This Western New York Town Is Turning 184 Years Old Today
It's not every day that you get to wish an entire town happy birthday, but today is a big one for this town in Western New York.
Not sure how big of a cake we should get but maybe enough to cover a couple thousand people. Cheektowaga is turning 184 today.
Bad Roads Led To The Birth Of Cheektowaga
Who would've thought that it was potholes that gave the earliest settlers the idea to become a new town? According to a post from a town historian named Maureen Gleason on the Town of Cheektowaga's Twitter page, that was how Cheektowaga got started. Originally it was part of Amherst, but the bad roads were the driving force behind splitting from them. The movement was led by a person named Alexander Hitchcock. He was the son of one of Amherst's earliest settlers.
Cheektowaga Originally Went With A Different Name
Cheektowaga isn't just a name that is hard for out-of-towners to pronounce. It's the second name that they chose. At first, they began calling this new town "Chictawauga." Ironically, that's still how some people from Western New York pronounce it.
Cheektowaga Becomes A Town
It was on March 22, 1839, that the Act passed in the New York State Senate and Assembly to erect the town of Chictawauga. According to The Town Of Cheektowaga page, the name comes from the Erie-Seneca Indian word, "Ji-ik-do-wah-gah", or “place of the crabapple tree.”