By the mid-1800s, the Steep Falls area at the south-eastern end of Main Street was a flourishing industrial development. Water power generated by the 65-foot drop along the outlet of the Pennessewassee Lake attracted a variety of mills producing paper, lumber, flour, piano keys, barrels, foundry castings, and shovel handles. Let’s take a look at […]
1792: ‘Intrepid’ family travels 170 miles to harvest area’s ‘white gold’
Updated Mar 02, 2021;
Posted Mar 02, 2021
- Painting by George Kasson Knapp, 1904. This depicts the fathers of the area’s salt industry Ephraim Webster, Comfort Tyler, and Asa Danforth (from left to right). They were the first white men to settle in Salt Point, in 1788. Courtesy of the Onondaga Historical AssociationCourtesy of the Onondaga Histori
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By Robert Searing | Curator of History at Onondaga Historical Association
Two Hundred Twenty-Nine Years Ago: On the afternoon of March 2, 1792, Isaac Van Vleck, his wife, Bata, and their daughter Catherine, emerged from the vast forested wilderness in their covered wagon and looked out at the “Salt Lake.” The Van Vleck family arrived having traveled on a nearly one hundred seventy-mile journey from their home in Kinderhook, NY. The settlement they found near modern day Hiawatha Blvd. and Park Street was called Salt Point. The
What could these cute little round bottom bowls be? I’m glad you asked and when I tell you, you won’t want to use them as cereal bowls or candy dishes. These are bleeding bowls from the 1800’s. The spring lancet, for “breathing the vein” is from the same period. The process of bleeding as a treatment is believed to pre-date the Egyptian period.
Initially it was thought that illness was the result of an imbalance of the humors, not funny humors but fluids. An individual’s health or temperament was believed to be the result of blood, phlegm, yellow bile and black bile. Most issues or imbalances required the removal of amounts of one or more of these humors through bleeding, purging or vomiting. Still with me?