History of Chautauqua County, New York, From Its First Settlement to the Present Time; with Numerous Biographical and Family Sketches

672, 64 pp. Chautauqua County is the westernmost county in the U.S. state of New York. As of the 2020 census, the population was 127,657. Its county seat is Mayville, and its largest city is Jamestown. Its name is believed to be the lone surviving remnant of the Erie language, a tongue lost in the 17th century Beaver Wars; its meaning is unknown and a subject of speculation. The county was created in 1808 and organized in 1811. Chautauqua County comprises the Jamestown–Dunkirk–Fredonia, NY Micropolitan Statistical Area. It is located south of Lake Erie and includes a small portion of the Cattaraugus Reservation of the Seneca. Prior to European colonization, most of what is now Chautauqua County was inhabited by the indigenous Erie people prior to the Beaver Wars in the 1650s. French forces traversed the territory beginning in 1615. The Seneca Nation conquered the territory during the Beaver Wars and held it through the next century until siding with the British crown, their allies for most of the 18th century, against the American revolutionaries in the American Revolutionary War. Chautauqua County was organized by the state legislature during the development of western New York after the American Revolutionary War and the ratification of The Treaty of Canandaigua, between the United States and the Council of the Six Nations. It was officially separated from Genesee County on March 11, 1808. This partition was performed under the same terms that produced Cattaraugus and Niagara counties. The partition was done for political purposes, but the counties were not properly organized for self-government, so they were all administered as part of Niagara County. On February 9, 1811, Chautauqua was completely organized, and its separate government was launched. This established Chautauqua as a county of 1,100 square miles (2,800 square kilometres) of land. Chautauqua has not been altered since. The first New York Chautauqua Assembly, was organized in 1874 by Methodist minister John Heyl Vincent and businessman Lewis Miller in the county at a campsite on the shores of Chautauqua Lake.