Deception, Dammed Waters, and a County Seat
Nehemiah Ingersoll’s Deceitful Politicking
To win Albion the county seat, one man staged an elaborate deception — complete with fake waterworks.
Every town has its founding fathers, but in Albion, one man earned his place in history not through honesty, but through cunning and trickery. That man was Nehemiah Ingersoll.
Ingersoll purchased 100 acres along the Erie Canal and Oak Orchard Road and immediately set about turning the land into a village. He had it surveyed, divided into lots, laid out streets, and sold parcels to settlers. But his true ambition went beyond land sales. In the 1820s, power meant one thing: securing Albion as the county seat.
Competition was fierce. The nearby village of Gaines was also vying for the honor, and state commissioners were sent to inspect both locations. Albion had one glaring problem: Sandy Creek ran low during the summer, and without water power, the village appeared sleepy and unproductive compared to Gaines.
Ingersoll, however, had a plan. He built a dam upstream, storing water until the commissioners arrived. He entertained them lavishly, then whisked them by carriage to the mill on East State Street. At the perfect moment, he released the dam. Water gushed forth, powering the mill in a dramatic display of activity and enterprise. The commissioners were dazzled. Albion seemed alive with energy and industry, and the county seat was secured—while Gaines was left in the dust. It was one of the greatest political swindles in Orleans County history, achieved with nothing more than charm, a dinner, and a well-timed flood.
Ingersoll’s ambitions didn’t stop there. He donated the land where the courthouse now stands, built one of the first warehouses along the canal at the foot of Platt Street, and gave land to the Methodists for a church. Yet even a man of his cunning was not immune to failure. A mercantile venture in Detroit ended in disaster, and he returned to Albion older, wiser, and considerably poorer. Still, when he died, he left $10,000 to Christ Episcopal Church—a fortune at the time.
True to form, Ingersoll exerted control even from beyond the grave. His widow added a stipulation to the gift: if the church wished to keep the money, they had to gather at his grave every year and hold a service in his honor. For years, the congregation trooped to Mount Albion Cemetery, standing at his grave, bound not only by faith but by the will of a man who had mastered manipulation—even from six feet under.
Nehemiah Ingersoll is remembered as a founder, a benefactor, and perhaps Albion’s greatest political trickster—a man who dammed a creek to win a county seat, and then dammed up his church until it paid homage to him at his grave.
