What’s In A Name: The Butternut Valley

I've been exploring the area I grew up in. It's been very interesting.

(Butternut Creek in the Butternut Valley near Gilbertsville. Photo: Jan Costello)

The Haudenosaunee, called the “Iroquois” by the French, settled in what is today upstate NY and parts of New England and Canada centuries before the Europeans showed up. One of the five (and later six) tribes that made up the Iroquois Confederacy, the Mohawks called the eastern part of central NY home. One valley in particular had abundant natural resources; game, fresh water, flint for arrowheads and other tools, fruits, grains and nuts, especially the nut that was later called by the Dutch and English, the “butternut.” The Mohawks called the valley the “the place where the butternut grows.” The Dutch, the first Europeans in the area, set up trading posts in the Albany area. They learned of the valley through the use of a well-established trail, already centuries old when they came upon it in 1614. They called the trail the “Old Butternut Road.”

(This was what the fuss was about - the butternut. Photo: Practical Self Reliance.com)

Except for solitary trappers and scattered settlers, there was very little European settlement in this part of New York when the English, the French and their Native allies fought each other in what is now called the French and Indian Wars, from 1754-1763. After the American Revolution, the British ceded all the land making up the Iroquois Confederacy to the United States, a good half the state, without any treaties or permission. They just did it. The tribes were pushed out, and what was still called “the frontier,” was opened for settlement.

The many counties of upstate and central NY were once only two or three counties. The central and western part of the state, from the Susquehanna River to Lake Ontario still belonged to the Five Nations at the time. The British divided up the rest in the early 1770s. The three largest counties east of the Susquehanna were Albany, Washington and Tryon. Washington County encompassed the entire Adirondacks to the Canadian border. Albany was around the town of Albany and stretched north, south and east to Vermont and Massachusetts.

Tryon County was the largest, stretching from the eastern and southern border of Albany county westward along the Mohawk River, past Oneida Lake and on along to Oswego and Lake Ontario. The boundary hugged the lake shore and the Canadian border on up to the St. Lawrence Seaway and then almost straight back down, between Schenectady and Albany. After the Revolutionary War, the name was changed to Montgomery County, after Major General Richard Montgomery, who died in the battle for Quebec in 1775.

In 1784, the once-Six Nations land was annexed to Montgomery County. The Native Americans got kicked out of their land again, as settlement went west into the center of the state, the Finger Lakes and then on to Buffalo and down to Pennsylvania. Their many place names remain to this day, but they didn’t. The Haudenosaunee were pushed onto reservations, into Canada and further west. They never should have trusted the British, or anyone else, for that matter.

Montgomery County was now bigger than some states. That’s a lot of territory to try to keep track of, so between the years of 1789 and 1854, Montgomery was divided into smaller counties, some of which were subdivided again, and then again. Otsego County was one of the earlier counties carved out. It was created in 1791, with Cherry Valley and Otsego as its core settlements and Otsego Lake as its center point. Cooperstown, a part of the greater town of Otsego, was chosen to be the county seat.

(Somehow, growing up as a resident of Otsego County, I learned very little of this until researching this piece. We studied NY state history throughout one entire year of history class, in seventh grade, too. Which goes to show, it’s never too late to learn about where you live. Google is your friend.)

According to historians, The Town of Butternuts was one of the first townships in Otsego County, established in 1796. Because of its location, on the Unadilla River and near the Susquehanna River, settlers could at that time, navigate the waterways deep into the frontier. That was very helpful to the Morris family, who once owned a great deal of land in the county, with over 32,000 acres, and to Abijah Gilbert, who purchased 1,000 acres of land from Morris and was the founder of the village that became known as “Gilbert’s Ville.”

Gilbertsville is classified as a village, and is part of the larger Town of Butternuts, located in the Butternut Valley, a part of in Otsego County, at the northernmost tip of the Catskill Mountains in upstate NY. It is smack in the middle of “the place where the butternut grows,” and along the Old Butternut Road, which is now Route 51. The Butternut Creek runs past the villages in the area. You may be getting the “butternut” theme here.

(Map of Butternuts, 1856. Gilbertsville is right in the middle.)

When we first moved to our house in Gilbertsville, we lived on Cliff Street, aka Academy Hill, just up from the village. Local people told us that there was a stand of butternut trees across the road towards the end of our property. There were about four or five tall trees more or less in a row along the side of the road, lending one to believe that sometime ago, they were purposefully planted. These were our butternut trees.

The butternuts themselves were encased in a furry green pod that looked like a small lemon, with the actual nut growing inside. The pods were thick, so the nut inside was not nearly as large as one might think. In the late fall, as the leaves fell, the pods would turn hard and brown, then would break open, like the petals of a flower. The mature nut would fall to the ground, where squirrels, chipmunks and other wildlife had a field day eating them or gathering them for winter.

(Butternut tree, via Treehugger.com)

Butternuts (Juglans cinerea) are in the walnut family, and are also called white walnuts. The nuts aren’t as big as walnuts, and are long, more like a pecan in shape. Butternut Valley people told my parents that they were edible, which, as a child, I found very cool. I was a Queens kid. Stuff you can eat, like nuts and berries, growing right on the side of the road, who knew? I liked nuts, so was looking forward to this.

My Mom also was fond of nuts. As a child, she grew up in South Carolina surrounded by pecan trees. She remembered picking pecans and cracking them on the porch with her family. They used them in food and desserts, but mostly just ate them raw from the shell. She grew up poor and rural, so eating pecans was not just a snack, it was food.

We always used to buy bags of polished mixed nuts in the shell during the Christmas holidays, and always had a bowl of them, along with the nutcracker, in the living room as a snack. I liked all the nuts, especially the Brazil nuts, Mom always went for the pecans. Pecan shells are soft enough that you can crush the shell by taking two of them in your hand and squeezing. She said that was how they did it in South Carolina. The nut meat was easy to get out of the shell, and then yum, pecans.

When I was at Yale, I stumbled across a grocer on a back street in New Haven who sold shell pecans by the pound, out of a burlap sack. They were straight from the South, he said. The price was right, and I used to buy as much as I could carry to take back to my Mom when I went home for Thanksgiving and Christmas. She couldn’t believe it the first time I showed up with a large bag. These were not the polished nuts in a plastic bag, these were barely cleaned off shells, straight from the country. Of course, years later after moving to NYC, finding nuts was much easier, especially already shelled pecans. There were actually stores that sold nothing but nuts, kept in giant glass jars! She loved them, and even today, I still buy them as snacks. They always remind me of my mother.

Anyway, back to the butternuts.

(Photo: Treehuggers.com)

The Haudenosaunee people who lived in the valley hundreds of years ago were familiar with the butternut. They ate them and the meat was also crushed into an oil, which among other uses was used as a salve. The sap of the tree was also harvested in the spring for syrup.

I’m sure when the European colonists settled in the area, they were quite pleased to see butternuts. They were far more prolific than they are now, hence naming the area the Butternut Valley, Butternut Creek, etc. Several different kinds of plant diseases have taken a devastating toll over the centuries, not to mention the encroachment of people, roads and cultivated land.

We gathered them on our first fall living in Gilbertsville and tried them out. Unlike a hazelnut with a shell protecting one solid piece of nut meat, the butternut meat was arranged in a complex framework of shell, just like a black walnut. If they were harvested before the husk dried enough, they were really sticky and hairy. It was really difficult to get the meat out. It was also really easy to crush the shell and compress the meat in its framework, and then you could really forget it. We gave up trying to eat them and went back to store-bought nuts.

I have the feeling that they were harvested more for their other properties, not as a plentiful food source. Butternut husks can be boiled down for use as a fabric dye. The husks contain a natural yellow-orange dye. Depending on how long the fabric was soaked, the color ranged from yellow to a dark brown. The dye was never used commercially but was a staple in the range of homespun colors used in the 18th and 19th century. Butternut wood was also used for furniture and wood carving. It wasn’t as sturdy as black walnut, it’s much softer, but has a beautiful grain, brought out by polishing oil and is a favorite of woodworkers. I don’t think I’ve ever seen any furniture that was labeled “butternut,” but I would imagine it to be quite striking.

(Butternut wood bowl, via JL Woodturning, on Etsy)

After I left Gilbertsville, I never heard the name “butternuts” in any other place or context. In fact, in Googling the word, the only other somewhat common use was to describe the uniforms of Confederate soldiers in some regiments from the border states, especially towards the end of the Civil War. They were dyed in a color that to many resembled faded butternut brown, and the soldiers were called “butternuts.”

The history of the villages, hamlets and towns of the Butternut Valley shows that the area was a prosperous location in which to farm, to start a mercantile business, work as a skilled craftsman, and more. Churches, schools, taverns and community organizations were built in and around homes and businesses and that’s how towns were born. Gilbertsville and Morris, both named after the original settlers and landowners were among the most successful. They may still be small villages and towns in 2022, but they were the economic engines of their day.

More about Gilbertsville and the Butternut Valley soon.