Finger Lakes history · regional story
The mail contract with two departure times
A contract copied into Skaneateles’s local history tied a mail-coach schedule to the season when Hudson River steamboats stopped running.
The Albany coach had two departure times. In the postal contract Edmund Norman Leslie copied into his history, the first mail left at 9 a.m. while steamboats were navigating the Hudson. When that navigation stopped, departure moved to 3 p.m. The allowed journey to Buffalo remained fifty hours. Leslie’s 1902 history.
Leslie connects the contract to Isaac Sherwood, whose stage-business headquarters he places in Skaneateles. The copied agreement begins January 1, 1833, for four years. It calls for four-horse post-coaches serving the intermediate offices along a group of New York routes. Leslie’s 1902 history.
The terms put a price on that work: $15,134.50 a quarter, or $60,538 a year for the principal route group listed. Those are contract terms in a later printed copy, not receipts proving that every payment was made or every journey arrived on time. Leslie’s 1902 history.
Sherwood did not own every coach on those routes, Leslie cautions. The business involved shared interests, agents and a partner, Amasa Parker, working at Utica. That distinction matters: the network described here was larger than one proprietor’s stable. The drivers, relays and day-to-day difficulties still need their own records. Leslie’s 1902 history.
Sources & research notes
Review status: Developing history. Human editorial review is pending.
Written and source-checked with AI assistance under an owner-authorized editorial process. This is not a personal review by Riley or an independent historian. Sources and unresolved questions are listed below; corrections are welcome.
- What the records establish
- Leslie’s printed account preserves specific route terms, seasonal departure times and distinctions between ownership and partnership. It documents what this later copy says, not independent confirmation of every operation.
- What remains uncertain
- The original signed contract, amendments, postal payment accounts, driver identities and performance records have not been collated. No literal departure scene, income received or guaranteed travel time is inferred.
- What we are researching next
- Locate the original agreement and its route schedules, then compare payment and operational records. Identify the people doing the work without assuming all coaches or employees belonged to Sherwood.
Sources
- Skaneateles: History of Its Earliest Settlement and Reminiscences of Later Times — Edmund Norman Leslie; 1902. Locator: Title / PDF 13; preface xxii / PDF 30; Printed 29 / PDF 63; Printed 30 / PDF 64; Printed 253 / PDF 289; Preface xix–xxii / PDF 27–30. Exact sub-passages registered separately; dates, attribution, methods and units checked against the retained source. Accessed October 22, 2026.