1827 History and Maps

[Robert Lauterbach]

Here are a few scans from the Village of Rochester directory....showing that the Southwedge dates back to that time, and also shows the history of Rochester though 1826.

[Robert Lauterbach]

More history

[Robert Lauterbach]

More History

[Robert Lauterbach]

More 1827 history

[Robert Lauterbach]

1857 map of Southwedge

[Chris Jones]

Here are a few more!

[Chris Jones]

And a few more.

[Robert Lauterbach]

Thank you. It is so interesting how our streets have been around for 150 years. My Uncle Bill Lauterbach who lived on Sanford St for 90 years starting in 1905 would say that he would always know when it snowed while lying in bed...because he could not hear the horse's hooves on the street going to the coal docks on the river in the morning. If only our streets could talk....we would learn so much. Thanks for the maps.

[Carl Almer]

Hi everyone,

I just joined the group because this subject really interests me. Researching the neighborhood history was a way for making myself feel at home here when I moved to Rochester six years ago.

One thing to keep in mind, which I discovered is that these maps will often show streets that only existed on some surveyor's notes. The tracts that became the South Wedge were bought up by speculators, who laid out lots and streets, but for all practical reasons the land remained farmland or fallow. A better indicator of when a street or block was settled are the street and city directories. An often overlooked catalyst for the neighborhood's development was the building of the bridge over the canal in the 1840s followed by street car service on South Avenue a few years later. This was rounded out by the opening of two plank roads that connected Rochester to communities further south: the Rochester Henrietta Plank Road and the Rochester-Hemlock Plant Roads (today Routes 15 and 15A respectively) (from Blake McKelvey, "The South Avenue Area in the 19th Century" in South Side News [no date], but clipped in the South Wedge folder in the Local History Division of the Central Library). McKelvey notes that its at this time that congregations begin establishing themselves in the South Wedge, a good sign that dense settlement is beginning to happen.

One map that I really like because it shows houses in the city and lists the property owners is the 1851 Marcus Smith and B. Callan Map of the City of Rochester. It's owned by the Rochester Historical Society, but available on-line on the Library's "Rochester Images" page as scan rpm00447.jpeg.

I'll put up another image, this one from the 1875 plat, because it shows the how the streets were still proposals. I now live on Nicholson, so that's how I came across this. Note how there's a house in the middle of (the future) Nicholson Street on Grand (today Gregory).

Well I hope to hear more stories and other facts!
Carl

[Robert Lauterbach]

Thanks Carl. I wish your scans were larger as they are hard to read, but are still good to see. When my Grandmother's family arrived in Rochester...the Priens, they lived at 17 Nicholson St.

Remember many/all streets were renumbered in 1900, but it looks like 17 Nicholson st was the number before 1900. I think her uncle actually had the house built around 1888 or so.

One very cool book to acquire is the Rochester House directory, which lists families by street address. From that, you can see what the house numbers were before 1900. Actually Sanford St...where I live was called Engelwood Ave. The Central Library has copies back to about 1885. I bought a 1917 copy, but would like to have a pre1900 copy at home. From those books, you can see when businesses came and went, for example. I tracked the history of 750 South Ave (now Equal Grounds) back to about 1890, where my grandfather/uncles and father ran a hardware store from 1899-1995. Seems that the building was a grocery store before going vacant in 1898. That grocery moved across the street and then left the area.

There is no question that with some effort, the history of many of these buildings could be reconstructed. It would be very interesting to see the types of businesses and how long they lasted. I remember my uncle Bill Lauterbach telling me that his mother had him walk down to the bar on the corner of South Ave and Caroline St. to get a "pail" of beer. She died in 1913, so my uncle was about 7 or 8 at the time. I am also sure there are hundreds of these stores waiting to be told.

Thanks for your interest in this history.
Robert

[Carl Almer]

You're very welcome! I arbitrarily chose the size of the scan just to give every one a sense of what you can see. On the Library "Rochester Images" site you can zoom in and out of their scans. For the 1851 Smith and Callan map I think you can zoom down onto a 1/256th section of the map! (I used to be able to just drag the image onto my desktop, but I can't anymore. To get very contemporary for a moment, when I started I was using Mac OS 9 and MS Explorer now I'm using OS X and Safari or Firefox. So I had to use a screen image capturing program.) But if you like scanning (in the old sense of the word) a document in hand, the copy at the Central Library is great.

17 Nicholson, huh. I can picture it. I'll have to double check what that number is now. I have used the house directories; they are great. Thanks for the tip, though. I found out not only who lived in my houses, but what jobs they did. It gave me a small sense of what their lives must have been. Hopefully the library will scan them soon. Some are now so brittle that they break with every touch (so much for wood-pulp paper).

I saw the pictures you posted of Lauterbach's. They were great! In fact I'm posting this from Equal Grounds now! When I moved into the neighborhood six years ago, some of my neighbors still referred to the hardware store as Lauterbach's.

All these stories should be collected in some form. (I guess that's what this forum is for.) My mom's church (and my childhood one) in Los Angeles just celebrated its 100th anniversary, but they found out that they virtually have no history before the 1970s. The old congregation--mostly Italian and Irish American--had moved far away or, sadly, but expectedly, passed away. The former priests could not be located and any archives were disposed of years earlier. It was very sad. I have a centennial celebration brochure put out by St. Boniface in the 1950s. It would have been nice if something like that had been printed 50 years ago and laying around the parish office at my mom's church. It would have been a wealth of information for the new parishioners.

I'll post in PDF form, on a new discussion thread, two histories that I wrote about my wife's former house and the building that now houses Boulder Coffee (as you can see, I really like coffee.) Hopefully everyone will enjoy them!

Carl

[Robert Lauterbach]

Thanks Carl

Maybe you or Ben Munson or someone could connect with the right person to some how figure out in an orderly manor how to capture the history of our neighborhood (how about an RIT /UR computer PHD type). Maybe a layered map of the big streets, so with a click at an address on a certain layer, people could see how things looked and could post names, photos, comments, etc.

I wish the D&C and the Library could scan and have searchablity on all of their papers/directories. The directories are scanned but are not searchable...darn. Then just don't seem to understand the gold mine they own. They could make money if they could understand what they have.

BTW, did you know Tommy Quinn at St. Boniface in the 50s or 60s?

Maybe if we can find a few more people interested, we all could have a cup of coffee over these ideas.

Best to you,
Robert