The 1772 Becker Stone House, one of five Wright buildings on the National Register of Historic Places. Photo by R.L. Bergh for the Schoharie County Historical Review, Fall-Winter 1966.
By Mark Stolzenburg
A Brief History of the Town of Wright
The area of the Fox Creek, or Foxenkill, Valley now known as the Town of Wright saw its first white settlers in the 1740s or 1750s with the Becker, Zimmer, and Schaeffer families, who had previously lived in the Schoharie palatine settlements. Schoharie settlers knew the area, since the trail to Albany passed through it. Revolutionary War history was made when two prominent area Patriots, Major Jost Becker and founding member of the Schoharie Committee of Safety, Jacob Zimmer, were the targets of a raid by the Tory, Adam Crysler, with about twenty-five Tories and Indians, the morning of July 26, 1781. The raiding party killed two at the Zimmer place and one at Becker’s. Two prisoners were taken, and buildings were burned. Thanks to a spirited defense at Becker’s house by only three men, and three or four women and several children (who deserve much credit), the Becker Stone House became known as “the house the Indians couldn’t burn.” It stands to this day.
After the Revolution, several Hessians who had fought for the British, then deserted or were captured, settled on land that they purchased in the southern part of what became the Town of Wright. That part of today’s Cotton Hill Road neighborhood became known as the “Dutch Settlement.”
The largest hamlet in the Town, Gallupville, was named after Ezra Gallup, Jr. who built a mill there on Fox Creek about 1819. It was the start of an economic boom that carried Gallupville and the Town of Wright through the rest of the nineteenth century. The Foxenkill and its tributaries provided the waterpower to directly or indirectly fuel these businesses and more in Gallupville and other hamlets:
Feed and flour mills
Harness manufacture
Clover mills
Blacksmiths
Fulling mills
Sawmills
Tanneries
Axe manufacture
Wagon and carriage manufacture
Clothing works
Button sorting
All types of retail shops
Gallupville was on the stage route to Albany, providing the clientele for two or more hotels, taverns and food establishments. One of those hotels serves today as a community center known as the Gallupville House. Economic growth led the population of Wright to peak in the 1840s and 1850s and to the designation of Wright as a separate township in 1846, being named after NY Governor Silas Wright. Hiram Walden, businessman and politician from Waldenville in the Town, represented Schoharie and Otsego counties in the US Congress, 1849-1851.
The advent of steam and petroleum-powered machines, and with it the automobile, heralded the end of most milling and manufacturing in Wright. Easier transportation and the prohibition of alcohol severely curtailed hotel and tavern business by the 1920s.
Farms in the Town in the 1800s typically produced a diversity of products, with the exception of more concentrated growing of hops in the later part of that period. By the 1940s, rural electrification allowed many of the farms to switch to dairying as the principal enterprise. Economies of scale and volatile pricing forced most dairies to close by the end of the twentieth century. Wright is still considered by most people to be a rural community.
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