Description: This gable-and-wing house has delicate brackets under the eaves. While it has changed fenestration and an added porch, it otherwise looks much as it did when Ledyard Cuyler lived here after the Civil War. 

Discussion: Born in Macedon, New York, about 1835, Ledyard C. Cuyler grew up on a farm just west of this house. His parents Samuel C. Cuyler and Elizabeth (“Julia”) Speed Cuyler kept a major way station on the Underground Railroad. According the 1877 History of Wayne County, Samuel C. Cuyler often sent Ledyard to Sodus Point, carrying people escaping from slavery to Canada. Local tradition suggest that he also sailed small boats with people escaping from slavery, aided by an African American locally known as “Black Bob.” In 1907, the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle reported that Ledyard S. Cuyler, son of Samuel C. and Elizabeth Julia Cuyler, “retains the strongest impression, of his youth the memory of the black men who hid in his father’s kitchen waiting for the boat. He has piloted many a fleeing negro to the harbor where a ship was waiting to take aboard cargo.”  

Ledyard Cuyler attended the Macedon Academy, in Macedon, New York. Ledyard was also a cousin of Dr. Theodore C. Cuyler, a well known abolitionist preacher in Brooklyn, New York.  

            Beginning in the 1870s, Cuyler spent eighteen years in New York City as paymaster in the Customs House. He returned to Wayne County about 1890, where he became Wayne County Clerk and lived in Pultneyville.

Primary Source

 Wolcott NY Lake Shore News, after 1909

Fultonhistory.com

 Former County Clerk Drowned In a Bathtub.

 Ledyard S. Cuyler, former county clerk and for fifteen, years a Republican leader in this county, committed suicide at his home, No. 295 Meigs Street, Rochester, last Saturday afternoon, by drowning himself in a bathtub. For ten years Mr. Cuyler had been afflicted with, paralysis agitans,which increased in severity with age. He had been subject to long periods of despondency, and an attendant had been employed to care for him. It was during the temporary absence of the attendant that he ended his life.

In the seventy years of his life Mr. Cuyler had held places of honor, and was known for his geniality and thoughtfulness of others. He was a Cousin of Dr. Theodore C, Cuyler, the famous Brooklyn preacher who died in 1909, and the son of Samuel C. Cuyler, former state senator from Wayne county, who was an active promoter of the underground railway in Antislavery times. In his youth Ledyard Cuyler was frequently sent by his father to Sodus Point with slaves bound for Canada. Mr. Cuyler was born in Macedon, in 1842, the son of Samuel C. Cuyler and Elizabeth Speed Cuyler. The family moved in a few years after Mr, Cuyler's birth to Pultneyville, where his father purchased a farm. This was the home of the elder Cuyler until his death and of Ledyard for many years. In the early seventies Mr, Cuyler went to New York, where he became Paymaster in the custom house. He held this office for eighteen years, and then returned about 1890 to Pultneyville, where he lived for four years. In 1892 Mr, Cuyler was elected on the republican ticket, to the county clerkship. During his incumbency in that office be became one of the republican leaders of the county and wielded a large influence in politics,

He held the office of county clerk for five successive terms of three years each, until the increasing severity of the disease that Indirectly caused his death forced him to give up many of his activities. Mr. Cuyler then removed to Rochester with his wife, who was Miss Mary Bowen, daughter of Seth Bowen, of Clyde, and whom he married in 1882. The funeral was held Tuesday from the home, and the body was taken, at Mr, Cuyler's own request, to Buffalo for cremation. Mrs. Cuyler is the only surviving near relative.