Sunday, March 8, 2009

Scipioville Remembered

Scipioville was once a busy little town in Scipio. I can remember the grocery store there from the 1960's, run by Horace and Alice Hitchcock King. I'm sure I can blame at least one of my fillings on those delicious chewy caramels with the nougat centers they used to sell! The store was previously owned and run by Alice's grandfather's brother, Fred Hitchcock.
Much earlier than that, in the 1840's, Scipioville was home to one of Scipio's first enterprises, the tannery built in 1797 by Israel Busby and eventually run by Lemuel Allen. The Citizen of January 11, 1976 had a great article by our current County Historian, Sheila Tucker, that described the process of tanning in those days.
In the 1840's, Scipioville also had a carding mill, and a hotel. By the 1890's, the tannery had mostly burned down, but Scipioville had a wagon shop, blacksmith, harness shop, sawmill and 2 feed mills. Fred Hitchcock ran his upholstery business in Scipioville for awhile until relocating in Aurora, NY.

There were several more businesses, and I am going to try to find the article by Sheila by going to www.fultonhistory.com and searching "Scipioville."

2 comments:

Roger A. Post said...

Sandie, if you get too many hits on "Scipioville," you might want to try browsing the actual papers on the referenced site. There is a ticker tape-type display that runs across the middle of the search page, and one of the tape entries is clickable to browse the newspaper pdf files. You can click your way from the proper newspaper title to the year of interest but then it is somewhat of a slog to find the actual paper date within the year of interest. As far as I can tell, you just have to sample some paper pages to find out where they are during the calendar year and skip ahead or back until you find the date of interest. They are generally in chronological order but not always.

Sandie Stoker Gilliland said...

Roger, I am always amazed at how much I don't know! I never knew that tape was clickable. If I had a high speed internet connection, I think I would try more online. Yes, I'd like a little cheese with that wine.
I did have some success with "Scipioville" though, and will blog about it this week.