Wednesday, September 3, 2008

How Scipio Got Its Name

You say tomato, I say tomahto. I was talking with someone interested in our town and she asked me a simple question - how is the name of our town pronounced? Now why I hadn't ever thought about that before, I'll never know.
The short answer is that phonetically we pronounce it "Sip-ee-oh."
I have heard it said as "Skip-ee-oh: too, and I think that is because of the way we pronounce the name of the man who our town was named for.
He was Scipio Africanus, a great Roman General who defeated Hannibal (another nearby town) in the Second Punic War in 202 BC. You can read all about him online at Wikipedia or any of a dozen other websites.
Our town of Scipio was town #12 of the original Military Tract, an area of about 1.75 million acres that includes portions of the present NY counties of Onondaga, Cortland, Cayuga, Seneca , Oswego, Schuyler, Tompkins, Yates and Wayne.

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