ITHACA history

"Geneva, Ithaca, and Sayre Railroad Timetable," The Newfield Tribune, July 20, 1889, on microfilm in the Newfield Historical Society.

•1891: The first ice cream sundae

By the 1870s, there were four major railway lines running through Ithaca. Ithaca College opened in downtown Ithaca buildings in 1892, at first a music academy, then expanding into a number of fields.

By 1900 Ithaca's population stood at 13,136 people.

Alpha Phi Alpha, the first Greek letter fraternity for African-American men, was formed in Ithaca in 1906.

The first car in Newfield is a 1910 Studebaker, owned by Frank Mcallister.

For a decade, beginning in 1914, movies were made in Ithaca.

•In 1921 Ithaca was the third city in the state to convert to dials on telephones.

In 1935, disaster struck the Ithaca area, which received more than eight inches of rain in less than twelve hours.

The increase thereafter was slight until 1940 when the total population of Tompkins County was 42,340.

In 1941, as the United States entered World War II, Ithaca's population stood at about 20,000 people.

By the time the war ended in 1945, 174 military men from Tompkins County had met their deaths.

In 1947 air passenger service started up, linking Ithaca to New York City.

•1952: The first female African-American flight attendant Carl Ruth Taylor on Mohawk Airlines.

In August of 1953, a series of strong earthquakes brought great damages to the Ionian Islands, destroying the majority of the buildings.

In 1956 42 suburban school districts merged with the Ithaca City School District.

During 1855, other settlers began to appear in the area and in the fall of that year, Jeffery cleared the land that was to become the main business district of Ithaca. Ithaca became a City in 1961.

In 1966, the preservationist society, Historic Ithaca, was formed and two years later a new county public library was constructed.

The year 1974 saw the opening of the Ithaca Commons pedestrian mall.

Canandaigua Lake would be similar to Keuka Lake if its water level were high enough to fill the branching West River trough, according to Bradford Van Diver in Roadside Geology of New York (1985).

In 1988, Cornell opened its new Center for Theatre Arts and the Ithaca/Tompkins County Convention & Visitors Bureau became operational.

By the 2000 federal census, the population of Tompkins County was 96,501.

USA Today ranked Ithaca number one in its list of "Emerging Cities" in March 2004.

These pages were redesigned to fit the historical society web pages by Linda Poppleton (2009).