“That township in which we now were is named Unadilla and lies in the county of Otsego. It is composed of rocks, hills and valleys, with a handsome collection of intervales along the Susquehanna. On a remarkably rugged eminence, immediately northwest of the river, we saw the first oaks and chestnuts after leaving the neighborhood of Cat skill. The intervening forests were beech, maple, and so forth.
“The houses were scattered along the road which runs parallel with the river. The settlement is new and appears like most others of a similar date. Rafts, containing each from twenty to twenty-five thousand feet of boards, are from this township floated down the Susquehanna to Baltimore. Unadilla [the township] contained in 1800 823 inhabitants.”
V.
LATER MEN OF MARK.
1804-1815.
Important additions to the population soon followed the coming of Curtis Noble and Isaac Hayes. They included men who for a long period were to remain foremost citizens. One was Stephen Benton, who came from Sheffield, Massachusetts, and from Peter Betts of Bainbridge in 1804 purchased his farm of 115 acres. Guido L. Bissell in July 1805 charged Mr. Benton with “three day’s work at harvest 18 shillings”, “to making drag 10 shillings”, and “to putting up partition 6 shillings.” Two years later Mr. Bissell charged against him “to making of bedstead 17 shillings”, and “to making table 6 shillings.” In 1810, when work was going forward on St. Matthew’s Church, Mr. Bissell charged for “5½ days work on Church, £2, 6s.”
THE BENTON AND FELLOWS STORE.
Mr. Benton opened a store on the northwest corner of Main and Clifton Streets. Across the street may still be seen the building in which on the former site he and his son Albert long did business: it has the date 1816 still upon the pediment. From Sheffield Mr. Benton in 1816 secured as clerk a young man then fourteen years old named Christopher D. Fellows. Mr. Fellows came to Unadilla over the Catskill turnpike, and in 1823 became a partner in the store with Albert Benton. He thus was launched upon a business career that was to last nearly eighty years, his span of life extending to his ninety-third year.
Major Fellows’s share in building up the village was large. He became an active and intelligent force in nearly all that advanced its interests. A feature of the Benton and Fellows business was a distillery. Like Noble and Hayes this firm suffered from a surplus of grain. There was no other way by which the stock could be disposed of. A merit of this whiskey, however, was its purity. Much of the product was consumed by men engaged in lumbering. So great was the demand for it, that a hogshead was sometimes sold at retail in one day. Large quantities in casks were shipped down the river every year.