How Syracuse, New York Got Its Name After Five Others

Syracuse, New York, went through five names in fourteen years before a young lawyer borrowed one from an ancient city in Sicily. The lawyer was John Wilkinson, the village’s first postmaster, and he picked Syracuse because he thought the two places looked alike.

Five names in fourteen years

J. H. French’s 1860 gazetteer of the state packs the whole run into one footnote. The place was “Bogardus Corners” from 1806 to 1809, “Milan” until 1812, “South Salina” until 1814, “Cossitts Corners” until 1817 and “Corinth” until 1820. Since then, French says, “it has been known as Syracuse, the name given it by John Wilkinson, the first postmaster.”

Joshua Clark, who published a two-volume history of Onondaga County in 1849, fills in some of the people behind those names. Henry Bogardus put up a tavern there in 1806. Sterling Cossit ran the same tavern, by then the South Salina Hotel, from 1815 to 1825, and people called the spot after him. Clark puts South Salina before Milan, though, and treats Cossit’s Corners as a nickname that ran alongside Corinth. So you’ll see the order and the dates shuffled depending on whose list you read.

Corinth was already taken

The names didn’t just change on a whim. Clark says Milan had to go after “an ineffectual attempt to obtain a Post Office, there being already one of that name in the State.” Judge Joshua Forman, who had directed the 1819 survey of the village, then named the village Corinth.

That one ran into the same wall. When the post office finally opened in February 1820, the Onondaga Register announced it like this: “A new Post Office has been established at Syracuse, (formerly Corinth) in the town of Salina, and John Wilkinson, Esq., appointed Post Master. The name of this village was necessarily changed, there being a Post Office of the name of Corinth previously established in the State.”

A poem about Sicily

Who gets credit for the new name was argued over for years. The Memorial History of Syracuse, edited by Dwight H. Bruce in 1891, says “there has been at various times considerable dispute as to who had the honor of bestowing its final name,” then settles it in favor of Wilkinson, citing a local writer, M. C. Hand.

Here’s how Bruce tells it. Wilkinson got the idea “while reading a poem on ancient Syracuse, in which he noted the similarity between that city and the site of the modern village, with a ‘Salina’ near both.” A committee was set up to pick the name: Judge Forman, Rufus Stanton, Wilkinson and two others. Forman had wanted Corinth, and since that was out, he declined to suggest anything else. Wilkinson proposed Syracuse and explained why. The committee chose it “by a unanimous vote,” and Bruce says it “gave general satisfaction.”

Henry Gannett’s government list of name origins, published in 1905, backs up the short version: the city was “named from the ancient city of Sicily.”

Sicily keeps showing up

The name stuck, and so did the Sicilian theme. When the Marquis de Lafayette visited in June 1825, Clark says, he told the crowd that the names of Onondaga and Syracuse brought to his mind “the ancient Sicilian city, once the seat of republican institutions.” A few miles east of the city, some sulphur springs were named Messina Springs in 1835. Clark says the neighbors picked the name “on account of its contiguity to Syracuse,” to match “the places bearing the same name in Sicily.” If you’ve ever wondered how far a borrowed name can travel, that’s one answer: the village that couldn’t keep Corinth ended up with a Sicilian name of its own and a Sicilian neighbor a few miles down the road.

Syracuse wasn’t the only New York town that had to drop a name because someone else had it first. Elmira lost the name Newtown for the same reason.

Sources & further reading

• J. H. French, Gazetteer of the State of New York (1860), p. 488. The run of names, 1806 to 1820: “Bogardus Corners,” “Milan,” “South Salina,” “Cossitts Corners,” “Corinth,” and Syracuse, “the name given it by John Wilkinson, the first postmaster.”
• Joshua V. H. Clark, Onondaga; or Reminiscences of Earlier and Later Times, vol. 2 (1849). Henry Bogardus and the tavern, 1806; South Salina, then Milan (pp. 86-87); John Wilkinson, “then a young lawyer,” laying out the village in 1819; Milan dropped for lack of a post office; Judge Forman’s “Corinth”; Cossit’s Corners (pp. 88-89); the Onondaga Register notice of February 1820 (p. 99); Lafayette’s visit of June 9, 1825 (pp. 99-100); Messina Springs, named in 1835 (p. 239).
• Dwight H. Bruce, ed., Memorial History of Syracuse, N.Y. (1891). “Milan” could not be kept and Judge Forman chose “Corinth” (p. 102); the dispute over who named the village, the poem on ancient Syracuse, the “Salina” near both, and the committee’s unanimous vote (p. 106).
• Henry Gannett, The Origin of Certain Place Names in the United States (USGS, 1905), p. 295. Syracuse, “named from the ancient city of Sicily.”
• GNIS feature 966966 (U.S. Geological Survey). The federal record for Syracuse, with its location.