Thayer Mansion

Joel Thayer

Thayer was the picture of industry. He arrived in the Village in 1835 to clerk for John Legg in his carriage works, and within months married his employer’s daughter, Juliette.

To Legg’s business interests Thayer married his business acumen, and made both of them wealthy. At various times, they owned a distillery, a farm, a saw mill, a paper mill and the flouring mill in the Village.

Thayer served as Postmaster, President of the Board of Trustees of the Village, founder and President of the Bank of Skaneateles, and founder and President of the Skaneateles Railroad Company. In Syracuse, he was president of the Trust and Deposit Company, vice-president of Syracuse Chilled Plow and the Central City Railroad Companies, and a director of the American Steamboat Company that ran boats on Lake Ontario and the St. Lawrence River.

A civic-spirited man, Thayer was also a founder of the Skaneateles Library Association and president of the Lake View Cemetery Association, to which he provided a great service. In 1878, after the suicide of Charles Pardee, a villain straight out of Dickens, Thayer bought the Evergreen Cemetery lands that Pardee had hoarded, accepted the adjacent Lake View lands gratis from the cemetery trustees, and donated the combined properties to the Village the following day.