Freeville, NY

Freeville is a Tompkins County village in the Town of Dryden, east of Ithaca, where Fall Creek and Virgil Creek meet the old mill landscape. Daniel White, a Revolutionary War soldier, began clearing land here in 1798 and completed a gristmill by 1802. His son John built a larger mill in 1833, and the operation eventually employed as many as forty people. Teco pancake flour made at the mill traveled by rail across the country until orders declined after World War I. In the early 1870s, the Southern Central Railroad and the Utica, Ithaca and Elmira Railroad turned the mill settlement into a regional rail junction.

Freeville's name carries its own local story. The settlement was first called White's Mill or White's Corner, but an older tradition says Elder White argued that the place should not be named for the first landholder. The name Freeville was written into a circuit rider's record after an 1810 meeting. Union School opened in 1889, became a full high school in 1906, and consolidated with Dryden in 1936. New York Routes 38 and 366 still meet in the village, while the Dryden Central School District serves students today. The 2020 census counted 498 residents. Freeville remains the only incorporated US municipality with its name, a creek village built from mills, schools, and rail lines.