CASSADAGA

A short history of Cassadaga

Cassadaga is a Seneca name meaning 'water under the rocks', descriptive of the natural springs of the area flowing from glacial moraines. In dry weather, many of the local streams "disappear", and the spring-fed water runs wholly within the gravelly bottoms of the stream beds draining from the surrounding hills.

Cassadaga was settled by European Americans in 1848 at the headwaters of the technically navigable Cassadaga Creek. Practically, the upper few miles of it are not navigable in the 21st century, due to numerous shallows and beaver activity along its course. Many of the settlers had migrated from New England and eastern New York after the American Revolutionary War. They gradually migrated westward as this territory was opened up for settlement after the Seneca people and other Iroquois League tribes had been forced out of the state after the war.

Early settlers harvested the abundant and large trees (some exceeding 5 feet (1.5 m) in diameter) as a primary source of income. They shipped them downstream to markets via log rafts and flatboats on the creek as timber, charcoal and pearl ash, the latter two products in demand in the early Industrial Age.

The Dunkirk, Allegheny Valley and Pittsburgh Railroad, which laid track from Dunkirk, New York, and eventually to Warren, Pennsylvania, was constructed on the west side of the Cassadaga Lakes in the spring of 1871. It also ran through the then adjoining hamlet of Burnhams, which was later annexed by the village. The railroad contributed greatly to the economy of the area, both as a source of population growth and visitors to the lakes and rolling hills for recreation, and for transportation of the forest and farm products of the area to urban centers.

Workers harvested ice from the lakes in winter for refrigeration, shipping it to other cities. The Webster Citizens Company ice house stood on the west shore of the Upper Lake, with a three-car rail siding to serve it, and was listed as a railroad business as late as 1931. The Cassadaga Spring Water Company had a siding on the Middle Lake where it bottled water from a leased spring on the north side of the Glenn Halladay farm for shipment by rail to city customers, primarily in Buffalo. It ceased operations by the late 1920s as municipal water supply systems improved. The rail line was abandoned after extensive flood damage near Sinclairville from Hurricane Agnes in 1972, and subsequently removed.

Adapted (trimmed) from the Wikipedia article Cassadaga, New York, revision 1380404786 by its contributors, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0.