Utica 1838

After the Revolutionary War ended in 1783, a small settlement began to grow around Fort Schuyler (on which Utica is now located).  Enterprising citizens of Fort Schuyler began to build and operate hotels, inns, taverns, blacksmith shops, wagon repair shops and stores of all kinds. In the spring of 1790, John Post and his family took up residence in Old Fort Schuyler. Post sold tobacco, blankets, ammunition and whiskey from his house.  In 1791, he built a store on Bagg's Square and soon became a very wealthy merchant.

In 1794 Moses Bagg arrived as a blacksmith, but soon was operating a tavern at the square that later would be named for him and his family. In 1812, his son, Moses Bagg Jr., erected a large hotel on the site and  Bagg's Hotel remained there until the 1930s. Jason Parker got a job carrying mail on horseback between Whitestown and Canajoharie. In 1795, he began a stagecoach business along the same mail route. It was a huge success and by 1811, his stages were running between Utica and Albany and west to Buffalo and Niagara Falls.

Utica Academy 1814

In the spring of 1798, 13 citizens of Fort Schuyler gathered in Bagg's Tavern to select a new name for the village. They wrote their choices on slips of paper and placed them in a hat. Attorney Erastus Clark  knew that the Phoenicians had built a city near Carthage that later rivaled Carthage as a powerful city and religious center. That city was called "Utica" and that's the name Clark wrote on his slip of paper.  And that's the slip of paper that was drawn.  On April 3, 1798, Fort Schuyler was incorporated as a village and that new village would be called "Utica."

On March 28, 1814, the Utica Academy was incorporated and eventually Uticans erected a school building on Bleecker Street, between Academy and John. In 1837 the Utica Female Academy opened classrooms in the United States Hotel at Genesee and Pearl Street. In 1839, the young ladies moved into a new building on Washington Street at Genesee.

In 1817 construction began on the Erie Canal – a vital waterway that would change the village of Utica forever. It would help it to grow and prosper at a rate much faster than most cities in the state.  The entire length of the canal – 363 miles of water linking the Hudson River with Lake Erie – was opened in October 1825.  And, of course, like all communities on the canal, Utica's population grew rapidly – from 5,041 in 1825 10,183 in 1835.

In 1839, John and Nicholas Devereux, longtime Utica merchants, founded the Savings Bank of Utica.  On February 26, 1900, the Savings Bank moved into its new home – complete with a "gold dome" – on Genesee Street.

Savings Bank of Utica

From its very beginning, Utica had been a leading transportation center and two events in the 1830s made it one of the busiest in the country.  In 1836, the Chenango Canal was completed. It connected the Erie Canal in Utica to Binghamton and the coal fields of Pennsylvania. The second event was the coming of the railroad. In 1837, the Utica & Schenectady Railroad was completed and, at the time, the 72-mile line was the longest in the world. Freight and products could be moved to market faster and cheaper than on canal boats and citizens could travel to faraway places in shorter periods of time.

From the late 1830sto the mid-1840s the city's cotton and woolen mills were still using hand and some water power to operate looms and other machines.  Utica's wealthy citizens — industrialists like Theodore Faxton — gave the city a boost by paying out of their own pockets to convert the Utica's textile mills to stream-powered mills and build new woolen and cotton mills, too.  Within two years, the city had the Utica Steam Cotton Mills, the Utica Steam Woolen Mills, the Globe Woolen Mills and dozens of other industries using steam to run their machinery. The city's "Textile Era" had begun and it would be the city's major industry for the next 100 years, employing thousands of men and women and making Utica "the knit goods capital of the world."  By 1902, there were 19 large knitting mills within the city limits employing more than 20,000 men and women.

City Hospital

And Utica became the home of the world's first commercial telegraph company.  John Butterfield, Hiram Greeman and Faxton had convinced a group of area investors in 1845 to finance the electric telegraph. Their company strung lines from New York City to Buffalo via Oneida County and soon owned most of the lines in New Jersey, Pennsylvania and west to the Mississippi River.  Utica was becoming a fast-growing, modern city.

Uticans who became ill were well-cared for and soon the settlement had a reputation as a leader in medical treatment and care.  On January 16, 1843, the first patient was admitted to the new Utica Lunatic Asylum (later called Utica State Hospital). In 1869, St. Luke's Home opens its doors in a house on Columbia Street. Faxton Hospital, a gift to the city and its peo­ple from industrialist Theodore Faxton, opens on Sunset Avenue in 1874.  In 1886 Utica General Hospital, which opened in 1858 at South and Mohawk Streets in East Utica, is renovated and gets its first modern operating room with the latest equipment.  St. Elizabeth Hospital, the city's first private hospital which was begun 20 years earlier in a tenement house on Columbia Street, moves to new quarters nextdoor in 1887.

It also was a time when political giants walked the city.  Horatio Seymour was elected governor of New York in 1852. He was the party's candidate for president of the United States in 1868 and was narrowly defeated by Civil War hero Ulysses S. Grant.  Seymour's brother-in-law, Roscoe Conkling, was one of the top trial lawyers in the Northeast; was the boss of the Republican Party in the state and an outstanding congress­man who later became a member of the U.S. Senate.

Utica Saturday Globe

The Civil War began in 1861 and found Uticans doing more than their share in support of President Abraham Lincoln and the Northern cause.  By the time the war ended in 1865, Utica had provided the Union Army with hundreds of troopers and 61 offi­cers, including six major generals.

Utica's John Butterfield, in the 1850s, had formed the Overland Mail Company and was the first to deliver mail and passengers from the Mississippi River to California in fewer than 25 days. He returned to Utica and in 1862 headed a horse-drawn trolley company that installed tracks from Utica's Bagg's Square to New Hartford and then on to Clinton. When trolley service began in 1863, Utica was only the fifth city in the country to have a regularly scheduled street-car line (the others being New York, Boston, Philadelphia and New Orleans).

In 1881 the Saturday Globe newspaper is founded by William and Thomas Baker. Within two years, it was one of the most-read publications in the world. It was the first illustrated newspaper in the country and its circulation reached more than 200,000.

In the 1890s, Utican, Arthur W. Savage had invented a superior sporting rifle – a hammerless, repeating, high-powered weapon – and opened a small factory in East Utica. In 1900, he built a large factory on 35 acres off Turner Street along the city's eastern boundary. Soon, hundreds were at work there making rifles, pistols and shotguns.

As the city approached the 20th century, railroads and trolleys were its guarantee that it would continue to grow and prosper. Dozens of trains were rolling in and out of Utica daily with passengers, freight and foreign-born men and women to work in its mills and factories.