Comstock's History Page Ten

SOME OF THE EARLY HISTORY OF THE TOWN OF SCIPIO

CAYUGA COUNTY NEW YORK by Austin B. Comstock

I will be posting each page of this history separately. The index, posted on June 24, 2014 in 4 parts, provides the page numbers; you can also search the blog for a particular name appearing anywhere within it. 

The index is also published at  http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~nycayuga/ and will eventually include a link back to this blog.

I hope you find something new!

Page Ten

to buy hogs and produce after he went into business for himself and after he built the “Cobble Stone Store” in 1837. He used the main floor of the old store (the hospital annex) to pack pork in. Hundreds of barrels of pork were here packed each year for many years, as well as many hundreds of hams and shoulders. Alonzo Comstock did the work packing and curing the meat, and most of it was shipped by canal boats from Levanna where Slocum was owner or part owner of a storehouse. The writer remembers going with his parents to Good Templars Lodge in the upper story of this building and it was with much awe and fear that he went through the lower room which was only lighted with a lantern, and saw perhaps 30 or 40 pigs and hogs hanging up ready to be taken down and cut up, and perhaps several on the cutting block. The upper floor was also used about this time by Alden Robinson (a brother of Henry Koon’s wife) as a store and printing office. The upper room was also later leased to John A. Hudson as an auction room, but it proved to be more of a club room and “Poker” room, and Slocum soon got rid of this sore spot. The reason for this club room was that the hotel next door had been purchased by William Howland and he had rented to the Good Templars who rented it only to a person who would not sell liquor. The Good Templars reserved the “ball” room for a Lodge room and ceased to occupy their former rooms, making it possible for Hudson to rent the upper floor for an auction room, and as liquor could no longer be sold in the hotel, made it natural that this room should become a “Blind Tiger” much patronized by the sporting element of Sherwood and vicinity.

Slocum Howland was an old time abolitionist when there were few such in this county, and he strenuously advocated equal rights for all. His house was one of the “Stations” of the “Underground Railway” and many escaped slaves were hidden by him during the day and sent on their way to Canada at night.

His ideas on the slavery question in many ways made him unpopular away from his own

Town. He did on two different occasions rise to the dignity of Supervisor of his Town.

In 1846 he was a candidate for member of the Constitutional Convention. When it was whispered around his ideas on slavery it as sufficient to elect by a small majority, his

Democratic opponent, who was favorable to the question of slavery.

It seems queer to us now that there should have been even a small majority in favor of

slavery in this vicinity.

In the writer’s boyhood, there was a colored family by the name of Herman Phillips, who was an escaped slave, with 5 or 6 children who

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