This old house
Gershom Morse, mentioned in the last post as the grandfather of Gershom Morse Barber, was born in the Massachusetts Bay Colony and somehow managed to find his way to what is now Moravia, New York. Morse built this house in about 1830. It is listed on the National Register of Historic Places and is now a bed and breakfast. (This gives me entirely too many relatives from New York, I suppose, but you can't choose your heritage.) The land around there originally belonged to the Algonquin tribe until the 1300s when the Iroquois nations forced the Algonquins, and by the time of the events I'll relate in here was dominated by the Seneca and Cayuga tribes. I'm contemplating a later post discussing these tribes, probably in two weeks. Stay tuned. As an inducement to gain recruits for the Revolutionary War, the state of New York set aside almost two million acres to be awarded to veterans. Many took the offer and settled there, but quite a number decided to sell the land to specu