#newyork | yatescountyhistorycenter (2024)

By Jonathan Monfiletto

I would like to think the answer to the question I have posed in the title of this article is a resounding yes. After all, the Penn Yan Express of July 24, 1867 contained an item titled “Incorporated” and including the following declaration: “The village of Branchport has been granted a Charter and is now, as we understand, an incorporated village, in accordance with the vote of its citizens as announced in this paper two or three weeks since.”

Penn Yan became Yates County’s first officially incorporated village in 1833; Dundee became the second in 1848. Rushville followed in third in 1866; Dresden incorporated as the fourth – as far as I know – the next year. Indeed, the “Incorporated” item goes on to state: “Dresden is also aspiring to the dignity of an incorporated village, having voted in favor of incorporation at a late election.”

Regarding the vote in Branchport, the Express of July 10, 1867 indicated such an election took place in Branchport the Saturday before. “There was little or no opposition to the movement – the question being carried unanimously in the affirmative,” the newspaper stated in a “Branchport Items” column. “There is a good deal of enterprise and public spirit in Branchport, and this move is one that will add to the growth and thrift of that already thriving village.”

As delightful as these snippets are to uncover and peruse, the major problem with them – and it is a major problem in my mind – is they seem to be the only hard evidence I can uncover with regard to the idea (or fact?) that Branchport once existed as an officially incorporated village. Now a hamlet of the town of Jerusalem at the tip of the west branch of Keuka Lake, Branchport was once a thriving commercial area – as many small communities once were – and may have been its own village as well. However, to say the evidence is confusing and contradictory is about the same as saying the sky is blue and the grass is green. Yes, of course it is.

I located these items from the Express through our digitized newspaper database, which is hosted online through New York State Historical Newspapers (https://nyshistoricnewspapers.org/). Yet, among the more than 700 results I browsed, I found neither proceedings of any Branchport village boards nor results of any Branchport village elections. A typewritten history of Branchport from our subject files asserts the village incorporated in 1867 and elected a president (a position similar to the office of mayor) and trustees on an annual basis. Another typewritten document from the files lists some of the “known presidents of the village”: Robert German in 1873, William Rynders in 1874 and again in 1881, Charles Hibbard from 1875 to 1876, and John L. Bronson in 1882.

Again, that seems to be the only hard evidence I can find to point to Branchport having been a real village (Pinocchio just exclaimed, “I’m a real boy!” in my head) at one point in time. Among the said 700-plus search results – using “village of Branchport” and “Branchport village” as keyword terms – nearly all of them reference a village of Branchport but seems to show it as nothing more than a wooden village (yes, a lame analogy with another Pinocchio reference), using village as a colloquial term. I have found similar references to the village of Bellona from sources who know Bellona is just a hamlet – a major one at that, having been settled around a stagecoach stop halfway between Geneva and Penn Yan – and not a village within the town of Benton.

Still, among those 700-plus search results are a few that seem to assert Branchport was indeed a real village, though to me they lack the smoking-gun hard evidence to make that a certain fact. For example, an article in the Yates County Chronicle, profiling 84-year-old Samuel Davis as one of the oldest residents of Jerusalem, contains an interesting parenthetical thought, noting Davis came to Jerusalem at the turn of the 19th century when “not a tree was cut in the vicinity of that somewhat assuming, (incorporated!) but moderate village of Branchport.” A letter to the editor in the Express in June 1874 references a meeting of the Board of Excise of the Village of Branchport during which the board granted a liquor license to a local drug store but denied the same to the Branchport Hotel. In December 1874, the Board of Health of the Village of Penn Yan banned residents of the village of Branchport from entering Penn Yan because of a small pox outbreak in Branchport.

These latter references are not alone in mentioning groups – including the Jerusalem Town Board, the Branchport Fire District, and the local Republican Committee – that met in, or discussed matters related to, a supposed village of Branchport or in mentioning a supposed village of Branchport alongside Yates County’s other villages. The Dundee Observer of June 8, 1881 listed population numbers for Yates County and its communities according to the 1880 U.S. Census; 271 people called Branchport home at that time. While there is an asterisk next to unincorporated villages – Bellona, Himrods’ Corners, and Eddytown among them – Branchport has no such asterisk, indicating it was an incorporated village. Proposed enlargements of the boundaries of the village of Penn Yan, considered by the New York State Legislature at various points, list the village of Branchport in relation to Penn Yan’s borders.

According to the November 22, 1882 edition of the Express, Louisa J. Wagener sued the village of Branchport after suffering an injury during a fall caused by – according to her argument – a defective or faulty sidewalk. “The injury sustained was the dislocation of the right shoulder joint, or the fracture of the neck of the scapula, by reason of which the use of the arm has been seriously and permanently impaired,” the newspaper noted in reporting the court awarded Wagener $2,000 (just over $64,000 in 2023 dollars). I threw the quote in for the shock value, but the item seems to indicate the village of Branchport was a real entity since only real entities can be sued. On the other hand, August 18, 1886, a publication called The Pioneer carried – on the same page – sketches titled “Village of Middlesex” and “Village of Branchport.” Since Middlesex has never been an incorporated village, though there is a hamlet of Middlesex Center, that image leads me to believe Branchport was never a truly incorporated village either.

On October 14, 1891, the Express carried the statistics for Yates County from the Census of the prior year. Branchport gained two more people for a population of 273, and once again the list seems to indicate it was an incorporated village. In fact, only the county’s nine towns and five incorporated villages are included; the list contains no other hamlets or communities. Indeed, October 6, 1897, while celebrating the opening of the Penn Yan, Keuka, Park, and Branchport Railway, the Chronicle published a brief history of the village of Branchport, noting: “In 1867 the village became incorporated, taking upon itself certain municipal characteristics that its local affairs might be ordered and governed independent of the township of Jerusalem, of which it forms a part.” Apparently, the village of Branchport was separate from the town of Jerusalem at some point and for at least three decades.

Over time, there are numerous seemingly colloquial references to the village of Branchport, where the newspaper calls the community a village but it isn’t necessarily an incorporated village. In October 1907, residents there started the Branchport Village Improvement Society, but whether they lived in an actual incorporated village then is unclear. Likewise, the Branchport Chamber of Commerce formed in March 1920 to oversee the community interests of the village of Branchport. When the Yates County Board of Supervisors established more county highways in March 1913, it referred to roadways in the village of Branchport.

When Yates County celebrated the 150th anniversary of the Sullivan Expedition in 1929, there was a general committee to oversee the county’s part of the commemoration in Geneva. Then, there were 14 smaller committees – one for each town and village – to oversee the festivities within its borders. That count includes committees for nine towns and five villages – with Branchport listed among the villages that exist today. So, Branchport may have been an incorporated village then, but the only record of an election taking place there that I could find was the vote to create the Branchport Fire District in 1933. Still, a report on the Jerusalem town budget in 1953 showed there were separate tax rates for the village of Branchport and for the town at large, indicating Branchport was a separate taxing entity and perhaps an incorporated village. Five years later, though, a legal notice referred to the hamlet of Branchport as the location of the Jerusalem town office.

In the 1960s, reports of a proposal for the town of Jerusalem to establish a water district in Branchport refers to the community as a village. A 1978 listing of deed transfers also refers to the village of Branchport alongside Yates County's other villages.

Branchport, of course, is no longer – if it ever was – an incorporated village and nowadays is considered a hamlet of the town of Jerusalem. Was Branchport ever an officially incorporated village? Looking at the evidence through more than 100 years of newspapers, part of me believes it was once a village and part of me thinks it never was a village. Can anyone out there shed some light for me?