Founding Families
Ebenezer West | Waite Carr West | Increase Jones | Hannah Bowen Jones | William Hill | Elizabeth Hill
Edward Talbot | Sarah "Sally" Martin Talbot | Absalom P Morse | Lydia Tallman Morse
Alfred P White | Huldah Symonds White | Robert Shaw | Jane Talbot Stiles Shaw
Ebenezer West | Waite Carr West | Increase Jones | Hannah Bowen Jones | William Hill | Elizabeth Hill
Edward Talbot | Sarah "Sally" Martin Talbot | Absalom P Morse | Lydia Tallman Morse
Alfred P White | Huldah Symonds White | Robert Shaw | Jane Talbot Stiles Shaw
“The Old Gang” – Dan Berggren
Adirondack musician Dan Berggren, a great-great-great grandson of the Shaw family, wrote this song about the friendships and shared memories that bind people together over a lifetime. Its themes of community, memory, and place echo the kind of relationships that shaped early Minerva.
When families like the Shaws first settled here, survival depended on neighbors who worked together, shared stories, and built lives on common ground—much like the “old gang” Berggren celebrates in this song.
Adirondack musician Dan Berggren, a great-great-great grandson of the Shaw family, wrote this song about the friendships and shared memories that bind people together over a lifetime. Its themes of community, memory, and place echo the kind of relationships that shaped early Minerva.
When families like the Shaws first settled here, survival depended on neighbors who worked together, shared stories, and built lives on common ground—much like the “old gang” Berggren celebrates in this song.
Minerva's Founders - The Early Settlers Who Built the Town
A century of Minerva’s earliest settlers, paired with an authentic 1828 road sketch created by A.P. Morse—one of the town’s founders and first surveyors.
Founder's Park
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The early settlement of Minerva was shaped by a small network of families who arrived between 1800 and 1820. These families built homes, mills, farms, schools, and churches while carving a community out of what had been wilderness only a few years earlier. The families covered in this section represent some of the earliest known settlers whose descendants helped shape the town that Minerva would become.
The story of Minerva begins long before the town was officially formed in 1817. The land itself, rich with lakes, ponds, streams, and the great Hudson River along its edge, shaped the lives of the earliest settlers who ventured here in the early 1800s. Among the first was Ebenezer West, whose arrival marks the beginning of Minerva’s settlement story. These early settlers came to a place that was still deep wilderness. They cleared forests, built homes, raised families, and slowly formed a community. Names found in Minerva’s earliest records include West, Jones, Hill, Talbot, Morse, White, Shaw, and many others who helped establish a lasting presence. Lumbering dominated the first decades of settlement. William Hill’s saw and grist mills, built on Minerva Creek in 1805, became an important center of early industry, processing timber for homes and contributing to the first log drives by the 1840s. As mills rose and fell and new families arrived, the settlement grew into a network of farms, workshops, and scattered homesteads connected by the Canton and Carthage Roads. By 1817, residents successfully petitioned to become a town, choosing the name Minerva after the Roman goddess of wisdom. The name reflected the resourcefulness and determination required to build a life in this remote place. These founders were more than names on old maps. They were farmers, millers, teachers, surveyors, and civic leaders who shaped Minerva’s earliest roads, schools, churches, and traditions. Their work laid the foundation for everything that followed, including the shift to agriculture after lumbering declined, the era of potash and tanneries, and the growth of the community that exists today. While many early records focus on the public roles of men, these families were sustained equally by the women who worked beside them. Wives, mothers, daughters, and widows kept households, raised children, managed farms and businesses, and helped build the social fabric of the community. These women—Minerva’s founding mothers—were as essential to the town’s beginnings as the men whose names appear most often in the records. |
Ebenezer West
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Increase Jones
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William Hill
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Edward Talbot
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Waite Carr West
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Hannah Bowen Jones
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Elizabeth Allen Hill
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Sarah Martin Talbot
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A.P. Morse
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Alfred White
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Robert Shaw
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Lydia
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Huldah Symonds
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Jane
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