White men appear to have been in the upper Susquehanna valley in 1616, or about one hundred and sixty years before the Revolution. They came as explorers and then as fur traders. After them in the next century came missionaries to the Indians. Finally in 1769 arrived surveyors, owners of land patents and actual settlers. When the first Indian raids were made upon the valley in 1777 during the Revolution, thriving farm communities, composed mainly of Scotch-Irish, with a few Dutch and Palatine Germans, had been established at points from Otsego Lake down to the mouth of the Unadilla River.

One of these existed at the mouth of the Ouleout Creek and was called Albout; another was in the old paper mill region; another across the Susquehanna in what is now Sidney village and still another along the lower waters of the Unadilla River. The three settlements at the confluence of the Susquehanna and Unadilla rivers were sometimes known collectively as Unadilla, although the one on the site of Sidney was often designated separately as the Johnston settlement before the war and as Susquehanna Flats afterwards. While it is not unlikely that some of the Unadilla village lands had been occupied in that period, actual proof of this is wanting.

When the war closed, and settlers began to return to the valley, seven years had passed since those early pioneers were driven out. The country was again a wilderness in some respects more forbidding than when the settlers first entered it. Only the blackened logs of burned houses remained on many farms. Lands that had produced wheat and corn through several seasons in happier times were now overgrown with weeds, brush and briars.

No part of New York state, not even the Mohawk valley, had been more constantly the scene of depredations; none had been so often used as a route of travel for small armies of Indians and Tories on the one hand and of American patriot soldiers on the other; none had now become a land of such utter desolation.

When the Revolution closed the earliest settlers to return came in 1784 and many were families whom the war had driven out. Others were men who had entered the valley as soldiers, or who had heard of its rich lands through others who were soldiers. Many went to the old paper mill region. Among these were the Johnstons who had formerly lived in Sidney, and, after spending a year on Unadilla lands, returned to Sidney again. The McMasters and William Hanna also settled in the paper mill region. Others went to the valley of the Unadilla River and still others to the Ouleout. All these men took up lands that had been occupied before the Revolution.

Of those pioneers we have, in several cases, full and authentic records. One who settled on the Ouleout was Sluman Wattles, who came from Lebanon, Connecticut, in 1784 and took up lands below Franklin village where he was to remain a potent factor in the life of all that region for the remainder of his life. Another was Timothy Beach who settled at the mouth of the Ouleout. Another, in the same region, was James Hughston and still another Nathaniel Wattles, who opened a hotel near the Sidney side of the present upper village bridge.