Orleans: Named for a Victory Still Fresh
New York
The town of Orleans was set off from Brownville, Jefferson County, on April third, eighteen twenty-one. Sources say the town was named for the French city of Orleans.
Orleans sits in the northernmost tier of Jefferson County, with a neck of land reaching the Saint Lawrence River and cutting the edge of Wellesley Island. The principal village is LaFargeville, named for the early French landowner who built a now-ruined stone mansion there. Stone Mills, the first settlement, grew up around a grist and saw operation in the early eighteen hundreds.
It is quiet farm and river country today, well north of the Adirondacks, close enough to Canada to hear the accent shift.
