Port Byron: Named for a Poet No One Can Confirm

Settlers reached this bend of the Owasco Outlet in seventeen ninety-seven and called the place Bucksville, after an early settler named Aholiab Buck. When the original Erie Canal reached here in eighteen nineteen, the town transformed almost overnight from a frontier clearing into a busy canal port. Around eighteen twenty-five, residents renamed it Port Byron.

Two stories compete for the honor of explaining that name. One holds that the name honors the English poet Lord Byron, though no evidence survives. The other ties it to the village becoming a port on the canal. Neither has ever been proven, and Port Byron has been living with the mystery ever since. The village was incorporated in eighteen thirty-seven. In nineteen seventeen the canal was rerouted under the Barge Canal system and bypassed the village entirely, leaving Port Byron with a quiet main street and a name attached to a story nobody can quite verify.