L. B. Woodruff came to Unadilla in 1829 in company with Edwin J. Smith, who also was from Meredith. The two engaged in blacksmithing near the present stone shop and for many years conducted a prosperous business. Blacksmithing had previously been carried on in the same place by Turner McCall and Charles Wood. Mr. Woodruff in 1835 or 1836 built the stone shop still standing and later on the spacious dwelling on the Main Street corner. Retiring from the shop, he engaged in trade in a store near his house, and during the railroad building years conducted a large business. He died in 1879.
Mr. Woodruff was followed in 1835 by his brother, Henry S. Woodruff, who survived him several years. He also was a blacksmith, but he abandoned that calling from ill health and for a long term of years was proprietor of the stage line from Unadilla over the old Turnpike to Delhi, by way of Meredith Square. He had exceptional eminence for familiarity with that road. He was born upon it in the town of Meredith and had travelled over its western end more times than any one else living in his day. When he died the buildings on his premises were found stored full of many curious relics of the stage business, from the smaller hardware of sleighs and harnesses, to worn-out whips and ancient buffalo robes, from two-horse vehicles to an old-time covered sleigh that marked in signal manner the passing away of an interesting era.
The year 1841 brought to the village the third of these brothers, Lloyd L. Woodruff, who engaged in trade as a merchant tailor and then as a general dry goods merchant, builder, &c., with his brother-in-law, Milo B. Gregory, in the uptown brick store. John Woodruff, the fourth brother, spent some years as a clerk in the old brick store when a young man, but finally removed to Delhi where he became an eminent citizen and merchant.
More than sixty years ago, when the Masonic Hall stood on its original site, one of its occupants was Seleck H. Fancher, whose sudden death from heart failure in March, 1891, startled the community. He was found in his garden about eight o’clock in the morning with life extinct. He was a native of Connecticut and died at eighty-two years of age. Until the hour of his death, his life had been an active one. Several generations of boys and girls will long preserve the memory of this open-minded man, this kind-hearted friend of theirs. He was a shoemaker and like Samuel Rogers was wise in many things besides his craft. A building that will long be associated with his activities is the octagon house built by him and which was his home for more than twenty years. Mr. Fancher was himself as many-sided as the house he dwelt in. His mind had as many windows open to the sun.
X.
TWO MEN OF NOTE.
1828-1835.
At the junction of Main and Mill Streets two other men, destined to notable distinction in village annals, began their careers. Each had been born in another place, each came to Unadilla as a young man, each spent here the most of his remaining days, and here finally each was to pass away and be buried in the old churchyard, the one fifty-one years afterwards, the other sixty-six—Frederick A. Sands and Samuel North.
Mr. Sands, as early as 1835, was a clerk in the Wright store. He had come to the village from Franklin and was a son of Judge Obadiah Sands, a native of Sands Point on Long Island, descended from Captain James Sands[21], an Englishman, who came to this country about 1642, landing at Plymouth. Capt. Sands had been born at Reading, England in 1622.
Benjamin Sands of Sands Point married Mary Jackson, and Obadiah Sands, the father of Frederick A. Sands, was their son. Leaving Sands Point in May 1795, when in his twenty-first year, Obadiah, fifteen days later arrived at Cookoze, now Deposit, then a large centre of the lumber industry. He had with him as cook a colored boy who was a slave. Mr. Sands engaged actively in lumbering and dealt in real estate, following these pursuits at Cookoze until 1802, when he settled in Delhi, remaining there three years. He then removed to a place in Sidney, about three miles below Franklin village on the turnpike, and in the same year was married to Elizabeth Teed of Somers in Westchester County. In 1811 he removed to Jericho[22], afterwards Bainbridge Village, where he engaged largely in the purchase and sale of real estate.
Mr. Sands afterwards purchased a tract of land in Franklin, one mile east of the village, and in 1818 went there to live. On this farm Abel Buell of Lebanon, Connecticut, had settled in 1790, or earlier, and thus was near his old Connecticut neighbor, Sluman Wattles. Franklin thenceforth until 1840 continued to be Judge Sands’s home. For a short time afterwards he lived in Meredith and in 1845 went to Oxford where he died in 1858. He was buried on the farm in Franklin, but his remains were afterwards brought to Unadilla and now rest in the churchyard. He had six sons and three daughters. All but three of them survived him. The survivors were Dr. William G. Sands of Oxford, Jerome B., of Bainbridge, Marcellus, Dr. A. Jackson, who lived many years in Unadilla, Frederick A., and Elizabeth E., who became the wife of Joshua C. Sanders and is still living in New York.