Today’s State Route 5 crosses New York State from Buffalo to Albany and parallels state Route 20 and the New York State Thruway. The part of Route 5 between Utica and Canandaigua in Ontario County, some 105 miles, is still called the Seneca Turnpike.
Originally a Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) path, the route has been referred to in various accounts as the Great Genesee Road, the Great Genesee Trail, the Genesee Turnpike, the Great Seneca Turnpike or Seneca Road. Previously it had been known as the part of the Great Indian Trail or Iroquois Trail.
A traveler who left Albany in 1792 found the road as far as Whitestown in Oneida County passable for wagons, but could not generally prevail upon the driver of his sled to go beyond this point. A bridge over the Mohawk River was swept away in 1792 causing demands for the State to improve bridges and roads.
A French diplomat Francois Barbé-Marbois (1745–1837) ventured this way in 1784 and noted the terrible road conditions saying that “the transportation difficulties getting to Oneida Castle were… barbarous and wild.”
River travel west proved the best way in the colonial and post-Revolutionary period as many traders and soldiers used the Mohawk River and the locks of the Western Inland Lock and Navigation Company at Little Falls and Fort Stanwix. After the Revolutionary War, New England migrants typically went west this same way.
Many travelers came in winter on crude sleighs and hoped to find the streams frozen as the muddy conditions in other periods of the year made travel tiresome and unsafe.
According to Lawrence Hauptman another motivation for road, canal, and later railroad building west was to wipe out the Oneida Reservation by dispossessing the Oneidas of their lands, which lay directly in the path west from Utica to the Genesee Country.
New York State appropriated $2,700 in 1793 for roads on the state’s western Military Tract. In 1794 the Legislature appointed Israel Chapin, Michael Myers, and Othniel Taylor as commissioners for laying out a highway from “Old Fort Schuyler [now Utica] to the Cayuga Ferry (until 1800 when the Great Cayuga Lake Long Bridge was built)as nearly as straight as the situation of the country will allow.”
The Great Genesee Road was laid out starting in March 1794 at the ford of the Mohawk River in Old Fort Schuyler and followed the Indian trail to Cayuga Ferry, Geneva ,
and Canandaigua. There was no City of Syracuse then.
No work was completed until 1797 when the State authorized a lottery to raise $13,900 for constructing the road. The Legislature actually authorized three lotteries in
1797 to raise $45,000 to improve the road further. Local citizens along the route pledged 4,000 days work to improve the only artery west.
Captain Charles Williamson wrote to England on this subject, “the State Commissioner was enabled to complete this road of nearly 100 miles, opening it 64 feet wide and paving with logs and gravel the moist parts of the low country. Hence, the road from Fort Schuyler, on the Mohawk river, to Genesee, from being in the month of June, 1797, little better than an Indian path, was so far improved that a stage started from Fort Schuyler on the 30th of September, and arrived at the hotel in Geneva, in the afternoon of the third day, with four passengers.”
The privately-held Seneca Road Company received a State charter in 1800 with a capitalization of $110,000 and took over the Genesee Road. The charter included a land grant.
This was a stock company with such prominent Utica men as Jedediah Sanger (a founder of New Hartford and Sangerfield), Israel Chapin, Charles Williamson (agent for the Pulteney Estates in Bath area), Col. Benjamin Walker (aid to Baron von de Steuben), Joseph Kirkland (nephew of Rev. Samuel Kirkland, lawyer and one-time mayor of Utica), and Wilhelmus Mynders (militia brigadier general and investor in Seneca Falls area in late 1790s). It paid dividends for 40 years
.
Many investors lived in Europe, such as Col. Angel DeFerrier, a Frenchman, who was the largest stockholder. DeFerrier came here in 1793 as the French Revolution raged and bought 2,000 acres of land between Wampsville and Oneida in the Town of Lenox. He built a large house about two miles west of Oneida along with mills, a tavern, a store, and a hotel.
The company received a land grant of a 120 feet right of way, but the roadway was 28 feet. The firm was required to clear a road six rods (about 100 feet) wide of all trees. It was to have a 20-inch crown, covered with broken stone or gravel 20-feet wide, 15-inches deep in the center and 9-inches on the sides. It was completed to Canandaigua by 1808, and reached Buffalo in 1813. In some low and moist places corduroyed logs and gravel were used.
Other State stipulations were that the fare would be six cents a mile and only 12 passengers in a coach. Four horses were to be used on each coach, and it covered six miles per hour and carried US Mail. It took three days for a stage with passengers and mail to travel from Utica to Geneva.
Shortly the new road was dotted with hotels and inns, swarming with coaches and loaded wagons, and “from end to end alive with business,” one observer said.
Old Fort Schuyler became a village in 1798 and steadily gained in population and business firms. The Village of Utica grew in commerce and population and got its second
village charter in 1805.
“Prairie schooners,” wagons with white canvas tops carried entire emigrant families west. Some of these were 25 feet long and were drawn by four yokes of oxen or horses. Other livestock accompanied these settlers.
Some travelers used Concord coaches of elegant design and painted in different colors. Some horses used came from France, and the tack came from London thus causing a
grand and impressive scene for observers.
The goal of the travelers was the same: “The Genesee Country.” This was the fertile Genesee Valley south of Rochester of which six million acres the State of Massachusetts bought from Indigenous people and cleared title with the Buffalo Creek Treaty in 1788. The State of Massachusetts then sold the land to speculators Nathaniel Gorman and Oliver Phelps for one million dollars.
They, in turn, failed to meet payments to Massachusetts so in 1790 returned two thirds of what they had bought. Other land speculators took over and sold the land to New England emigrants. Settlement in Canandaigua, Ontario County, began in 1789 and, in five years, the village had a square, a courthouse, a main street, and 40 houses.
Tollgates were located at 10-mile intervals. The private company paid dividends of 10 percent for 40 years, but competition from railroads in the mid-19th century doomed the private firm.
People going to and from church paid nothing nor did the farmer going to a gristmill or blacksmith or one reporting for jury duty. If you needed the services of a doctor or a midwife, you also escaped the tolls.
In 1846 with revenues insufficient to maintain the Turnpike, the company gave up and surrendered its charter back to New York State in 1852 thus ending the private phase of road. Thereafter the State took full responsibility for the route.
270 private stock corporations with stock totaling $11 million operated 4,000 miles of roads by 1820 in the State. Route 5 east of Utica had been called the Mohawk Turnpike in the 1800s as hundreds of thousands of settlers migrated to Utica and points west before the days of the Erie Canal (1825) and railroads (Syracuse and Utica Railroad, 1839).
In 1804 Yale President Timothy Dwight traveled west on the Seneca Turnpike and wrote that the “road was excellent” and the “surface smooth.” Further that “fruit trees abounded among them peach.” Dwight called many of the houses “neat and some handsome.”
Today State Route 5 takes the footprint of the old Seneca Turnpike from Kirkland to Chittenango. Originally, the Seneca Turnpike followed Genesee Street south through Utica and New Hartford and continued west on present-day State Route 5 through Kirkland, Vernon, Oneida Castle, etc.
Limberlost Road (State Route 5-A) shows on a 1907 map as a dotted line and was the “Syracuse Road” from around 1910 until State Route 5 (Seneca Turnpike) was paved in
the 1920s on the present alignment from the Yahnundasis Golf Club west to Kirkland.
West of Chittenango the former northern section continues as Route 5 but the southern section travels over State Route 173 to Manlius and Jamesville, then over Onondaga Hill and continues westerly on State Route 175 through Marcellus and ends just east of Skaneateles.
The Seneca Turnpike heads west through Auburn via State and US Route 20 to Geneva and Canandaigua. A northern branch left State Route 5 in Chittenango and proceeded through Fayetteville and Syracuse, Camillus, Elbridge, and rejoined the main branch in Auburn.
Read more about early New York State roads.
Illustrations: Great Seneca Turnpike historic sign; and a map showing the route of the Seneca Turnpike from Utica to Canandaigua.
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