Department store magnate arrived on Packet Boat

Binghamton Press

July 4, 1923

Benjamin F. Sisson

         Sissons’ Have Pride in History of Store

                 _____

Growth with City of Mercantile Establishment in Same

   Family and Place Over 75 Years Celebrated with Sale

                 _____

    A packet boat on the Chenango Canal made its slow way through Port Dickinson and the “upper level”  81 years ago this spring, was warped through the lock in what is now State street, near the Westcott building, passed under the arched bridge at Court street, and landed to discharged its passenger and freight.

    Grouped on the deck in the bright sunlight - the women in  hoop skirts and paisley shawls, the men i s striped pantaloons - the passengers were objects of interest to the villagers -  especially to the small boys, who ran along the canal bank to be in at the landing and watch these folk from the great outside world alight. And in the group of travelers was one young man destined to make mercantile history in Binghamton - Benjamin F. Sisson, traveling to Ohio with his wife and child to make his fortune in the “Far West.”

    Mr. Sisson was a cabinet maker. He had lived in North Stonington, Conn., and practiced his trade. He had heard great things about the opportunities awaiting in the raw new town of Dayton, Ohio, and now he was on his way there, with his family and household impediments, to establish a new home.

          Binghamton Holds Him.

    Benjamin F. Sisson little dreamed when he made his way ashore with his family that his arrival in Binghamton was tp mark an epoch in his life and to start a train of circumstances that was to be memorable in the business life of Binghamton. He intended to stay in the village overnight, resuming his journey westward on the morrow. The canal ended here; the rest of the journey must be made by stagecoach. But after he had looked around the little village that night and had seen it by daylight next morning, he was so impressed with its possibilities that he decided to stay. He remained in Binghamton all the rest of his life.

    Because Benjamin F. Sisson reached that decision 81 years ago, the Sisson Bros. - Welden company’s great department store, of which he was the founder, is planning to celebrate its 81st anniversary. The celebration will take the form of a great special sale, darting July 10. If Mr. Sisson could see the department store which rears its eight stories on a site which he passed in the packet boat, he surely would rub his eyes in amazement.

          When Travel Was Slow.

    The Binghamton of 1842 presented to the undiscerning eye little promise of the thriving city it was destined to become. Its population was about 2,000.Steam railroads were being talked of but it was to be many years before they should reach the village. Travelers came and went by stagecoach or like Mfr. Sisson, on the Chenango canal, completed only five years previously. Its northern terminus was Utica; at Binghamton it tempted into the Chenango river about where the new soldiers’ memorial bridge is shortly to be built. During his long, slow journey from Utica to Binghamton, the small white-painted, green-shuttered packet on which Mr. Sisson and his family traveled had passed through 114 locks. One can easily imagine the leisurely nature of its progress. 

    The canal was the very center of the Binghamton of 1842. The principal business houses, such as they were, bordered its banks. Shaky looking structures some of them were, where the rough and ready canal men found entertainment of a sort. In summer it was a busy place, especially the basin, where boats were loaded and turned. In winter the young people skated in the frozen basin or in the long reach of the “upper level,” extending from the lock just north of Court street to the “one-horse grocery,” at what is now Bevier street. Boys used to go to the end of the level, or even to far-distant Port Dickinson, to ride in on the boats.

    Four years before Benjamin F. Sisson’s arrival the Broome County House, a tavern favored both by the more prosperous canal men and by the burly drives and important stage drivers, had been burned. In 1842 it had risen from its ashes and, appropriately enough, was called the the Phoenix. It stood on the canal bank, at what is now the southwest corner of Court and State streets, the site of the present exchange building. Quite likely Mr. Sisson and his family slept there on the night of their arrival; there is no record of the fact, but it was a logical choice. If so they probably saw stage coaches stop at its doors with a great flourish and caught glimpses through the door of the bar room of the drives and of canal boat captains arm in arm over their wassail. The name of this tavern, by the way, was changed to the Exchange Hotel the very year of Mr. Sisson’s coming to Binghamton.

             Day of Way’s Hotel.

    Further up Court street in 1842 stood, where the New Crandall now is, another inn of which the village was proud - Way’s Hotel. Court street was then a strangling village thoroughfare of low wooden or brick “blocks,” interspersed with dwellings set back in yards of ample space. The Binghamton Academy of which Daniel S. Dickinson was one of the founders, had just been opened when the Sisson family arrived. it stood on Court House Square on the site of the present county clerk’s office.

    Of merchants the village had barely a dozen in 1842. The more prominent were Stores & Ely, Samuel H.P. Hall, Hart, Haight & Cary, Hallam & Frank Pratt, Levi M. Rexford, Albert C. Morgan, Horatio & Alfred J. Evans, and Thomas Allen.

    Bit in this small town Mr. Sisson, for some reason now unknown, foresaw possibilities. He saw beyond the unpretentious little buildings and the straggling street and the odorous, stagnant water of the canal to something bigger. Perhaps his decision to stay in Binghamton was influenced in part by the “railroad talk.” The New York and Erie had long since been chartered and was in progress of building. Six years after Mr. Sisson came it reached the village, and a boom was on. By 1850 there were 4,000 inhabitants and building lots were selling fast.

                   Built Slowly, Surely.

    Mr. Sisson’s entrance into the mercantile business was not made immediately upon his arrival in Binghamton. He worked first at his trade. He made money and saved it. Then he branched out. Moving his shop to what is now the northeast corner of Main and Front streets, he hung out his sing. It read “Groceries and Yankee Notions.”

    That sign, or one of its immediate successors, with its lettering almost obliterated, is still in the possession of the company. Int was rescued from the muddy bottom of the old canal when the canal was abandoned, drained and turned into a street. It is warped and water-soaked and dingy, but it is a cherished possession.

     Benjamin F. Sisson’s stock in trade consisted of a few groceries, calico, shoes, and not much else. Inside the door was a sign, “Cash Paid for All Farm Produce. Most of the sales were on credit, and often-times the customers forgot to pay. Those who did settled were slow. There changed their farm produce for groceries or dry goods. It was six years before the proprietor was able to enter in his books cash sales for one day of $20.63. It was a proud day, that.

    Two of Benjamin F. Sisson’s yellow old ledgers are kept behind glass in the luxurious office of the present vice president and treasurer, Benjamin F. Welden. They record page after page of petty transactions wherein so many yards of calico or so many shoes were charged for such and such a number of shillings. Like the old sign  these ledgers are prized possessions. In the same year before that store reached cash sales of $20.50 in one busy day its patrons owed it more than $13,000 for goods bought on credit.

                 Prospers With Town.

    But the business grew and prospered with the town. In 1848 it was moved to Court and State streets. It has remained there ever since, expanding from year to year suffering the reverses and overcoming them, but always true to the motto of its founder of 81 years ago, “Integrity and Service.” As to its phenomenal growth, “that is another story,” familiar to ask who know their Binghamton.

    It is given to few business houses to live and flourish for the Biblical span of three score and ten. Still fewer businesses, after so long an existence remain in the hands of descendants of the founder, and fewer yet stay in the same location for 75 years. And all this because Grandfather Sisson in 1842 decided that he preferred Binghamton to Dayton, Ohio, and cast his lot with a town that has more than fulfilled his fondest dreams.

[Note: The department store closed in 1963]