New York, New York may be one helluvah town because the Bronx is up and the Battery is down. But Smyrna too is one helluvah town, in its own way. Its eponymous village is down and Upperville is, as the name indicates, up, by about a hundred feet. Although, it does seem much higher because it is a steady grade. Upperville is the area around the intersection of Quaker Hill Road with State Route 80. The village and Upperville are both on Pleasant Brook.
Upperville is in the center of the Town of Smyrna and is labeled Smyrna Centre on the 1875 map. The 1855 map does not name it and the 1863 map calls it Upperville. Child’s 1869 Directory calls it Upperville (page 132). This little hamlet’s original name was Ladds Hollow, named for Elias Ladd, an early owner of the Towsley mill, according to Frederick Burdette Sprague in his unpublished 1963 manuscript, “Some History of Smyrna” (page 104).
As is often the case in Chenango County, what today seems unremarkable was once a thriving hotbed of commerce and industry.
Behold the beautiful Upperville Falls in the photo. Telling me about them is their proud owner, Lee Schwarting. Lee is pointing toward the north side of the stream, where a water wheel was once located. Parts of stone foundations of buildings still remain there. Those long thin strips of rusty iron he is holding are barrel hoops. A distillery is reputed to have operated here and hoops galore remain as a hangover. According to a postcard from the early 1900s, a wood flume crossed over the top of the falls.
Whiskey once made Chenango County famous. In his 1813 “Gazetteer of the State of New York,” Horatio Gates Spafford accused Chenango County of having a “multitude of small distilleries” and he railed against folks who kept a jug of booze “constantly at hand” (page 10). Sprague says that there were 13 distilleries in the Town of Smyrna around 1839 (page 255). Perhaps these early settlers knew what industry this county is best suited for. Hooch fetches a better price than unprocessed farm crops.
Some of the industries at Upperville were: a wagon shop, a saw mill, a grist/flour mill, a cooperage/shingle mill, and a chair factory. What today is State Route 80 was in 1805 the Ithaca-Albany Turnpike. The cooperage made both dry and wet barrels. This information is from Sprague, page 104.
The basic book on the history of Smyrna was published by George A. Munson in 1905, “Early Years in Smyrna and Our First Old Home Week.” Only a page and a half are devoted to Upperville, 132-133. Munson mentions an axe factory, a grist mill, a hotel, a flax mill, and “other minor business concerns.” The “Friends’ Society” (Quaker) church and a schoolhouse are briefly described. Munson is very stingy with dates, probably because the town records were destroyed by a devastating fire on June 16, 1900, when a sizable chunk of the village burned down.
The Quaker meeting house was built in 1896-97. Details are provided by Patricia F. Scott in The Evening Sun on July 16 and 23, 2004, page 11 for both articles. Lee showed me a small, garage sized, wooden building on the southwest corner. He heard that this could have been the original Quaker church.
The Upperville Post Office operated from June 21, 1898 to October 30, 1915, according to “New York Postal History: the Post Offices and First Postmasters from 1775 to 1980,” by John L. Kay and Chester M. Smith, published in 1982 by the American Philatelic Society, page 70.
The history of Upperville is much more involved than I can get into here. It really deserves to be written as a book. Actually, the entire stretch along Pleasant Brook, the Village of Smyrna, Upperville, and the hamlet of Bonney, formed a socio-economic unit, which interacted with places near and distant. Bonney is about 200 feet higher than Upperville, a Super-Upperville as it were. In fact, they form a chain of almost equidistant settlements. Smyrna is about two and a half miles from Upperville, which is about three and a half from Bonney, which is about three miles from Otselic, which connects with another chain along State Route 26. Drive through these bucolic places today and you would never guess how vibrant and dynamic they must have been a century or two ago.