Otsiningo

Otsiningo was a group of small Indigenous settlements on the Chenango River, near its junction with the Susquehanna. It was a stopping place for travelers on their way to the heartland of the Haudenosaunee. In the eighteenth century its inhabitants included Onondaga and Oneida people, alongside Nanticoke and Conoy refugees from Maryland and Shawnee from the Susquehanna valley.

Diplomats and missionaries recorded stopping at Otsiningo as early as 1726. Many of its residents had fled warfare and encroaching settlers in the southern colonies. In August 1779, during the American Revolution, a Continental Army reconnaissance party of a hundred men sent by General James Clinton came upon the settlements. The inhabitants had already left, burning the roughly twenty dwellings before the soldiers arrived.