II. 



OUR LOG FOUNDATIONS. 



Ithaca was not settled until George Washington be- 

 came President. The certainty of some stable govern- 

 ment, and adequate protection against their lurking 

 foes the Indians, encouraged the colonists to push out 

 into new regions ; and so in the very month in which 

 Washington assumed office for the first time, April, 

 1789, three men, Jacob Yaple, Isaac Dumond and Peter 

 Hinepaw, took up four hundred acres of land bounded 

 on the west by the line of what is now Tioga street. 

 They planted some corn on the flat, and Yaple left his 

 younger brother to look after it, while the rest of the 

 party went back after the good Dutch women and child- 

 ren. The three families, numbering some twenty souls 

 all told, came back in September, and put up log cab- 

 ins, Hinepaw on the north side of Cascadilla Creek, 

 near the present location of Williams' Mill, the other 

 two on East State Street, where now stands the residence 

 of the late Adam S. Cowdry. But in 1793 these three 

 families had the misfortune to lose their land, which 

 passed into the possession of Simeon Dewitt. He laid 

 out the Village of Ithaca, and encouraged settlement by 

 the liberal terms offered to settlers. By 179S there were 

 half a dozen houses. In 1806 the number of buildings 

 had increased to twelve, six or seven of which were 

 frame. A Mr. Vrooman kept a hotel on the spot where 



