Free Hollow to Forest Home – Forest Home Improvement Association

Introduction
Chapter 1- The Early History of Free Hollow
Chapter 2 – Industry and Commerce in Forest Home
Chapter 3 – Free Hollow to Forest Home
References
Appendix

1. The Early History of Free Hollow

This entire chapter is taken from pages 1, 2, 3, and 4 of Albert Force’s The Story of Free Hollow. Explanatory remarks are enclosed in brackets.

This is the story … of the little village that grew up to be Forest Home. It is the story of Free Hollow, a peaceful hamlet settled more than a century and a half ago within the rim of our wooded hills, divided by a busy stream which we call Fall Creek. … It was a bustling place a hundred years ago, quite self-sufficient as were all the early communities, and a very important milling and trading center. …

The first white man [to come into this region] was a Moravian missionary, Father Carheil¹, who was sent here to work among the Indians in the seventeenth century. … Although no trace of an Indian settlement or relics or arrow-points or tools are found, the local tribes must have frequented our village site on hunting and fishing expeditions out of the Indian town of Coreogonel which stood near Buttermilk Falls. …

General Sullivan’s march in 1779 completely wiped out the villages of the Six Nations, ruined their plantations and stores, and drove them out of their own country. They fled before the white men as was planned, to open the way for the first settlers. …

In the months of September and October, 1790, Moses DeWitt surveyed the Town of Ulysses and laid out the Military lots to be assigned to veterans of the Revolutionary War. Our village lies within Lot no. 92 [also parts of Lot no. 93] which was granted to Lieutenant Benjamin Gilbert around 1971. Our town was then called Ulysses and the county Herkimer.²

In 1794 there were only 25 persons living in the town. … Our hollow was untenanted, wild and unspoiled. No wonder that a lone settler, Joseph S. Sydney, coming this way in search of a favorable location for a grist mill, was impressed with the potential water power in the creek. … His descendant, Mr. Joseph Sydney Barr of Ithaca, thinks that he may have been one of the several New Englanders who settled in these parts. …

No doubt Sydney imported granite stones and simple machinery for his mill – but he had to cut the timber and build the log dam which was on the site of the present dam, and frame up and finish the mill itself, and his dwelling. … In 1795 his mill was in operation. I can only guess its location, and believe it may have been on the site of either the saw-mill on the south-west corner of the first bridge, or on the opposite bank. …

Our hollow came to be called Sydney’s Mills. … In 1799 the mill burned and Sydney sold out … and moved to the site of Dwyer’s dam on Cascadilla Creek where he built another grist mill in 1800. He was assessor of the town in 1799 and school commissioner in 1801, and died in 1815. …

The village became known as Free Hollow, the name that persisted until the establishment of a post-office in the eighteen eighties. The present home sites were not purchased with checks drawn on a bank. They were bought with the blood and sweat of the soldiers of the Revolution to whom land grants were made in compensation for their services to the new country. It is small wonder then that when it came to naming the new little village, these early settlers would express their gratitude for freedom by calling it Free Hollow . … The name of the village, of course, was a great temptation for the jokers of that day. … It was sometimes called “Flea Holler.” …

By 1812 there was a great stir of activity hereabouts. Dust rose in clouds from the now well-traveled Owego Turnpike as teams came and went with farm produce, and returned from the east with manufactured goods not yet obtainable in the home market. … It was a young country. Only the young, brave and strong could face the rigors of its life – and only courageous women would leave the comparative comfort of the old houses in Jersey and New England where life was secure, to face the loneliness of life in Tompkins County where there were few neighbors and where they must bear their children and bring them up single-handed, feed them from often insufficient stores, clothe them from home-spun and woven cloth, and physic them with home-made remedies, stewed and ground from wild herbs. …

The first dwelling in the village, according to my old Aunt Mary Lib McKinney … stood on the site of the present church. … The house was occupied by an English family who brought their country customs with them and on Christmas eve they would go through the village singing carols. … My Aunt when she was a very old lady said she could still hear their voices in her mind’s ear singing “As shepherds watched their flocks by night.”

¹ According to Henry Abt (1, p. 18) Father Stephen de Carheil was a Jesuit. Glenn Norris (33, p. 14) states that the Frenchman, Eitenne Brule, came in 1615. He was the first white man to visit what is now Tompkins County.

²Forest Home is now located in the Town of Ithaca, in Tompkins County.

Introduction
Chapter 1- The Early History of Free Hollow
Chapter 2 – Industry and Commerce in Forest Home
Chapter 3 – Free Hollow to Forest Home
References
Appendix

The history of Free Hollow is continued in the next two chapters. Much of the material is taken from The Story of Free Hollow and from the two transcribed tapes Albert Force made for the Cornell University Oral History Program. Additional information from numerous other sources has been added, and the history of Forest Home has been updated and expanded to include all of the village.