There's something special about every hometown across Upstate New York, but the town of Lysander is very special to me. 

The sign over the old cemetery says Jacksonville, but this little hamlet was born with another name, Palmertown. The story begins with a Revolutionary War veteran in the 1790’s.

"The soldiers had not been paid, so the New York state government came up with the idea of paying with land," Lysander Town Historian, Bonnie Palmer Kisselstein said. 

After the town of Lysander was created, Jonathan Palmer, of Connecticut, quickly claimed his 500-acre lot. To get there, he followed the Mohawk River on a canoe, through Oneida Lake, to the Oneida and Seneca Rivers, arriving to pure wilderness.

One of the first settlers, Mrs. Palmer didn’t see another white woman for seven years.

"Imagine paddling all the way up here on the lakes and when they got here, there was nothing for them," Fulton Historian, Lawton Peter Palmer said. "They had to build fast."

"He felled trees and put up a log cabin and I guess they did that in several days and it was seven years before they had a floor in it," Kisselstein added.

When Palmer died, it appears his brother took over the land– my fifth times great-grandfather Nathaniel Palmer. Over the next century, more families arrived to cultivate the land.

"They grew tobacco later on and that was the outer leaves for cigar wrappers and that was very labor intensive, but it was very much of a cash crop," Kisselstein said.

An early church for settlers, built in 1833 is still here as a local grange. But the hamlet’s nickname, Palmertown, perished with the arrival of a post office, right around the time of the Jackson administration. And so it became Jacksonville. After a brief stint as Polkville, the name of Jacksonville remains.

Most of the information about Palmertown, and later Jacksonville, was passed down and documented by local teacher, historian, and journalist Pearl Palmer.