Aurora’s history is
mostly unwritten
The public archives hold only 3 old photos of Aurora. The rest are in attics, shoeboxes and the historical society. Help start the collection.
The story
from WikipediaRead it all ↗Indigenous peoples occupied the lakeshore and riverways in present-day New York for thousands of years. Prior to European-American settlement, a major Cayuga village, Chonodote, stood near the present-day site of Aurora village. It had permanent dwellings and the people cultivated fields for their staple crops of varieties of corn, beans and squash. Chonodote was destroyed by the Sullivan Expedition in 1779 during the Revolutionary War, when the Cayuga were allies of the British army, in retaliation for raids by Joseph Brant and his Mohawk and Loyalist forces mostly in the eastern Mohawk Valley. Most of the Cayuga went with other Haudenosaunee nations to Canada, where their descendants are enrolled in the Six Nations Reserve. Some members of the Cayuga tribe returned to the area after the war, but the tribe had been forced to cede its land to New York. They were left landless and shared…
Text from Wikipedia, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0.
Timeline
built from the dates on the items belowStart Aurora’s collection
The first neighbors to add old photos shape how Aurora’s history is told.
1 of 10 decades since 1900 have photos 🔁Retake an old viewCayuga County, Left Page (Village…, 1904: stand where they stood+15 📦Share a family photoSign in to add one+10Famous people from Aurora
See all 7 →
Aurora, decade by decade
1990s
Nothing in Aurora is on the National Register yet
That’s true of most small towns. It doesn’t mean Aurora has no history, only that no one has written up a nomination. The closest listed place is Aurora Village-Wells College Historic District in Ledyard, 0.1 miles away.
Aurora and the nearest listed places
How a place gets listed
Then & now
No then-and-now pairs yet. Take a photo from the same spot as Aurora, N.Y. from the "North Poplars" - drawn by H.W.P. ; lith. of Richd. H. Pease, Albany, N.Y (1848) and it appears here side by side.
🔁 Retake this view · +15Stories next door
nearby towns’ historyFrom Wikimedia Commons (5) and the Library of Congress (1). Images are copied here with their credits and licenses, shown on each photo’s page. Refreshed monthly.