A-Z April Challenge - U is for Utica, NY

I can't say I have spent a lot of time in Utica, NY.  Kat and I passed through there once and made a couple of stops.  It was a sweet little town.  My biggest draw on the town was the Indian lore and history that went with it.  Utica is located at the shallowest spot along the Mohawk River which made it the best place for fording across, and an Iroquois Indian crossroads and fording location made trade exceedingly easy for local merchants. With a shallow spot on the river that was already inhabited by trading partners, the location was ideal for a settlement.  Utica was first settled by Europeans in 1773, on the site of Fort Schuyler which was built in 1758. The fort was named Fort Schuyler after Col. Philip Schuyler, a hero of the French and Indian War. After the French and Indian War the fort was abandoned and then during the American Revolution the original settlement ^]was destroyed by Tories and Native Americans. The settlement eventually became known as Old Fort Schuyler when a military fort in nearby Fort Stanwix in Rome, New York was renamed Fort Schuyler during the American Revolution and evolved into a village.  In 1794, a state road was built east-southeast from Utica to Albany, New York. By 1797 the road was extended west to the Genesee River, which demarcates the "Genesee Country" of Western New York, and the entire road was thereafter called Genesee Road. The creation of the Seneca Turnpike was the first significant factor in the growth and development of Utica, as this small settlement became the resting and relocating area on the Mohawk River for goods and people moving into Western New York and past the Great Lakes.
Moses Bagg, a blacksmith, built a small tavern near Old Fort Schuyler to accommodate weary travelers waiting for their horse's shoes to be repaired. After just a few years this small shanty tavern became a two story inn and pub known as Bagg's Hotel. The first bridge over the Mohawk River was erected in the summer of 1792 by a Long Island carpenter who had settled in Utica, Apollos Cooper, although local and regional architects that had seen the bridge were very skeptical to use it, and the bridge was soon destroyed in the spring floods.  The perhaps apocryphal account of Utica's naming suggests that around a dozen citizens of the Old Fort Schuyler settlement met at the Bagg's Tavern to discuss the name of the emerging village. Unable to settle on one particular name, Erastus Clark's entrant of "Utica" was drawn from several suggestions, and the village thereafter became associated with Utica, Tunisia, the ancient Carthaginian city.  Utica was incorporated as a village in 1798. Utica expanded its borders in subsequent charters in 1805 and 1817.  Expansion and growth continued to occur in Utica; by 1817 the population had reached 2,860 people. Genesee Street was packed with shops and storefronts, a prosperous stagecoach line had expanded its business, a fully established bank was founded by Alexander Johnson, a newspaper company The Utica Observer established by William McLean, five churches as well as two hotels were all located within this center square of Utica.^[2] Suffering from poor harvests in 1789 and 1802 and dreaming of land ownership, the initial settlement of five Welsh families soon attracted other agricultural migrants, settling Steuben, Utica and Remsen townships. Adapting their traditional agricultural methods, the Welsh became the first to introduce dairying into the region and Welsh butter became a valued commodity on the New York market. Drawing on the size of the local ethnic community and the printing industry of Utica became the cultural center of Welsh-American life by 1830. The Welsh-American publishing industry included 19 different publishers who published 240 Welsh language imprints, 4 denominational periodicals and the influential newspaper Y Drych.  However, the Welsh community in Utica was never very large and was often dwarfed by other ethnicities, most notably the Polish and Italians. The largest nationality group of the great migration to America between 1880 and 1920, Italians trace their presence in Utica to the arrival of Dr. John B. Marchisi in 1817. A prosperous pharmacist, he was the first of thousands of Italians to arrive in Oneida County over the next century

I have a thing for old theaters.  I love the ones with the old Wurlitzers still there.

I am not a fan of chairs in the air, but you really get to experience the town this way.

Shot of downtown from a rest stop.

Flat iron buildings are another thing I love. 

I so wished we could have stayed in this hotel.  It was magnificent.  If I ever get a chance and find myself back in that area again I am so going to spend more time there.  Utica was different.