What brought so many people from St. Lawrence County to West Windsor?
That Turn-of-the-Century Migration From a Small Town in New York?
We Have Questions…
Does anyone know what prompted the migration of families from a few small, neighboring towns in New York State, a century or more ago?
Beginning in the late 1800s, numerous residents of St. Lawrence County, New York, migrated to West Windsor and neighboring towns, including members of the Crandall, Lobdell, Hewett and Dana families (the latter including Marion Dana Hastings, a long-time West Windsor correspondent for local newspapers).
Samson and Eliza Crandall came to West Windsor from Pierrepont, N.Y., with their family in 1890, shortly after their son Henry was hired as the first superintendent of the new cheese factory in Brownsville. They soon settled on a farm in South Reading.
Their daughter, Agnes, married Will Best and lived her adult life in the farm house across from what came to be known as Best’s Covered Bridge on Churchill Road. Two of her daughters, a sister, a niece and two nephews had places close by at various times, on or near Willow Brook.
The Crandall, Lobdell and Hewett families were friends and in-laws, both before and after their move to Vermont. The cheesemaker, Henry Crandall, for example, was married to Myrta Lobdell. Their daughter Bernice, born in West Windsor in 1895, married Floyd Hewett, later a selectboard member in Windsor. Henry, Myrta and Floyd all were born in Pierrepont, a town of roughly 2,000 inhabitants.
In later years, the transplanted New Yorkers would hold annual reunions, often in West Windsor or Hartland. In August of 1938, for example, the Vermont Journal reported that 70 New Yorkers attended a reunion at Will Best's farm, the participants coming from Claremont and Lyme, New Hampshire, and from Cavendish, Windsor, Hartland, Perkinsville, Springfield and Weathersfield, Vermont.
Some members of these families had moved to New York from Vermont a generation or two earlier, and several families had roots in the Westerly, R.I. area.
Was it Henry Crandall, the cheesemaker, who started the migration, or were there others before him? If you are a member of one of these families or if you have any clues to share, you are invited to respond in the comments section below.
