Place:Ovid (town), Seneca, New York, United States

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

Ovid is a town in Seneca County, New York, United States. The population was 2,757 at the 2000 census. The town is named after the Roman poet Ovid, a name assigned by a clerk interested in the classics.

The Town of Ovid contains a village also called Ovid, one of the county seats of Seneca County. The town is in the southern part of the county, extending between two Finger Lakes, and southeast of Geneva, New York.

History

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

The town was the native land of the part of the Iroquois. The Sullivan Expedition passed through this area in 1779. The region was part of the Central New York Military Tract used to pay soldiers of the American Revolution. Andrew Dunlap, the first settler in the town, is believed to be also the first settler in the county.

The town was formed in 1794, while still part of Onondaga County. Part of Ovid was taken in 1802 to form the Town of Hector (now in Schuyler County). In 1817, part of Ovid was used to form the Town of Covert.

Ovid was, at times, on the south border of Seneca County as some of the other county towns were assigned to adjacent counties.

In 1853, of farmland in the town of Ovid were purchased for the site of the Ovid Agricultural College, which opened in December 1860. Within months, its president and most of the teachers and students marched off to fight in the Civil War, and the college never reopened. It was superseded by the new land-grant university, established in Ithaca on land donated by state Senator Ezra Cornell. As part of the negotiations in the state legislature to enact the charter of Cornell University, Ovid was promised that the site would become the Willard Asylum for the Insane, which was the second New York State facility, following the opening of the Utica Lunatic Asylum in 1843. In 1864, the Legislature appointed Dr. Sylvester D. Willard to investigate conditions in almshouses, jails and other places where the insane were kept. His report led to the enactment of a bill in 1865 authorizing a second state asylum, specifically designated for the care of the chronic insane. The asylum, located on the site of the abandoned Ovid Agricultural College, was named in memory of Dr. Willard, who died of typhoid fever just days before passage of the bill he authored. The hospital opened on Oct. 13, 1869. The facility continued as a mental hospital until 1995, when it was converted into a Drug Treatment Facility.

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