Historian's Corner



Charlene Cole
Sandy Creek/Lacona Historian
Historian's Corner
January 31, 2014

Photo: Art Wart, past Sandy Creek Historian, standing on a snow bank dated 1936. A pictorial “snow” display is on the wall outside of the town clerk’s office.

2013 in review
Volunteers are the life-blood of any organization and the History Center is no exception. Over the years we have had as many as 12 and as few as 5 volunteers and during my tenure as historian we have clocked 97,440 volunteer hours.

* 2013 was the 210th year since the first settlers
* February was Black History Month and we documented several black families living in Sandy Creek as early as 1840, serving in the Civil War and later calling Sandy Creek home.
* North Road /Barnard Cemetery located on County Route 62 work began on repairing pioneer gravestones. The earliest recorded burial here was made in 1809, so it predates the present Woodlawn Cemetery by several years, but the last burial was made well before 1900, and abandonment was final by the mid 1930’s.
* Cemetery spring/fall flowers and bulbs have been planted at all cemeteries. All plants/bulbs are drought tolerant, full sun or shade, deer and rodent resistant that can survive winters up to 30 degrees below zero and watered by Mother Nature.
* Coterie Club celebrated 100 years and the Outlook Club celebrated 75 years service to the community.
* A new web site was created to provide more information on the History Center and we have been receiving quite a few queries from this new web page. A statistics page keeps us updated on site usage.
* The purchase of the 1880-1900-1925 Sandy Creek Census has allowed us to help researchers and is invaluable to us in History Center research.
* 4th Grade Local History booklets
* 156th Oswego County Fair
* VFW reception November 10th was a tribute to our veterans and the culmination of a seven military book series which began in 2003.