In 1891, the Lehigh Valley Railroad (LVRR) completed its mainline from Manchester to Buffalo, which travelled right through the heart of Mendon. The "Peanut Line," as it would later be referred to after it was acquired by the New York Central Railroad was opened, and had a station in the village of Honeoye Falls. The first train travelled through Mendon on January 1, 1853, when a railroad was built between Canandaigua and Batavia.
On June 7, 1825, Marquis de Lafayette attended a dinner reception in his honor at the Mendon Hotel hosted by Revolutionary War veterans during his tour of all 24 states of the union. In 1821, Mendon was annexed by Monroe County when the county was created.Īccording to a local historian, Mendon most likely got its name from Caleb Taft, an early settler, who came from Mendon, Massachusetts. On May 26, 1812, the Town of Mendon separated from the Bloomfield holding its first town meeting and elections on April 6, 1813. From 1789 to 1812, the area was within the Town of Bloomfield. įor a short period, the area that is now Mendon was ostensibly part of New York's Montgomery County until Januwhen Ontario County was formed. Included in the Phelps and Gorham Purchase was the land that would later become the Town of Mendon (known as township number 11, range 5 in the purchase's 1788 survey). The Sullivan Expedition pushed the tribes to the British-controlled Niagara Frontier, the western edge of Western New York.įollowing the Revolutionary War, in 1788, Oliver Phelps and Nathaniel Gorham bought of 6,000,000 acres (24,000 km 2) of land in what is now western New York State from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. The rest of the Seneca suffered a similar fate when, in 1779, Major General John Sullivan was ordered by George Washington to wage war against Loyalists and four nations of the Iroquois Confederacy who had sided with the British in the Revolutionary War. Shortly after the destruction, the surviving natives moved elsewhere. In 1687, the town was destroyed by Marquis de Denonville, the Governor of New France, during his expedition against the Seneca. Totiakton, the native settlement in present-day Mendon, was home to about 4,000 people. The earliest known inhabitants of the land where the Town of Mendon is located were the Seneca of the Iroquois Confederacy.