E R w I isr. 



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GENERAL DESCRIPTION. 



This town lies west of Corning, and was formed from 

 Painted Post, July 27, 1826. Lindley was taken off in 

 1837, and a part of Corning was annexed in 1856. The 

 surface of the town is about equally divided between high 

 rolling uplands, and the broad alluvial valleys of the 

 streams. The hills rise from four to six hundred feet 

 above the valleys, which are from one to two miles wide. 

 The Tioga and Canisteo Rivers unite in the southern part 

 of the town ; the Tioga and Conhocton in the northeast 

 part, forming the Chemung River. 



SOIL AND PRODUCTS. 



The lands of this town are divided into valleys and 

 hills, three-fifths of which, perhaps, belong to the latter 

 division. Nearly the whole of them in the valleys of the 

 Conhocton, Tioga, and Canisteo are improved. The soil is 

 a deposit of rich alluvium, well adapted to the growth of 

 cereals, roots, and most of the choice fruits, and many of 

 the farms are now carefully and scientifically cultivated. 

 The hills, where the sides are not too precipitous (and this 

 is rarely the case, though some of them reach an altitude 

 of nearly six hundred feet above the rivers), are all tillable, 

 and their soils of loam and clay generally produce good 

 crops and are well adapted to fruit and grazing. 



EARLY SETTLEMENT. 



The first settlement in Steuben County was made within 

 the bounds of this town. In 1786, William Harris, a 

 Pennsylvania Indian trader, established his cabin and 

 trading-post near the north end of the bridge which now 

 spans the Conhocton River, in the village of Painted Post. 

 While he was in Pennsylvania on a visit, about Christmas, 

 1787, his house was burned. This is the circumstance re- 

 ferred to by Judge McMaster in the following description 

 of Judge Baker's visit to Painted Post, with his Indian 

 guide, from his log cabin up the Tioga River, just beyond 

 the Pennsylvania line : 



" On the morning of Christmas day, in the year 1787, 

 a backwoodsman and an Indian issued from the door of a 

 log cabin, which stood half buried in snow on the point of 

 land lying between the Cowanesque Creek and the Tioga 

 River, at the junction of those streams, and set forth on 

 the ice of the river for a journey to the settlers below. 

 They were clad according to the rude fashion of the fron- 

 tiers and the forest, in garments partly obtained by barter 

 from outpost traders, and partly stripped by robbery from 

 the beasts of the forest. Tomahawks and knives were 

 stuck in their belts, snow-shoes were bound to their feet, 

 and knapsacks of provisions were lashed to their backs. 

 286 



Such was the equipment deemed necessary for travelers in 

 Steuben County not a century ago 



'' The pioneer and his savage comrade pursued their 

 journey on the ice. The Tioga was then a wild and free 

 river. From its source, far up in the ' Magnolia Hills' of 

 the old provincial maps, down to its union with the equally 

 wild and free Conhocton, no device of civilized man fretted 

 its noble torrent. A single habitation of human beings 

 stood upon its banks, the log cabin at the mouth of the 

 Cowanesque. . . . But it bore now upon its frozen surface 

 the forerunner of an unresting race of lumbermen and far- 

 mers, who in a few years invaded its peaceful solitudes, 

 dammed its wild flood, and hewed down its lordly forests, 

 through which it flowed. The travelers kept on their 

 course beyond the mouth of the Canisteo to the Painted 

 Post. Here they expected to find the cabin of one Harris, 

 a trader, where they might have lodgings for the night, and, 

 if necessary for the comfort of the savage breast, a draught 

 from ' the cup which cheers (and also inebriates).' On 

 their arrival at the head of the Chemung, however, they 

 found that the cabin had been destroyed by fire. The 

 trader had either been murdered by the Indians, or de- 

 voured by wild beasts, or else he had left the country, and 

 Steuben County was in consequence depopulated. 



" Disappointed in this hope, the two travelers continued 

 their journey on the ice as far as Big Flats. Here night 

 overtook them. They kindled a fire on the bank of the 

 river, and laid them down to sleep. The air was intensely 

 cold. It was one of those clear, still, bright nights, when 

 the moon seems an iceberg, and the stars are bright and 

 sharp like hatchets. The savage rolled himself up in his 

 blanket, lay with his back to the fire, and did not so much 

 as stir till the morning ; but his companion, though framed 

 of that stout stufl* out of which backwoodsmen are built, 

 could not sleep for the intensity of the cold. At midnight 

 a pack of wolves chased a deer from the woods to the river, 

 seized the wretched animal on the ice, tore it to pieces, and 

 devoured it within ten rods of the encampment. Early in 

 the morning the travelers arose and went their way to the 

 settlements below, the first of which was Newtown, on the 

 site of the present village of Elmira. 



" The backwoodsman was Samuel Baker, a New Eng- 

 lander, afterwards well known to our citizens as Judge 

 Baker, of Pleasant Valley." 



SURVEYORS AT PAINTED POST. 



That portion of the Phelps and Grorham purchase which 

 now constitutes Steuben County was surveyed into townships 

 by Augustus Porter, Frederick Saxton, and others, in the 

 summer of 1789. Judge Porter, in his narrative published in 

 Turner's History of the Holland Purchase, says with regard 



