Place:Ellisburg (town), Jefferson, New York, United States

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Ellisburg is a town in Jefferson County, New York. The population was 3,474 at the time of the 2010 census. The town is in the southwestern corner of the county and is south of Watertown. Ellisburg is named after early European-American landowners. Among the villages in the town is Ellisburg.

History

the text in this section is copied from an article in Wikipedia

This was long the territory of various cultures of indigenous peoples. Prehistoric remains show evidence of indigenous occupation for thousands of years prior to European encounter. The St. Lawrence Iroquoians had villages along the upper St. Lawrence River from the 1300s into the late 1500s. Along the southern areas of the Great Lakes, the Five Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy controlled territory from present-day New York into Pennsylvania and Ohio and south into Virginia. In historic times the Onondaga people were concentrated in this area. The Five Nations together identified as the Haudenosaunee.

In the mid-19th century, E.G. Squier conducted a survey of ancient Native American works for the Smithsonian Institution, publishing drawings, plans, and maps. He found evidence of Iroquois longhouses and burial grounds in this area, as well as numerous artifacts and remnants of what were believed to be defensive Iroquois fortifications along Sandy Creek from the early eighteenth century, for protection against French colonists and First Nations.

Samuel de Champlain and other French explorers and missionaries visited the area of the present-day town in the 17th century. After the French established a colony in New France (Quebec), their traders did business with numerous Iroquois villages, primarily those of the Onondaga and especially the Mohawk peoples. Later these peoples primarily traded with Dutch and English colonists in present-day New York, from Albany west along the Mohawk River. Most of the Iroquois nations allied with the British during the American Revolutionary War. As a result of Great Britain's defeat in the American Revolutionary War and cession of its territories in the Thirteen Colonies, the United States forced the Iroquois to cede most of their territory in present-day New York. The Crown compensated the nations by setting up land reserves in Upper Canada (now Ontario). There were already Mohawk-dominated villages along the St. Lawrence River in Quebec, near Montreal and upriver, which had started near Jesuit missions.

Following the war, New York State made five million acres of former Iroquois land available for public purchase; land speculators bought large tracts of land for development. They envisioned the rise of villages and farms. As part of such postwar land speculation, Alexander Macomb bought thousands of acres in Macomb's Purchase. Thousands of migrants from New England flooded into upstate and western New York in the postwar years, and the area also attracted immigrants from the British Isles and France. Marvel and Lyman Ellis purchased the town land from Macomb's Purchase and first settled around 1797 near what became Ellisburg village. Originally the name was spelled "Ellisburgh".

The town was organized in 1803 from the town of Mexico (now in Oswego County) before the formation of Jefferson County.

When President Thomas Jefferson established an embargo against trade with Great Britain in 1807 prior to the War of 1812, it adversely affected the thriving trade among the towns in upstate New York and Canada. In the tiny village of nearby Sackets Harbor on Lake Ontario, the US Navy built and operated a major shipyard employing 3,000 workers during the war; they completed 12 warships to be used for the battles on the Great Lakes and were critical to the US being able to fight against the British there. Thousands more military assigned to the Army and Navy were stationed at Sackets Harbor. By the fall of 1814, the village had become the third-largest population center in the entire state, after Albany and New York. In 1814 during the War of 1812, Americans defeated a British invasion force at the Battle of Big Sandy Creek in Ellisburg.

Settlers and developers had expected upstate New York to thrive due to trade with Canada, but this was severely interrupted by the war. Following the war, major changes followed the construction and opening of the Erie Canal in 1824 through the Mohawk River Valley and it drew development westward. It opened transportation and connection with the Midwest and Great Lakes communities, which could send their produce and commodities to New York City. Towns of Jefferson County generally were bypassed by such western development, resulting in many of their young people migrating west to Ohio, Michigan and Wisconsin from the mid-nineteenth century.

Watertown, New York, however, developed as a major industrial city at the turn of the twentieth century. Its paper and other factories were powered by the Black River. The industrial wealth generated by such manufacturing resulted in the city having one of the highest numbers of millionaires per capita in the early 20th century.

The community of Belleville incorporated as a village in 1860. The community of Mannsville was incorporated as a village in 1879. Ellisburg village was incorporated in 1895. In 1930, Belleville abandoned its status as a village.

Research Tips

External Links

• Outstanding guide to Ellisburg family history and genealogy resources (FamilySearch Research Wiki). Birth, marriage, and death records, town histories, cemeteries, churches, newspapers, libraries, and genealogical societies.