Oswegatchie

Oswegatchie. It’s a great word. It renders my spell-checker helpless. The program senses there’s something wrong and throws up a warning red squiggle, but can provide no better suggestions. 

Oswegatchie means “black water,” or “black river,” or “at the very outlet.” I’m choosing to believe because the last one, because that is the definition used by the US Navy. It might also mean “coming or going around a hill,” although that sounds suspiciously like someone made it up, as in, “Go away around that hill again, and stop asking me what this word means.” 

There’s an Oswegatchie River and a town of Oswegatchie in upstate New York (there used to be two of them.) There are the Oswegatchie people, an offshoot of the Onondaga, one of the Seven Nations of Canada. There’s an Oswegatchie Coffee Company. Spend long enough looking these things up, and the word starts to sing itself in your head, to the tune of “Oklahoma.” 

In Waterford, the name can be found on a road, a school, and a fire company. 

Most famously it evokes the Oswegatchie Colony, a summer resort area for the rich and playful that started to become popular in the mid-to-late 1800’s. The Oswegatchie House, the best known of the Colony’s hotels, took its name from the nearby quarry; it began as a boarding house for quarry workers. There is no mention, in the descriptions of boating and tennis and visits by President Woodrow Wilson and dancing at the casino which opened in 1915, of how the quarry itself came by the name. The early Indian inhabitants of the area were Nehanticks. 

Today, the Oswegatchie Historic District is the kind of neighborhood you visit with a carefully marked map and an agenda, both of which you soon abandon in favor of getting lost among curved lanes, grass islands, little dead-end streets, and glimpsed water views. The latter are dangerously pretty, the kind of visual temptation that brings you back to the Driver’s Ed mantra about the car going in the direction you are looking. Sometimes you turn and a perfect house or three appears in front of you, dream homes for a commitment-phobic apartment-dweller who sees houses simply as architecture and potential, and coos over them as if they were kittens. With a few obvious exceptions, it can be hard to tell which of the closely packed homes are original “cottages” - built in a hodge-podge of styles, they are often called “whimsical” or “fantastical” - and which are not. The area was built up further after World War II, when much of the farmland that had not already been developed was divided to create housing for year-round residents. 

In this modern suburban landscape, though, there remains some feeling of the past. I’m discovering that this is something Waterford does well. I don’t know what a fog plain is or was, but when I see the sign for Fog Plain Road I envision something ancient and mysterious, shrouded in mist. Similarly, looking out over the waterfront in the Oswegatchie Historic District, you can imagine the days of posh summer crowds, and of early settlers and Nehantick Indians before them. But you also get a fleeting sense of a time before that. And the question of whatever precise meaning Oswegatchie may have had fades into that unknowable world of water and sand.