Rome

The city developed at an ancient portage site of Native Americans, including the historic Iroquois nations. This portage continued to be strategically important to Europeans, who also used the main 18th and 19th-century waterways, based on the Mohawk and Hudson rivers, that connected New York City and the Atlantic seaboard to the Great Lakes. The original European settlements developed around fortifications erected in the 1750s to defend the portage, in particular the British Fort Stanwix (1758) built in New York.

Following the American Revolution, the settlement began to grow with the construction of the Rome Canal in 1796, to connect Wood Creek (leading to Lake Ontario) and the headwaters of the Mohawk River. In the same year the state created the Town of Rome as a section of Oneida County.