My old neighborhood is mostly gone now, destroyed by two “hundred-year floods” that occurred three years apart in the early 2000s. I grew up in a bend of the Susquehanna River, but when enough rain falls, the river straightens out.
The first name of our community was Chugnutt, an Iroquioan town that farmed on the south bank of the river, on both sides of the Choconut Creek. Town Destroyer George Washington and his minions, Generals Sullivan and Clinton, rampaged through the lands of the Haudenosaunee (the Six Nations of the Iroquois). The survivors fled to Canada.
Despite colonial descriptions of the Haudenosaunee as brutal ethnocentric imperialists, by 1776, they were welcoming displaced peoples into their national space. White indenture women had sought refuge among them, enjoying the gender-based freedom. Black men and women had married amongst the locals. The Nanticoke Indians, fleeing from Delaware and Maryland, lived on the north bank of the Susquehanna, where a creek and town still bear their name.
This region is now known as the Southern Tier of New York. Anglos renamed my town “Vestal,” and the larger town upstream, Otsiningo, was renamed “Binghamton.” Binghamton University is mostly located in Vestal, which makes Vestal more invisible than it should be, in my estimation. Outside the northeast United States, most people have never heard of Binghamton, New York, and even fewer have heard of Vestal.
Most of Vestal is not located in the Susquehanna River valley, but in the wooded mountains around it. There are still dozens of working farms in the region.
Downstream from Chugnutt, the Susquehanna crosses the imaginary line into Tioga County, named for a high point in between the river’s joining with the Chemung River at Annon Tioga, now just south of the state line in Athens, Pennsylvania.
An RV manufacturer uses Tioga as a brand name. The company is not based in our region, and I can’t determine how they picked the name Tioga for their product. There is also a town in Texas named Tioga. It’s the hometown of the singing cowboy Gene Autry, but I could not figure out how the Texas town got its name, either.
There’s even an unincorporated suburban community that grew up a sloping mountainside overlooking the Susquehanna, named Tioga Terrace. Though “the Terrace” (as locals call it) does not appear as a separate place on US census maps, even though it is home to at least 5,000 people. More invisibility.
Tioga Terrace uses the post office of Apalachin, NY, a much smaller semi-rural hamlet that has the dubious distinction of being the location of the largest reported Underworld meeting in 1957. Locals can detect outsiders when they mispronounce Apalachin as “apple-AY-Chin”, when us locals pronounce it as “apple-AY-Kin.”
We locals are not mispronouncing Apalachin. Not at all. The Apalachin Creek flows out of Pennsylvania, and the township in which it arises, just south of Apalachin, NY is named “Apolacon.” Apolacon is, of course, pronounced “apple-AY-Kin”, just like the Iroquois pronunciation.
Apalachin means “from where the messenger comes” in Oneida. We locals have been pronouncing it the Oneida way all these centuries. It’s the settlers who misspelled it.
All the Indians did not relocate after the euphemistically-named “Sullivan and Clinton campaign ethnic cleansing of the region. Many retreated to the mountains, keeping a low profile for the most part. But their language survives, in local pronunciation, as do many of their bloodlines in living families.
(Picture: Susquehanna River valley - Courtesy Wikipedia)
