Ithaca gave the world the sundae and an early dancing-skeleton film
In 1892 an Ithaca fountain owner topped vanilla ice cream with cherry syrup for a local minister, who suggested naming it after the day of the week. The spelling was later altered to avoid offence, and the sundae was born. Eight years on, a Cornell anatomist made a skeleton dance on film.
Ithaca sits at the southern tip of Cayuga Lake in New York's Finger Lakes, a college town of about 32,000 people at the 2020 census, home to Cornell University, founded in 1865, and Ithaca College. It takes its name from the Greek island of Odysseus. For thousands of years before that, the land belonged to Native peoples; when Europeans arrived it was controlled by the Cayuga, one of the original five nations of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, whose hunters kept a camp at the foot of Cascadilla Gorge.
After the Revolutionary War, a cash-poor government paid veterans in land, the Central New York Military Tract, and most local titles still trace back to those grants. The surveyor general Simeon De Witt divided the future downtown into lots around 1791 and sold them cheaply. Under the 1794 Treaty of Canandaigua the Cayuga gave up their claims to the surrounding county in exchange for a reservation at the lake's north end.
Ithaca's steep lakeside hill shaped its economy. Salt and, after the War of 1812 blocked Nova Scotian supplies, gypsum fertiliser moved through the town, and the first steamboat on Cayuga Lake launched in 1820. But the terrain kept major rail lines away; later routes financed largely by Ezra Cornell were only branches. Industry arrived anyway. The Ithaca Gun Company, founded in 1883 and powered by a waterfall, became famous for finely decorated shotguns, and the village became a city in 1888.
The town has a cultural streak too. The anatomy professor G. S. Moler photographed a skeleton frame by frame in 1900 for The Skeleton Dance, and in the silent era the Wharton brothers made Ithaca a film centre, often filming the surrounding natural scenery. The Unitarian church where the sundae's minister preached still marks the occasion each September with Sundae Sunday.
Source: Ithaca, New York
