622032

Mary E. Messere

Mary E. Messere founded the Neighbors for Historic Eaton in 1995 and has been the chairman for 12 years. She is also the president of Old Town Folks Inc. and has been the curator for its Old Town of Eaton Museum for the past six years. For more than 10 years, she has written a popular weekly article in the Madison county papers under the pen name Back Street Mary. She is currently the Madison County historian.

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INTRODUCTION

Once touted as the sparkling jewel of Madison County because of its many scenic lakes and reservoirs built to feed the great Chenango Canal, the town and the hamlet of Eaton have played an important role in Madison County’s history, including being the Madison County seat during the reign of the infamous Loomis Gang.

The large parcel of land that encompassed most of Eaton and Lebanon was patented in 1795 to Col. William S. Smith and his wife, Abigail, the daughter of Pres. John Adams. Colonel Smith had served as an aide de camp of Gen. John Sullivan and had also served on the staff of Gen. Marquis de Lafayette and George Washington himself. Colonel Smith later became a member of the House of Representatives from New York. He and Abigail kept a farm parcel in what is today’s town of Sherburne, Chenango County, where he is buried. Even today this stretch of land is called Smith’s Valley.

Before this patent was issued, Joshua Leland, Jonathan Bates, Benjamin Morse, the Salisbury brothers, and many more cleared land in the summer and then would return to bring their families back with them to their new home the following year.

In 1793, Col. Joshua Leland, a Revolutionary militia man from Sherburne, Massachusetts, cleared land all summer long on today’s English Avenue and then went back to Sherburne to pick up his wife, Waitstill Greenwood Leland, and his children. The family returned that same fall and had to spend their first harsh Eaton winter in a three-sided hut with their animals.

Leland, a businessman, started a tavern with accommodations to make money on the influx of settlers coming to this new land. Leland was also a great friend of the Native Americans who fished the area near a number of ponds, which he later purchased and moved his family to, after selling his tavern. Today this area is known as Leland’s Ponds and is a New York State fishing site.

Eaton’s history includes inventions, famous writers, devoted missionaries, and early breeders of America’s Holstein-Friesian herd and is as varied as its landscapes that range from deep cold valleys on the Chenango River to high meadows carved in part by the ice age, to sparkling lakes, ponds, and fast-flowing water.

Its earliest settlers started a log community, dubbed Log City by visitors, a city of the future. Its founding families of Morrises, Bonneys, Lelands, Morses, and Salisburys had set out to find a new home and business prosperity, and for a number of years, they succeeded.

The early introduction of the Hamilton-Skaneateles Turnpike (1810) allowed for travelers to find their way east over the hilly terrain and allowed their goods to be shipped back to markets in Albany. Eaton’s Joseph Morse and his son Ellis became the largest shareholders in the Hamilton-Skaneateles Turnpike, owning over 50 percent of the stock, then worth $30,000. This turnpike connected the lower southern hills towns of Madison County and ran from Otsego County in the east to Skaneateles and the Cherry Valley Turnpike in the west. Few people realize that the extension of this road to Marcellus and Skaneateles was especially needed for the many woolen mills of Eaton; the teasels that were grown there were used to card the wool in the woolen mills. Early settlements sprang up along the area’s many fast-flowing waters, and industry stepped forward. Immigrants, many from Great Britain and Ireland, flowed into the area to work in these mills located along the Alderbrook. West Eaton, once called Leeville, after Revolutionary War soldier Phillip Lee, grew quickly with this new population.

Eaton’s cold hills limited the agricultural businesses that could be successful there. During the early 1800s, many Eaton farmers tried silk farming as a business, a business that Madison County put a bonus bounty on. The silk worms were imported and put in buildings on tables and were fed mulberry leaves. The cold of the winters and heat of the summers was not conducive to this business, the Mulberry plants did not do well in this hilly high cold, and so this business was abandoned. Emily Chubbuck worked as a child laborer making silk thread in one of these endeavors.

By 1834, the great Chenango Canal was introduced, and commerce was more easily shipped north to the Erie Canal and southward toward Pennsylvania. By 1848, the E. O. Wood and A. N. Wood Company started to produce steam engines for the burgeoning oil markets of Pennsylvania and eventually invented and sold the forerunner of today’s modern four-wheel-drive tractors. This company provided money for the area’s banks throughout all of the depressions of the late 1800s. Eaton also became the home of the Madison County Poor House (or Madison County Almshouse) starting in 1824 and continued to host the Home, as it was called in Madison County, until 1991.

Machinery manufactories, such as E. O. Wood and A. N. Wood Company who repaired the mill machines, later branched out to steam engines and became the Wood,