Place:Portage, Livingston, New York, United States

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Portage is a town in the southwest corner of Livingston County, New York, United States. The town is at the south end of Letchworth State Park. The name of the town stems from the need to portage (carry) canoes around the falls of the Genesee River. The population of Portage was 884 at the 2010 census.

History

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

The ancestral home of the Haudenosaunee, European American settlers arrived in the Portage area by the early 1800s. Portage was formed from part of the town of Nunda in 1827.

The Erie Railroad Company built a wooden trestle bridge over the Genesee River just above the Upper Falls in the mid-1800s. Construction started on July 1, 1851, and the bridge opened on August 14, 1852. At the time, it was the longest and tallest wooden bridge in the world. In the early morning hours of May 6, 1875, the bridge was destroyed in a tremendous fire.

Immediately after the fire, officials of the Erie Railroad Company moved quickly to replace the wooden bridge with one built of iron and steel. Construction began on June 8, 1875, and the bridge opened for traffic on July 31, 1875, It was used until December 10, 2017, making the current Genesee Arch Bridge the third bridge at that site.

Research Tips

External Links

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