Oneonta's Main Street always a busy place

February 09, 2008 04:00 am

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If you stand in front of 125 Main St. in Oneonta today, near the corner of Chestnut and Main, there is plenty of activity to observe. On any weekday, you can see people boarding and departing from Oneonta Public Transit buses at the main terminal or people shopping at the Clinton Plaza. On a weekend late night, you might see a few intoxicated people returning to campus or home from the Water and Market Street area.

Not much has changed at this busy intersection since the 1830s, except for the buildings.

Standing on the same site back then, you'd be in front of The Oneonta House, which had been built in the early 1800s. It remained until the early 1870s, when the Stanton Opera House was completed in 1873. The Stanton block stood until the early 1970s, replaced by an urban renewal project.

The Oneonta House was a significant landmark in Oneonta's history. It was here a meeting was held to incorporate Oneonta as a village in 1848. In the early 1850s, many interested promoters of a railroad from far and wide met here to get the Albany & Susquehanna (D&H) Railroad established. In 1865, a celebration banquet was held here when the first train arrived on the new railroad.

Across from today's 125 Main St. on Chestnut Street is the Baird block, which houses the Corfu Diner. Back in the 1830s, The Susquehanna House stood on this site, which had been built in 1815 by Roderick and Carleton Emmons. It stood until 1892.

In the early 21st century, it is a common sight around sunset in Oneonta to watch the skies and notice hundreds of crows noisily making their way toward a nighttime resting place.

Back in the 1830s, it was a common thing in summer evenings to see great numbers of blackbirds in the village. Their noise came up from the swamp behind the Main Street stores, in the area we know today as Market Street and Neahwa Park. It was swampy until around the time the railroad was built.

It was nearly routine to see guests at The Oneonta House go across the street to the area of today's Clinton Plaza, sit on the high bank, and listen to what Willard Huntington once called "extraordinary sound; at times so loud as to quite preclude intelligible conversation on the part of the auditors. They pronounced it something wonderful and unheard of at any places elsewhere in the course of their travels." In the early spring, people also gathered to hear the noisy chorus of frogs in the swamps.

Regarding those who may have had a few too many at the bars of The Oneonta or Susquehanna Houses, Huntington said, "As late as 1837, the hazing of intoxicated men was often practiced "¦ by the self-appointed conservators of law and order. It was not an uncommon experience, at the then foot of Chestnut Street, for the inebriated, in doing regular transit from one hotel to the other, to discover themselves the recipients of unexpected shower baths. These usually came in the shape of a bucketful of cold water thrown from a balcony above."

Huntington continued, "A more open course occasionally pursued by the regulators, consisted in escorting their more hopeless cases to the village millpond and incontinently throwing them therein. Others took pleasure in tripping up the unfortunate on the street, and otherwise making life temporarily unpleasant for them in ways more or less questionable."

As for law and order, Oneonta didn't have a full time police officer until 1880 when A.C. Wolcott was appointed at a salary of $35 a month. A part-timer, George Behan, served as a night watchman beginning in 1875 for a five-month period.

Those dumping buckets of water and other disciplinary actions on the inebriated often took their chances. "Sometimes," Huntington wrote, "the hapless victim proved himself able, in more sober moments, to visit ample punishment upon his erstwhile tormentors; and moreover was not slow in doing so, did he happen to know and recall them during such an interval."

On Monday: A variety of events from 1953.

City Historian Mark Simonson's column appears twice weekly. On Saturdays, his column focuses on the area during the Depression and before. His Monday columns address local history after the Depression. If you have feedback or ideas about the column, write to him at The Daily Star, or e-mail him at simmark@stny.rr.com. His website is www.oneontahistorian.com.