Place Names Along then Chenango Canal

Madison County Leader and Observer

December 9, 1915

          Eaton Street bridge over canal at Hamilton

                        Place Names

    Hamilton - Do you remember the former names and popular names of nearby places which have since been changed? If you do you remember when Oriskany Falls was Castor Hollow, Madison Center was Bulls Head, North Brookfield was Nigger City, Brookfield was Clarksville, East Hamilton was Colchester, Randallsville was Smith’s Valley, Lebanon was Toad Hollow, South Lebanon was Podunk, Georgetown was Slab City, Eaton was Log City, West Eaton was Leesville, and to go a little farther, Galena was North Norwich and Franklin Springs was Sodom. 

    Do you also remember three nearby places at one time were very important from a business standpoint, but which are now practically deserted?

    One of these was Pecksport, which sprang into being with the opening of the Chenango canal in 1836 and upon lands owned by Alonzo Peck, which had fondly hoped to see a great town grow up there, and those hopes seemed justified. A canal basin, a large store house, coal yard, hotel, blacksmith  and wagon shops were constructed there, and from the opening of the canal until 1869 was indeed a busy place.

    For during that time it was the one shipping point for Pratts Hollow, Morrisville, Eaton, Pierceville and West Eaton; the places from which they received their supplies, including coal and the place for shipping the products of the big tannery at Morrisville and the big distillery at Eaton and the long string of factories extending from the last named placed to beyond West Eaton.

    But the building of the railroads and the abandonment of the canal punctured a bubble with the the result that Pecksport has become farm land again. True it is a railroad station, but one can scarcely see why it should be. The second of the three places to which we have alluded to is Pierceville, at one time the center of a large group of factories, which made it one of the liveliest places in this section of Madison county. But the building of the railroads destroyed its prosperity, their location being such that the long hauls to and from them made manufacturing unprofitable.

    And now the factories, the hotel, the stores, the shops, the big boarding houses are no more and Pierceville like Pecksport is back to the farm. It was just outside Pierceville village in 1816 that the celebrated Emily Chumbuck was born and thee she wrote her poems and the “Alderbrooke Tales,”which gave the present name to the beautiful stream through the valley. In 1846 she became the second wife of the no less celebrated Adoniram Judson, first missionary to Burma. He died and was buried at sea in 1850. She died in 1854 and is buried in the Madison street cemetery at Hamilton.

    The third of the has-been places is Middleport. That place came into prominence in the early years of the last century, when David Colden, Hamilton’s first merchant, built a large factory there, and its prominence continued up to the building of the Chenango canal, during the construction of which a large force of workmen upon it were located there. Upon the opening of the canal its present name  was given it for the reason that it was situated midway between Hamilton and Earlville, and it was confidently expected that the opening of the Chenango canal would be the commencement of an uninterrupted career of business prosperity, but it was not to be. It was too near to two stronger ports, Hamilton and Earlville, and has since remained just a half-way place.

    A little south of Middleport lived and died William Smith and his wife, Margaret, she being the daughter of John Adams and sister of John Quincy Adams, a daughter of one president of the United States and sister of another.

 Morse's Planing Mill, Norwich, in 1855 with canal boat.