Unadilla: Place of Meeting

Unadilla is an Iroquois word meaning place of meeting, and the site earned that name honestly. Here at the junction of the Unadilla and Susquehanna Rivers, Indigenous peoples met for centuries to trade and council. When Revolutionary War-era settlers arrived in the seventeen eighties, the river junction made it a natural ferry crossing.

A man named Nathaniel Wattles established a ferry and hotel here in the mid-seventeen eighties and became the anchor for settlers moving westward into New York's interior. When the Continental Army's Sullivan-Clinton Expedition marched through in seventeen seventy-nine to destroy Haudenosaunee villages across western New York, this was a key staging point along their route. The village incorporated in eighteen eighty-nine, sustained by lumber, grist mills, and eventually by the Albany and Susquehanna Railroad.