Oatka Creek - History

History

As the glaciers retreated 12,000 years ago the landscape they left behind on the Allegheny Plateau was a rolling expanse of drumlins and depressions in which meltwater and precipitation could accumulate. It was ideal topography for stream formation, and these bodies of water eventually combined and became the Oatka, eroding the Oatka Valley. Fertile soil from the highlands accumulated in the valley, and the land eventually reforested.

The Native Americans who would become the Seneca nation eventually came and settled in the area. They established a few small communities at the clearings in the forest where they found good hunting, and were first to farm the lands in the valley. The network of trails that connected them eventually became part of today's road network in the area. The Senecas eventually became part of the Iroquois Confederation, where the Oatka was at the very westernmost extent, giving them the honorific "Keepers of the Western Door" within the Confederation.

In 1779, during the Revolutionary War the Continental Army's Sullivan Expedition came into Western New York to suppress Senecas who had professed loyalty to the British or might do so. Many of the troops came from farms in New England and recognized the quality of land in the Oatka watershed. After the war they agitated for it to be opened to settlement. After the war, New York and Massachusetts resolved the latter's claim to the area, and the 1797 Treaty of Big Tree (today Geneseo) extinguished all Native land claims.

The first settler along the Oatka was Ebenezer "Indian" Allan, who established himself near the mouth of the stream, in today's Wheatland, in 1786. The creek would be known as Allan's Creek for years afterwards. After he moved further down the Genesee, other settlers came, the beginnings of what became Scottsville. In the 1790s settlement progressed upstream with the establishment of Le Roy where the stream intersected an old Indian trail that later became New York State Route 5. Settlement moved quickly afterwards, with all present communities as far south as Gainesville seeing their first settlers in the opening years of the 19th century, when the Holland Land Company owned much of it.