Views and Vistas of Onativia LaFayette, New York

From its opening in 1854 until the triumph of the automobile sixty years later the railroad was LaFayette’s life-line. Nearly everything coming into or going out of the hamlet came by rail. Heavily laden wagons traversed the steep mile-long hill. Furniture or a new piano for the family parlor, vats of kerosene and non perishable goods for LaFayette’s general stores and embalmed bodies ready for burial waited in the freight house. By the 1880’s farm produce was being shipped in larger and larger quantities, requiring an extra siding for added freight cars. By the 1920’s, in addition to its general store and coal shed, Onativia could boast of three feed stores. Seventeen years before the railroad discontinued passenger service, Onativia station closed. Now everything else is gone. This book contains 80 photos that were taken in 1909 and 1910 at the height of the post card era. Collected forty and fifty years ago by the compiler, these views preserve all that we have of Onativia.