Fayetteville village, with a population of 4,248 (1990 census), is an outlying suburb of Syracuse in Central New York State. The Gage family moved here from the village of Manlius in 1854, when the Ledyard Dyke provided waterpower for Fayetteville industries and a connection with the nearby Erie Canal, opening new trade possibilities for Henry Hill Gage's dry goods business.

Located in an historic district, the stately Gage home is on the National Register of Historic Places. In collaboration with the Fayetteville Free Library and town historian Barbara Rivette, a walking tour guide of Matilda Joslyn Gage’s Fayetteville is being developed with publication planned before the end of 2003.

Lower village of Fayetteville. Site of Henry Hill Gage's general store is at lower left.

A walking tour begins in the lower village, where a feeder of the Erie Canal brought packet boats of goods to Henry Gage’s general store. The boats loaded up with products manufactured in the village for the return trip. Along the walking tour, visitors can see the history of the village come alive with visible reminders of the trade and water power and transportation that drew the Gage family here in the mid-1850s economic boom period.

Strolling up Genesee Street to the Gage house through the Limestone Hill-Genesee Street Historic District, visitors are able to experience Fayetteville much as it was when the Gages lived here. Across the street from the Gage house is the former home of L. P. Noble, publisher of the National Era, which first serialized Uncle Tom's Cabin. A block away is President Grover Cleveland's boyhood home.

Inside the Gage house, visitors learn about the statewide campaign that Matilda Joslyn Gage waged to educate women about the voting process after they won school suffrage. It was she who led 102 women to the voting place in 1880 (hence her designation as Fayetteville’s first woman voter) where they elected her neighbor, Frances Carr, as the first female member of the Fayetteville School Board. (For more specific information about suffragist leader Matilda Joslyn Gage, visit our Gift Shop or arrange to take a tour inside her home.)

View down Genesee Street from the Gage House. Taken by L. Frank Baum [1888].

Departing the Gage house along the route through residential streets to the cemetery where Gage is buried, walkers will pass Frances Carr’s home. The old Stickley furniture factory is on the same route, (now the Fayetteville Free Library) as well as Leopold Stickley's home and the Ledyard Dyke and Limestone Creek, which brought manufacturing to the village. The homes occupied by the factory workers on the side streets contrast sharply with the larger homes of the business owners on Genesee Street.

At the Fayetteville village cemetery, Gage’s gravestone stands out distinctively, with the words of her motto carved in bold relief: “There is a word sweeter than mother, home or heaven. That word is Liberty.”

Fayetteville provides a unique opportunity - through a focus on the Gage home - to learn about the Underground Railroad, the woman’s rights movement, L. Frank Baum and his world of Oz, the 19th century struggle for religious freedom and the relationship between the six nations of the Iroquois confederacy and their nearby neighbors. A walk through the village enlarges the history, telling a story that ranges from Grover Cleveland to the Stickley furniture factory and the Erie Canal.