Yates Once Shipped Grain From Shadigee

Yates has a lake story that is easy to miss if you look just at Lyndonville. The town history says Yates was set off from Ridgeway in 1822 and is bounded by Lake Ontario on the north. At Shadigee, that shoreline once had real business weight.

The Town of Yates history describes Yates Pier as a 275-foot pier built about 1850, one mile north of Yates Center. Farmers formed the stock company behind it, and a warehouse stored lumber and grain for shipment. For several years, George Lane bought and shipped grain from there to Oswego. Later, Erastus Spaulding took over much of the stock and bought as much as 50,000 bushels of grain in a season from Yates farmers.

Then the map changed. With the coming of the railroad, lake trade decreased, the business ended, and the pier deteriorated into Lake Ontario. The old loading-ramp mound at the end of Route 63 became its leftover clue.

That is the local story: a farm town whose north edge once handled grain by water, then watched rail traffic pull the business inland. Shadigee gives Yates a lake-trade layer that still feels different from the village-and-farm map farther south.