George Thayer Homestead - Hemlock and Canadice Lakes

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The George Thayer Homestead

at 4406 N. Main St. in Hemlock NY.

Photo courtesy of Douglas Morgan in 2007.

The first Hemlock Lake Post Office was situated on a nearly-one-hundred-acre square of land on the south side of Big Tree Road and west of today’s Route 15A. From about 1810 until after the Civil War a number of now extinct log and frame buildings populated this property. There were a couple of farmers’ homes and workmen’s sheds, a tavern, a school, and the Post Office, arranged roughly in a large rectangle. The property was known as “The Block” or “The Square.”

Decades before 1820, when Livingston County was divided from Ontario County, Stephen Tinker of Lima bought up several hundred acres of land in the township of Richmond — in the western part that would, in 1808, become the township of Livonia. The Tinker family came from Lyme, Connecticut, to western New York in 1791. They settled in Charlestown (now Lima), eight or ten miles away from the block of land that Tinker owned in Livonia. For upwards of twenty years the land remained wilderness.

John VanFossen was the first to settle on this corner of land. He bought a twelve-acre-square from Stephen Tinker in the early summer of 1823, a lot that included a mature grove of oak and hickory.The eldest son of Levi and Elizabeth (Hanna) VanFossen, John was born in Milton, Pennsylvania; at age thirteen (1795) his family moved north to settle in western New York. They were first in Avon, then ten years later came to Hemlock Lake. In 1805 Levi bought the primitive grist mill on the outlet creek, where it crosses Main Street (at the site where the old roller mill stands today on the north bank), and updated it.

Frank Connor, former Livonia Historian, wrote in 1930: “The first real gristmill [in Hemlock] was erected during the winter of 1799 - 1800 by Seth Simonds, of Bristol, for Thomas Morris, of Canandaigua. This mill was of the stone type and stood [on the bank of the creek downtown]. In 1805 or 1806, or about that time, Levi VanFossen rebuilt it and in 1811 he improved it. He also built and operated a distillery. Levi came to an untimely end in 1811 by falling into a vat of whiskey mash in this distillery. He left a widow and four children.” The VanFossen distillery was located on the east side of Main Street, just a bit south of Clay Street, near today’s Post Office. Levi’s two eldest sons John and Isaac were both involved with their father’s businesses.

In 1823, the year he settled on the Tinker property, John VanFossen was thirty-five years old, married ten years, and the father of three young children: Ralph, Mary, and Sarah. He put up a sturdy log house a bit south of Big Tree Road and moved his family in. He and his wife Eliza (Lester) lived there for about fifteen years. In that time several more children were born: two boys (whose names are not known), and three girls: Charlotte, Abigail, and Margaret.

When the Post Office was first established at Hemlock Lake on January 17, 1829, John VanFossen was appointed Postmaster. The mail came to his home via stage,three times a week. The Hemlock Turnpike, a graded dirt road from Springwater in the south to Lima in the north, ran right past John’s home (today’s Route 15A). The investor-financed highway was four years old when Hemlock Lake became a postal stop. It was a privately maintained thoroughfare and continued in business for a quarter of a century, until the building of the plank road in 1850.

Those who lived in the Hemlock Lake area — from Jacksonville to Slab City to Gullburgh— could check from time to time at the Post Office to see if they had mail; there was no such thing in the 1820s as Rural Free Delivery. John served as Postmaster for seven years, until the autumn of 1836 when he and his family picked up stakes and moved to Washtenaw County, Michigan. They settled in Ypsilanti, where John died January 22, 1858.

The next sale of property from the Tinker acreage occurred in 1825 when the Trustees of Livonia School District No. 2 bought one-quarter acre on the north side of the oak and hickory grove owned by the VanFossen family. A log schoolhouse was erected and school commenced during the winter term. There was to be a school in this area for nearly a century.Then around 1858 Livonia re-designated her school districts and District No. 2 became No. 4. The Hemlock Lake School was commonly called “The Block School” — a nickname that lasted well into the twentieth century, years after people had forgotten where the name originated.

Two or three log houses were built on Stephen Tinker’s hundred acres, rented to various families. Part of theTinker property, north of VanFossen’s land and bordering Big Tree Road,was leased to Peter Hawley, who settled here as early as 1810. Peter was from Westchester County, New York. He’d been married and widowed and remarried by the time he came to settle in Hemlock at age forty. He and his second wife Abigail had a two-year-old daughter and a few years later a son was born.

For several years Peter and Abigail leased a small farm and a log dwelling from Stephen Tinker. In 1818 the Hawleysbought four acres on Big Tree Road east of 15A, bordering the Hemlock Outlet Creek. (Today this area is the “forgotten” village of Jacksonville.) For five years Peter farmed his upland acreage, until he went bankrupt. The property was sold at auction in 1823 and Peter and Abigail moved back to their rented house on the Tinker property.

In December of 1825 the farm they had leased for some years became theirs when Abigail (in her own name) purchased an oddly-shaped lot of eleven acres nearly surrounding the twelve acres of John VanFossen, and specifically including the newly-built dwelling house.

Earlier that summer Stephen Tinker and John VanFossen, in partnership, had erected a frame building over a stone cellar. This house was immediately south of Big Tree Road, tucked in the corner where the two roads meet. For five years Abigail and Peter Hawley lived here and managed the Tinker Tavern. In a 1925 article for the Livonia Gazette, Miss Adelaide Gibbs spoke of this building: “Tinkers Tavern was the first frame tavern in town.” Long-time Livonia historian Frank Connor wrote in 1930: “Atavern was built on the land now owned by James Wood but was not operated very long. The site where it stood can be identified from the remains of the old cellar wall in the corner of the field.”

By 1830 the Hawley family had moved on to Wayne County, Michigan. Peter died there in the autumn of 1847.

When the Hawleys moved away the Elijah Stephens family came from York (Livingston County) to live in the former Tinker Tavern, which they rented. Elijah was in his late-thirties; his wife Meribah (Wing) was a few years younger. She was the mother of four children: William was ten; Hattie, eight; Ella — a boy — was five; and Walter almost two. Mr. Stephens operated a General Store in the defunct tavern.

The Stephens family grew by two in the spring of 1832 when Meribah gave birth to twins, George and Mary Jane. The infants, however, did not thrive; baby George died October 6 and Mary Jane succumbed the next day. Their mother died nearly two years later. Within a twelve-month Elijah remarried. His new wife, Jane Colton, gave birth the following year to her first child: Andrew. The boy did not survive and when another son was born in April of 1837 he, too, was called Andrew.

This second Andy was a few months old when Elijah was appointed Hemlock Lake Postmaster, after John VanFossen left for Michigan. This second Hemlock Lake Post Office was located in the Stephens Store. The business prospered and the Stephens family grew.

Jane gave birth to three daughters and two sons in the next ten years. Only two of these children would survive to adulthood — Mary Jane, born in 1841, and Elijah, born in 1848. When their nine-year-old grandson William died in 1850 he was buried in the Hemlock Cemetery on Clay Street. Where the twins were buried — or Meribah, Imogene, Edward, or Henrietta — is not known. Perhaps they too rest in the Hemlock burial ground, though without a marker.

Elijah and Jane moved in the spring of 1849 (when his tenure as Postmaster ended) to a house on Hemlock’s Main Street. By 1855 their family had moved to Parma (Monroe County), and a few years after that, to Rochester. Both Jane and Elijah died about ten years later.

The hundred-acre Tinker property changed hands after Peter and Abigail Hawley moved away. The Block, as it was called, still accommodated the schoolhouse, the Tinker Tavern-come-Stephens Store, and two or three log homes. After the VanFossen family moved away in 1836, their house remained unoccupied and fell gradually into ruin. The only frame building on the site was the store, but there were two or three log homes on the Block, rented by infrequent settlers, the residents changing from season to season.

In the winter of 1830 two brothers came from the neighboring township of Richmond and bought up great swaths of land in the northern part of Hemlock, including Stephen Tinker’s one hundred acres on the southwest corner of Route 15A and Big Tree Road. They bought land along both sides of Big Tree Road, east and west of the Hemlock Turnpike; together they owned upwards of three hundred acres. Tom Blackmer was the elder brother, twenty-eight, and unmarried. He moved into the existing house on the northwest corner. This had much earlier been the homestead of Samuel Pitts and would, more than a century later, be known as “the Country Store.”

The second brother, Hervey, was two years younger than Tom and newly married to Elizabeth Hayes. Hervey and Elizabeth moved into a house on the north side of Big Tree Road, about half a mile west of the corner. (It’s gone now.) A family memoir written by a Blackmer descendant mentions that Hervey and Elizabeth’s first child, Myron, was born on December 12, 1830, and when he was six weeks old his parents took possession of the Barnard house on Big Tree Road, the house that had been built three decades earlier by David Benton. After Mr. Benton died his widow, Nancy, married Chauncey Barnard and they lived in the home for several more years. This was the first frame house built in the Hemlock Lake area.

Neither of the Blackmer brothers had a home on the Block. They did, however, farm the land in a joint venture for a number of years, letting some of the log houses fall into disuse, converting others to outbuildings. Tom Blackmer died in 1840 and four years later a large chunk of his share of the farm was sold to George Thayer. This included the hundred-acre Block.

In 1844 GeorgeThayer built the gracious farmhouse that stands on the property today, and for the next twenty years he and his family lived there.

Son of Rufus and Permelia (Throop)Thayer, George was a year old in 1808 when his family made the move from Vermont to Ontario County, settling ona large and prosperous farm in Richmond. George was a vigorous and enterprising young man. In his late teens he went with his father and brother to Michigan where they bought a farm, intending to settle. Their sojourn to the western frontier, however, was short-lived. George returned to Richmond in ill health, languishing with an unknown ailment for nearly two years. When he had regained his strength,he was employed by Edwin Gilbert as a clerk in his Honeoye store. He worked for Mr. Gilbert two years and taught school during the winter months.

George was in his mid-twenties when Mr. Gilbert offered him a partnership in the store. It was an arrangement that lasted for more than ten years. For three years (1829-31) George served as constable of Richmond, an elected office.He was later appointed DeputySheriff of Ontario County and served for four years.

Meanwhile, he’d taken to wife Miss Phebe Lorinda Wood. Their first child, Samuel, was born in 1837 in Richmond, followed by Elizabeth, then Abigail. The children were still young when the family moved to Hemlock in 1844. Two years later the youngest Thayer child, George, was born.

By the late 1850s, the old log house of John VanFossen had fallen into disrepair; the other log buildings on the property were no longer in use as homes. Over the intervening years all vestiges of these structures have disappeared. The frame building on the corner that was occupied first by the Hawley family, then by the Stephens family, was bought by William Babbitt about 1850, a short while after he married Elizabeth Holt. William was George Thayer’s nephew, the son of his older sister Betsy. William, who moved on to Minnesota, owned the place only a few years before selling it back to his uncle. From the middle of the decade the place stood empty, until finally the roof fell in and the walls collapsed. By the time George sold the property, all that was left of the old tavern was a portion of the stone cellar.

The Thayer family lived for nearly twenty years in the farmhouse George had built. Then in 1863 he sold up and moved his family to Lima. The next owner of the farm was Myron Blackmer — son of Hervey, nephew of Tom: the two brothers who had owned and farmed the acreage thirty years earlier.Myron was thirty-three years old, a married man, and the father of three young sons: John, five; Frank, two; and Carl, a newborn.

From the age of six weeks Myron had lived with his parents and siblings in their home on Big Tree Road. Between the years 1850 and 1860 Hervey and Myron Blackmer were deeply involved with the work of the Underground Railroad. Family tradition asserts, and may be corroborated, that the Blackmer home — that house on Big Tree that has long since fallen into ruin — was a “station” on the chain of safe homes from Naples via Honeoye. Both the Blackmers, father and son, were ardent abolitionists, working by night to move freedom-seekers from Hemlock to Lima, Avon, and Rochester.

That extinct house where the Underground work was accomplished was the old Benton/Barnard home that Hervey had taken possession of in the winter of 1830. Its location can be tentatively identified by the old railroad bed. The railroad would come to Hemlock in 1895, during the time that William Lightfoot owned this farm; the tracks bisected the Lightfoot acreage. The railroad bed may still be discerned in the underbrush. Near where the rails crossed Big Tree Road the Blackmer house once stood.

Myron was in his early twenties when his father died in 1852. Shortly after Hervey’s death, his widow Elizabeth remarried;she moved to Cattaraugus County with her new husband and the younger Blackmer children, leaving Myron in possession of the family home. It took nearly a decade to sort out Betsey’s finances, as she desired that an equitable distribution of Hervey’s assets be made to all his children. In the spring of 1863 an agreement was finally hammered out and Myron came into his full inheritance.

When George Thayer offered his farm for sale, Myron was quick to respond — after all, the land, though not the house, had belonged at one time to his father and uncle. After selling the family homestead on Big Tree Road, he purchased nearly three hundred acres in the corner bordered on the east by Route 15A and on the north by Big Tree Road. On the property was the spacious farmhouse built by Mr. Thayer, the decaying remains of the former tavern, the remnants of the oak and hickory grove prized by John VanFossen, and the quarter-acre lot of the Block Schoolhouse.

In the second year of the Civil War, the Myron Blackmer family moved into the house at the top of the hill, the house built twenty years earlier by George Thayer. For ten years they lived here and during that time Hattie gave birth to four more children: Elizabeth (1868), Harriet (1870), and twins Tom and George (1873). Although Myron retained ownership of this property until his death in 1898, he and his family did not live there all that time. Shortly after the birth of the twins, they moved to Honeoye where they put down deep roots. For several years the house was unoccupied, until Myron’s heirs sold the farm in 1900.

James Wood bought the Blackmer farm and lived there almost thirty years. A bachelor, James was nearly sixty years old when he acquired the property. He’d grown up in Herkimer in Schuyler County, New York, the only boy among his parents’ four children. His childless, widowed sister Eliza lived with him until her death about 1921. Under James’ proprietorship the farm flourished. But as the years passed, he grew ever more feeble, until the summer of his eighty-fourth year when he went to live with his neighbor, Sam Collins. He rented the farm to Eri Jenks.

After James’ death, the property was sold in 1944 by his nieces: Ethel, Sophia, and Leila Stephenson the daughters of his sister Julia. Oscar Smith and his wife Elsie bought James Wood’s farm, in addition to several other lots in Hemlock. Smith’s farm grew to be one of the largest in the area. They remained in Hemlock for a quarter century before the farm was sold to William and Gail Gray in the spring of 1968. It was known, however, as “Smith’s Farm” for many, many years.