Fast Facts and Interesting Items About Herkimer and Oneida Counties

 

 

• Haudenosaunee is the Oneida word for what many of us learned as the Iroquois Confederacy.

• The turbulent romance of Grace Brown and Chester Gillette that inspired Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy and the film A Place in the Sun culminated in Gillette’s murder of Brown on Big Moose Lake, Herkimer County.

• Many state and  national leaders had roots in Herkimer and Oneida Counties, including Roscoe Conkling, Horatio Seymour, Alexander Hamilton , Supreme Court Justice Ward Hunt and James Schoolcraft Sherman.

• Notables who got their start in the area include Las Vegas developer Steve Wynn, entertainers Annette Funicello and Dick Clark, Arab American Institute founder James Zogby, pollster John Zogby, RCA founder and first president of General Electric Owen D. Young, and astronaut Gregory Jarvis.

• Jordanville in Herkimer County is home to a Russian Orthodox Monastery and is home to one of the largest rural Russian communities in the United States.

• In 1879, F.W. Woolworth opened the first Woolworth’s store in Utica.

• The first New York State hospital dedicated to the care of people with mental illnesses was in Utica. “Old Main” opened in 1843 and is now a repository for state mental health records.  The forerunner of the American Psychiatric Journal was also published here and the building itself is a world renowned example of Greek Revival architecture.

• The Saturday Globe newspaper was published in Utica. It was the first newspaper to use illustrations and color photographs.

• The Oneida Institute in Whitesboro was the first school in the United States to admit both white and African American students.

• The community was part of the Burned-Over District of the 19th Century. This period of intense religious revival produced a dedicated abolitionist movement in upstate New York.

• Francis Bellamy, author of the Pledge of Allegiance, was raised and educated in Rome and had a ministry in Little Falls.

• Artist Thomas Hicks had a home in Trenton Falls. Among those whose portraits he painted were Abraham Lincoln, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Washington Irving.

• Boonville was home to the 97th Infantry Regiment during the Civil War. Known as “The Conkling Rifles,” the troops battles included Antietam, Gettysburg and Appomattox Court House; they were present at General Robert E. Lee’s surrender.

• President Grover Cleveland spent four years of his childhood in Clinton and Holland Patent.

• Utican Theodore Faxton established the first commercial telegraph company in Utica, and founded the Associated Press by convincing newspaper editors from across the state to use it to transmit news.