Oneonta: Where the Railroad Brotherhood Was Born
Near Cooperstown, New York
Oneonta sits in the Catskill foothills where the Susquehanna River curves through a wide valley. Its name is popularly believed to come from an Iroquoian phrase meaning place of open rocks. The Albany and Susquehanna Railroad arrived in eighteen sixty-five and transformed a modest farming crossroads into a regional rail hub.
Eighteen years later, in eighteen eighty-three, a group of railroad workers gathered in a sidetracked caboose right here in Oneonta and founded the Brotherhood of Railroad Trainmen, one of the most powerful labor unions in American history. The Brotherhood eventually merged into what became the United Transportation Union, representing hundreds of thousands of workers. Oneonta was also home to the State University of New York at Oneonta and Hartwick College, giving a small city an outsized educational footprint.
