Before white explorers or settlers, central New York was occupied by the nations of the Iroquois Confederation.
Between 1763, the date of the Treaty of Paris ending the French and Indian Wars, and the leaving of the British in 1783, the lands in central New York were largely unsettled and unexplored except for small strategic posts such as Fort Stanwix (Rome) and Fort Schuyler (Utica).
In 1793, Gerritt Boon, an agent of the Holland Land Company, pitched his tent in a quiet valley at the junction of two streams. Some say he was attracted by the abundance of maple tree syrup, which he presumed flowed year-round. He called the new settlement "Olden Barneveldt" in honor of a seventeenth century Patriot of the Netherlands.
