Jimerson Town, New York

Jimerson Town (also spelled Jimersontown) is a native community on the Allegany Indian Reservation within the bounds of Cattaraugus County, New York. Along with Irving on the Cattaraugus Reservation, Jimerson Town is one of two capitals of the Seneca Nation of Indians.

The United States Census Bureau does not recognize the community and no population estimates are available. At the time of its founding in the 1960s, the community was developed with 145 residences, each on one-acre plots. It has been developed with several facilities since the 1980s.

History

Jimerson Town was founded in the 1960s adjacent to the City of Salamanca as a resettlement area for some of the more than 600 Seneca displaced as a result of the Kinzua Dam construction. It was one of two communities built for this purpose, the other being Highbanks, south of Steamburg. Jimerson Town (named after the Jimerson family, a prominent Seneca family in the area) is due west of Salamanca. Old Route 17 runs through the community. It historically has been accessible only through Salamanca; the highway leading west of Jimerson Town was closed to traffic in the 1970s. (It was reopened in 2014 after a portion of old Route 17 washed out, stranding several of the westernmost residents.) The Allegheny Reservoir terminates near the hamlet and runs adjacent to the community as the Allegheny River.

Jimerson Town's proximity to Salamanca and its better infrastructure has made it the more populous of the two resettlement areas. Since the mid-1980s, it has developed a volunteer fire department, day-care center, Montessori school, SNI buildings for tribal administration and athletics facilities (the current version of the athletic building, the Allegany Community Center, was built in the early 2010s to replace the original and now-demolished JoJo Redeye Building that served that purpose before). Through traffic was discontinued in the 1970s. This was in part because the Seneca Nation wanted to discourage outsiders (at the time of Jimerson Town's founding, the nation had a problem with tourists exploring the new community); other factors for converting Jimerson Town into a cul-de-sac included the reservoir's tendency to flood the roadway west of Jimerson Town, endangering traffic, and an effort to cut off Red House (the next community to the southwest of Jimerson Town along old Route 17) from the highway system and force its few remaining residents to move elsewhere so that that town's land could be claimed for expanding Route 17 and Allegany State Park.

The Seneca also have several facilities in Salamanca: the Seneca-Iroquois National Museum, the Allegany branch of the SNI library, a Seneca-owned bowling alley (the bowling alley was repurposed as a bingo hall around 1990) and two craft shops, and a restaurant featuring Seneca cuisine. The Seneca Allegany Casino opened just south of Jimerson Town in the early 2000s (decade).

Two churches operate in Jimerson Town: a Presbyterian church and the nondenominational Red House Memorial Chapel.

Further reading

• Joy A. Bilharz, The Allegany Senecas and Kinzua Dam: Forced Relocation Through Two Generations, University of Nebraska Press, 2002
• "Information about the Seneca Indians from THIS Seneca's Perspective", Jimerson family website