There is no street sign to indicate it’s there, but believe it or not, Blodgett Street still exists, kind of. If you look at this 1902 Sanborn Insurance map, you can see it is parallel to Port Watson Street and a turn off from Pendleton Street. On the Google map, it is merely the entrance to a parking area.
Blodgett Street is named after Hiram Curtis Blodgett, a name we have encountered before when I wrote about the Floral Fountain Trout Park.
I’m positively captivated by that place, so if you missed that article last year, here it is: https://www.facebook.com/CortlandCountyHistoricalSociety/posts/3438608786206742
Unfortunately, there is not a lot of information about H.C. Blodgett in our files. He was the son of Loren (or Loring) Blodgett, the man who established “Blodget’s Mills.” Loren was the son of Nathan Blodgett. Nathan was from Brimfield, Massachusetts, and a soldier in the Revolution. He and his wife Abigail Bliss moved to this area in 1805. They had 9 children, but one of their children died at about the age of two. Life in this area was extremely difficult and they survived on a diet of bran and water for a time. The child was probably too weak to survive with such deprivation. It was written that the gaps in their log cabin allowed the snow to blow in and the children would wake up covered in snow. The family was certainly resilient.
Grandson Hiram Blodgett was the founder of the Floral Fountain Trout Park, but I could find little else about him. His obituary is preserved in the A.D. Blodgett scrapbooks. He was born in 1818 and died in 1899. He died at his home at 113 Port Watson Street after a lengthy illness. He was remembered as a “man of strong character and deep convictions” who was interested in all matters in the community. He was an “indulgent and affectionate husband and father” to his wife Mariva and their five children. He and his wife, along with other relatives, are buried at the Cortland Rural Cemetery.
Floral Fountain Trout Park was one of my favorite research topics and I do wish we had a little more information on Hiram Curtis Blodgett to share. If you have more information, we would love to hear it! ~Tabitha
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