If you think about Oneonta’s West End area these days, especially around Country Club Road and Oneida Street, it is populated with businesses, the Soccer Hall of Fame, and many residences built after World War II. There is nearly nothing visible remaining in the area that reflects s to pioneer days.

However, there is a body of water behind Country Club Chevrolet that remains and has a storied past. It is called Pond Lily.

Longtime Oneontans can still recall ice being cut and harvested there, and it was apparently a very good berry-picking area.

It’s not the body of water, given the name because of the lilies that spread their beauty in the summer, that has the more-interesting past. It was a building that stood near it, along Oneida Street and Country Club Road, on the site of today’s car dealership. This was the Pond Lily Hotel.

The hotel was built in 1789 by a man named Mr. Westcott from Milford. Oneonta did not have a sawmill in operation at that time, so it is likely that he boated or rafted his building material down the Susquehanna from Milford. The course of the river was much different at that time, much closer to where the Chestnut/Oneida intersection is today. Construction of Interstate 88 in the 1970s moved the course of the river even farther away.

Not long after the inn was completed, or tavern as it may have been called at the time, John Culley was the first to operate the inn and a small general store located on the easterly front corner room on the first floor. At this time a ballroom extended along the whole front of the second floor.

Joseph McDonald bought the tavern and store and operated them until 1796 when he sold to his brother James and moved closer to today’s Main and River street intersection in Oneonta. Here he built a saw and gristmill. James sold the tavern a few years later to Jacob Cuyler and succeeded his brother as owner of the mills.

Cuyler operated the tavern a few years into the early 19th century. It was here his wife met a mysterious and tragic death in December 1805.

The Stoughton Alger family lived on a farm near today’s Winney Hill Road, then called Babcock Hollow. The Algers heard repeated blasts of a horn coming from the direction of the tavern, as did other neighbors in the area. They all went to investigate the commotion. It was here Cuyler showed them the body of his wife lying on the floor with the throat cut from ear to ear. There was a razor nearby.

Cuyler claimed that his wife had committed suicide but there were many who thought he had murdered her. The suicide theory was generally accepted in the community. That bedroom remained unoccupied for decades. It was said by past historians that one could still see the blood stains on the pine floor 100 years later.

As years went on, Pond Lily had a mixed history. At times it was a respectable hotel and at other intervals a private dwelling. There were other times in the 1930s that the hotel had a reputation as a house of ill repute.

That part of the town of Oneonta was becoming a magnet for business in the 1950s and ’60s. New York State Electric & Gas Corp. built their headquarters near the pond around 1960. That area had been the site of Keyes Airport, Oneonta’s first municipal airport, since the 1920s. Another new business located not far from the pond in 1958, Medical Coaches.

It was in the late 1960s that the Pond Lily was torn down. Country Club Chevrolet built on the site in 1973, according to owner Bill Davis. Other development in that area soon followed.

On Monday: Classes start at Broome Community College. We’ll go back 60 years to the very first classes when the place was called the Binghamton Institute.

City Historian Mark Simonson’s column appears twice weekly. On Saturdays, his column focuses on the area during the Depression and before. His Monday columns address local history after the Depression. If you have feedback or ideas about the column, write to him at The Daily Star, or e-mail him at simmark@stny.rr.com. His website is www.oneontahistorian.com.