The history of “Little Lewis,” as our County was often initially referred, has been told in great depth in the scholarly History of Lewis County, by Franklin B. Hough (the first version in 1860 and the second in 1883), as well as the ably done History of Lewis County, New York, by G. Byron Bowen (1970). Those books should be read carefully by anyone truly interested in our history.
To summarize those works briefly, it is fair to say that at the time of our establishment, we were then, much as we are today: small in population; entrepreneurial; hard-working; resourceful; and welcoming. And our founding fathers certainly needed to be all that and more when they first began settling in this area’s densely wooded wilderness in the 1790s.
The area that our County occupies today was originally claimed by the Province of New York (a British proprietary and later royal colony) in its original grant – although it was not occupied. Instead, it was part of the vast territory of the Iroquois confederacies, though even then used predominantly only as non-occupied hunting grounds by the Oneida tribe of the “Six Nations” confederacy to the south and, to a lesser extent, the tribes of the “Seven Nations of Canada” confederacy to the north along the St. Lawrence.
During the French and Indian War (1754-1763), both French and British soldiers and militia passed through the area, but none stayed. And the area largely remained under Iroquois control until after the end of the American Revolutionary War (1775-1783), when the new State of New York effectively seized the lands from those tribes that had supported the British. Technically, in 1788, under the formal treaty of Ft. Stanwix, the Oneida tribe, which were deemed to be the sole native owners of the land that included part of what is now our county, ceded all of their lands to the State of New York.
Originally, when the Duke of York established counties in New York in 1683, the lands of Lewis County were part of Albany County. Following the Revolutionary War, we became part of Tryon County (subsequently renamed Montgomery County); in 1791 we became part of Herkimer County; and then part of Oneida County in 1798. Even at the time, however, the “North Country” was mostly un-surveyed wilderness, and accordingly remained unattractive to settlement.
And then “Macomb’s Purchase” took place.
That acquisition in 1791 of some 3.6 million acres, in which over ten percent of New York State’s landmass was ostensibly sold to one man, New York City merchant and land speculator Alexander Macomb, for the equivalent of 12 cents an acre, changed everything – but not before it first raised a great scandal.
The most immediate result was that it ruined Macomb, who ended up in debtor’s prison when he was unable to sell his land to developers and settlers fast enough to fund his massive purchase. However, his silent partner, William Constable, Sr., and several others ended up with most of the land.
Dubbed “William the Purchaser” by the eminent historian, Franklin B. Hough:
Constable was a wealthy merchant, trader and land holder on an extensive scale, one of the leading directors of the Bank of New York on Wall Street and a close friend of everyone from George Washington to the Marquis de Lafayette to Alexander Hamilton to James LeRay de Chaumont to Gouverneur Morris to the Chiefs of the Iroquois Six Nations.
In the end, the massive Macomb’s Purchase land sale might more accurately have been called Constable’s Purchase. For from this one transfer of lands that ended up in Constable’s hands are ultimately derived most all the deeds for all of the lots of the lands that are now included in Lewis, Jefferson, St. Lawrence, and Franklin Counties, along with parts of Herkimer and Oswego Counties.
It was not until after the resolution of Macomb’s Purchase, however, and the initial subdividing of the land by Constable that much of the land that is now Lewis County was put in the hands of land developers and speculators. Men like Pierre Chassanis (Paris), Thomas Boylston (Boston), James and Vincent LeRay de Chaumont (Paris), John Johnson Phyn (London), John Brown (Providence, Rhode Island), Patrick Colquhoun and William Inman (London), James Watson (NYC), Charles De Wolf (Antwerp), Thomas Brantingham (Philadelphia), and Nicholas Low (NYC) and their various land agents. These men, in turn – many of whom never set foot in Lewis County – began to subdivide, develop and sell tracts and plots of land in the area, with the very first settlers in turn arriving as early as 1794.
For those consulting the older history texts and original deeds, it is important to note that the descriptions of most of the land title transactions occurring over the first ten years or so (before the official formation of Lewis County) typically refer either (1) to the original six numbered tracts of Macomb’s Purchase (Lewis County falls within portions of three of those tracts – Tract IV, Tract V and Tract VI, although the line between V and VI was never run and those two tracts were sometimes just referred to as the remainder of Macomb’s Purchase) or (2) to parts of nine other great tracts associated with early land sales. These secondary tracts, along with the numbers and names of the original subsidiary townships, were the following:
