Welcome to the Town of Webb
The Town of Webb is the largest township by area in New York State.
It is comprised of the hamlets of McKeever, Okara Lakes, Thendara, Old Forge, Eagle Bay, Big Moose, Stillwater and Beaver River.
Excerpt from the “EARLY HISTORY OF THE TOWN OF WEBB”
In 1792, Alexander McComb purchased one of the first series of land patents granted in northern New York State following the American Revolution. The vast two million-acre wilderness was virtually unexplored except by Native Americans and white fur traders.
John Brown, a successful Providence, Rhode Island importer, acquired nearly 210,000 acres of property in McComb’s Purchase in 1798. Brown hired surveyors who were the first to map the region and divide the Tract into eight townships. To encourage settlers to buy land, Brown built a dam on the middle branch of the Moose River, a gristmill, and a sawmill.
Following John Brown’s death in 1803, his son-in-law, Charles Frederick Herreshoff, tried his hand at settling the Tract. He cleared over 2,000 acres for farming and commissioned a 17-mile bumpy wagon trail southwest of the settlement into Oneida County. The “Brown’s Tract Road” became the primary access route into the region for the next seventy years. Near the site of his substantial manor house, Herreshoff mined iron ore and built a forge near the dam. The climate was too harsh for farming and the ore of poor quality and too expensive to process. Deeply in debt, he took his own life in December of 1819, but the settlement was from then on known as the “forge” and eventually the hamlet of Old Forge. The series of eight lakes within the Middle Branch of the Moose River were named the “Fulton Chain of Lakes” in honor of Robert Fulton who surveyed the region in 1811. Read the entire article on the Town of Webb website.
