Tag: Binghamton NY

Wikipedia says: Binghamton is a city in, and the county seat of, Broome County, New York, United States. Surrounded by rolling hills, it lies in the state’s Southern Tier region near the Pennsylvania border, in a bowl-shaped valley at the confluence of the Susquehanna and Chenango Rivers.

The first known people of European descent to come to the area were the troops of the Sullivan Expedition in 1779, during the American Revolutionary War, who destroyed local villages of the Onondaga and Oneida tribes. The city was named after William Bingham, a wealthy Philadelphian who bought the 10,000 acre patent for the land in 1786, then consisting of parts of the towns of Union and Chenango. Joshua Whitney, Jr., Bingham’s land agent, chose land at the junction of the Chenango and Susquehanna Rivers to develop a settlement, then named Chenango Point, and helped build its roads and erect the first bridge. Significant agricultural growth led to the incorporation of the village of Binghamton in 1834.

The Chenango Canal, completed in 1837, connected Binghamton to the Erie Canal, and was the impetus for the initial industrial development of the area. This growth accelerated with the completion of the Erie Railroad between Binghamton and Jersey City, NJ in 1849. With the Delaware, Lackawanna and Western Railroad arriving soon afterward, the village became an important regional transportation center. Several buildings of importance were built at this time, including the New York State Inebriate Asylum, opened in 1858 as the first center in the United States to treat alcoholism as a disease.