Rochester, New York, and the 'Ville' Its People Disliked

For a few years Rochester, New York, was legally Rochesterville, a name its people never liked. Both versions honor Colonel Nathaniel Rochester, who with two partners bought the land at the falls of the Genesee River where the city grew.

A hundred acres at the falls

William F. Peck’s 1884 history of the city tells how it started. “In 1802 Nathaniel Rochester, William Fitzhugh and Charles Carroll bought the One-hundred-acre lot of Sir William Pulteney’s agent, for seventeen and one half dollars per acre.” Then they sat on it. “Having greater interests elsewhere,” Peck writes, “the proprietors took no steps to improve or settle the tract until 1810.” Back then, he adds, the hundred-acre tract went by “Fall Town.”

The federal place-names database and Henry Gannett’s 1905 list say the same thing in a few words: the city was “named for the senior proprietor, Col. Nathaniel Rochester.”

The colonel from Hagerstown

Rochester had a long career before he ever lived on the Genesee. Peck’s biography says he was made a lieutenant colonel of militia during the Revolution, and later a colonel. In 1783 he and Colonel Thomas Hart started making “flour, rope and nails, at Hagerstown, Md.” In Hagerstown he served in the Maryland Assembly, as postmaster and as a county judge, and in 1808 he became the first president of the Hagerstown bank.

He didn’t move north until 1810, and even then he went to Dansville first, then to a farm in Bloomfield. By the time he finally moved to the falls in April 1818, Peck says, the town “in the interim” had been “called after him.” So the place had his name before it had him.

That extra “ville”

When the village was incorporated in 1817, the legislature wrote it down as Rochesterville. Peck guessed why: the suffix “was probably considered a mark of dignity.” It didn’t go over well. When the name changed back, he says, “the name of Rochesterville, which had always been distasteful to the people,” gave way “to the original appellation of Rochester.”

“This is what it ought to have been called all the time,” Peck adds. J. H. French’s 1860 gazetteer of the state dates the change to April 12, 1822. Peck tells it among the events of 1819, so you’ll find both years depending on which book you pick up. Peck also threw in an opinion of his own: he thought the place looked a bit like Rochester in England, a resemblance “certainly not wholly fanciful.”

Not the only Rochester in New York

Gannett’s list has a second one in the same state, and it has nothing to do with the colonel. The town of Rochester in Ulster County, he says, was “named for the Earl of Rochester.” So if you run into a Rochester, New York, in an old record, check the county before you credit the man from Hagerstown.

Sources & further reading

• William F. Peck, Semi-Centennial History of the City of Rochester (1884). The 1802 purchase by Rochester, Fitzhugh and Carroll at “seventeen and one half dollars per acre,” the wait “until 1810” and “Fall Town” (p. 88); Rochesterville in 1817 and the suffix “probably considered a mark of dignity” (p. 108); the name “which had always been distasteful to the people” and “what it ought to have been called all the time” (p. 113); the colonel’s militia rank, Hagerstown, the bank, the move to Dansville and Bloomfield, and the town “called after him” before April 1818 (pp. 670-671).
• J. H. French, Gazetteer of the State of New York (1860), p. 402. Incorporated as a village by the name of Rochesterville in 1817; name changed April 12, 1822.
• Henry Gannett, The Origin of Certain Place Names in the United States (USGS, 1905), p. 265. Rochester, Monroe County, “named for the senior proprietor, Col. Nathaniel Rochester”; Rochester, Ulster County, “named for the Earl of Rochester.”
• GNIS feature 962684 (U.S. Geological Survey). “Named for the senior proprietor, Colonel Nathaniel Rochester.”