Gazetteer of
the State of New York: Embracing a Comprehensive View of
the Geography, Geology,
And General
History of the State,
and a Complete History and
Description of
Every County,
City,
Town, Village, and Locality. With Full Tables Of Statistics.
By J. H. French. Syracuse, N.Y.: Published By R.
Pearsall Smith
1860.
Page
629.
WHEELER 5-- was formed
from Bath and
Prattsburgh, Feb. 25, 1820.
A part of
Avoca was taken off in 1843, and a part of Urbana in 1839.
It is an
interior town, lying N.E. of the center of the
co. Its
surface is a high,
rolling
upland, broken by the valleys
of Five Mile and Ten Mile
Creeks and of
several small
lateral
streams. The soil is a shaly and clayey loam, well adapted
to both grazing and
tillage. Mitchellville (p.
v.) contains 20 houses; and
Wheeler
Center (Wheeler
p. o.) 1 church and 15 houses.
The
first settlement was made in 1799, by Capt.
Silas
Wheeler, from Albany co. 6 Rev. Ephraim
Eggleston (Bap.)
conducted the first religious service, in
1802. There are
2
churches in town; Presb. and M.E.
5 Named
from Capt.
Silas Wheeler, the
first settler. Capt. Wheeler served
during the Revolutionary War, and was at the
attack on
Quebec and stood
near Montgomery when he fell. He was 4 times
taken
prisoner during the war. He died in 1828, at the age
of
78. 6 Nathan
Rose, Wm. Holmes, and Turner
Gardner
settled in town in
1799; Col. Jonathan Barney and Thos.
Aulls in 1800;
Phillip Murtle in 1802; and Otto F.
Marshall, and others,
named Bear, Ferval,
and Rifle, in 1803. William, son of
Jonathan Barney, was born Nov. 1, 1801, and
died Dec. 1,
1802, - the first birth
and death in town. Hon. Grattan H. Wheeler
was a party
to the first marriage. Capt. Wheeler
built the
first
sawmill, in 1802; and Geo. W. Taylor the
first gristmill, in 1803-04. John Beals
kept the first
inn, in 1820; and
Cornelius Younglove, the first store, in 1835.
The first
school was taught by Uriel
Chapin. "Capt.
Wheeler's first trip to mill is worthy of
record.
There were, at the time
when
he had occasion to 'go
to mill,' three institutions
in the
neighborhood where
grinding
was done, - at the Friends' settlement, at Bath, and
at
Naples. The millstones of Bath had suspended
operations, -
there being
nothing there to grind, as was
reported. Capt. Wheeler made a cart, of
which the
wheels were sawn from the
end of a log of curly maple; the box was of
corresponding
architecture. Two young men went before
the oxen with
axes
and chopped a road, and the clumsy
chariot came floundering through the bushes
behind,
bouncing over the logs and
snubbing the stumps, like a ship working
through an ice
field. The first day they reached a point a
little beyond
the
present village of Prattsburgh, a
distance of six miles from their starting
point, and
the second moored
triumphantly at the mill at Naples." -
McMasters's Hist. Steuben Co., pp.
195-196.
