Dr. Dwight came over the road in 1804 and tells how he saw “a few lonely plantations recently begun”, and how he “occasionally passed a cottage and heard the distant sounds of an axe and of a human voice”, while all else “was grandeur, gloom and solitude.” He describes Franklin as “for some miles a thinly built village, composed of neat, tidy houses”, in which everything “indicated prosperity.” Further down the Ouleout the country “bore a forbidding aspect, the houses being thinly scattered and many of them denoted great poverty.”
At Wattles’s Ferry he was unable to find a boat. Even a dinner was denied him. A bridge had been begun but he had to cross “a deep and rapid ford.” Further down the river William Hanna supplied him with a dinner. It was the opening of this turnpike[11] which, as I have said, determined that a village should grow up at its western terminus. Here was a stopping place, the end of the land journey, a place for stores and hotels, the point where pioneers might enter boats and thus be conveyed to destinations south and west.
The number of houses standing in the village in 1808 could not have been more than fifteen or seventeen. At the extreme eastern end near the bridge lived a man named Morgan. His house was a rude affair dug into the bank.
To the west of Morgan came one of the yellow houses, then occupied by Guido L. Bissell, who seems to have built it.
Next was the home of Curtis Noble whose family comprised at this date his wife and his two sons George and Charles, then five and two years old respectively, and an infant daughter.
Beyond stood the Isaac Hayes residence, built four years before, and already famous as the most attractive dwelling between Catskill and Ithaca.
Beyond this lived Captain Amos Bostwick, whose wife was Sally Hayes, an aunt of Isaac Hayes. Captain Bostwick had served in the Revolution in the same regiment with Elijah Boardman of New Milford. His wife died in 1825 at the age of seventy-seven, and he in 1829 at the age of eighty-six. Clark I. Hayes could just remember him as “an old, infirm man, sitting by his open fire on the hearth, cane in hand, poking the ashes.”
Several rods to the west were the home and shoe shop of Fowler P. Bryan, the father of Alexander Bryan, standing near where the Frank Bacon house is.
To reach the next dwelling, involved a walk to the home of Gurdon Huntington on the corner of Martin Brook Street. This house was built by Guido L. Bissell and Jerome Bates and has long been the oldest house in the village. Except for the rear part, put on afterwards, it has scarcely been altered since its original erection. The flight of time long since raised it to the eminence of a centenarian. Besides Dr. Huntington, those who have owned and occupied it include Dr. David Walker, Dr. G. L. Halsey and Albert T. Amsden, while at one time it was owned by Col. A. D. Williams. The last occupant who owned it was Peter Hodges, who, on the death of his wife in 1889, sold it to Dr. Halsey, who thus became its owner a second time. The design of the house is Flemish. Houses like it may be seen to this day in the older parts of Bruges and Ostend. Readers will perhaps pardon the personal pride which prompts the statement that beneath that roof, on an October day, some time “befo de war,” was born the writer of this chronicle.
Beyond the Huntington house came the store and house of Solomon Martin on the land now occupied by the residence of Marvin P. Sweet. This structure remained standing for more than twenty years when it was torn down to make way for the present house, which was built by the Rev. Norman H. Adams.