Oneida County
Rome, the carrying place between the Mohawk and Wood Creek; Utica; the trail from Oneida Castle to the Mohawk.
Everything in Oneida County comes back to the carrying place at Rome. The Mohawk, flowing to the Hudson, and Wood Creek, flowing to Oneida Lake and the Great Lakes, come within two kilometres of each other on the flats where Fort Stanwix was later built. The 1851 map names it Da-ya-hoo-wa-quat and draws the Central Trail arriving from Oneida Castle by way of Te-ona-tale (near Verona), then turning down the Mohawk past Oriskany to Nun-da-da-sis, now Utica.
The trail down the valley is NY-5 and NY-5S on the two banks, with NY-365 following the Verona–Rome leg and NY-69 the Rome–Oriskany leg. Fish Creek (Ta-ga-soke) and Wood Creek enter the county from the northeast; the sheet draws the upper Mohawk coming down from the north to Rome and turning east.
The Oriskany battlefield of 1777 lies on the trail between Rome and Utica, and the sheet’s dots along the river there are the villages and fords of the Oneida–Mohawk borderland.
Trails through the county
- The Mohawk valley — The trail from the carrying place at Rome down the Mohawk to Utica, Herkimer, Little Falls, Canajoharie, Fort Hunter, Schenectady and the Hudson at Cohoes.
- The Central Trail: Onondaga to Rome — The eastern half of the Iroquois Trail, from the Onondaga council fire through Manlius, Chittenango, Canastota and Oneida Castle to the carrying place at Rome.
Sources
- Morgan & Parker, Map of Ho-de-no-sau-nee-ga (1851), digitized by Yale Beinecke Library
- Russell's 1962 redraw, Leventhal Map Center, Boston Public Library
- W. M. Beauchamp, Perch Lake Mounds, with notes on other New York mounds and some accounts of Indian trails, NYS Museum Bulletin 87 (1905)