May 2, 2020

Towns Named Rochester

By roadsrus

DSC02173There are 24 cities and towns in the World with the name Rochester.  Nineteen of them are in the United States, but many of them are just small towns or hamlets.  There are also Rochesters in Canada and Australia.  Three of them are in England.  The most western USA Rochester is the one in Washington State about 25 miles south of its Capital, Olympia.

The largest Rochester in the world is the city in New York State.  There are more than 200,000 people living there, and Ruth and I visited it for the first time last year.  The 2nd largest Rochester is the city of more than 100,000 people in Minnesota.  Home to the Mayo Clinic, the Minnesota Rochester is often on lists of  the best places to live.  The 3rd largest Rochester is Rochester Hills in Michigan, the original home of the entertainer Madonna just north of Detroit.  It has about 71,000 people.  The Rochester in England, near London, is 4th in size with 62,000.  It began as a Roman town.  The Rochester castle, in fact, was built atop a Roman fort.

 

DSC02347.jpegDSC02386.jpegRuth and I enjoyed ourselves in Rochester, New York, where there is a lot to do, unlike Syracuse.  The only 5 Compass attraction in this other upstate New York city is an excellent  museum devoted to the Erie Canal.   Originally called Rochesterville, Rochester, New York is home to the art deco Times Square Building, the Eastman School of Music where singer Renee Fleming studied, and the George Eastman home.  Eccentric George Eastman, founder of Kodak, was not born in Rochester but he died there in 1932 after he shot himself.  Other famous people who spent time in this Rochester included Suffragette Susan B. Anthony, who died there, and social reformer/abolitionist Frederick Douglass.  This city was named after a Revolutionary War colonel, Nathaniel Rochester.

DSC01837.jpegRochester had one of the 1st railroads in America.  The engine just above was the first in America.  It ran along the Delaware and Hudson Canal with a test run in 1829.  The Rochester & State Line Railroad began operations in 1878 to the town of Salamanca in southwest New York State.  It was bought by the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad in 1932 but became the Rochester and Southern (RSR) and began service to Silver Springs, New York, in 1986 with a line from there to Buffalo.

Hank

About roadsrus

Since the beginning, I've had to avoid writing about the downside of travel in order to sell more than 100 articles. Just because something negative happened doesn't mean your trip was ruined. But tell that to publishers who are into 5-star cruise and tropical beach fantasies. I want to tell what happened on my way to the beach, and it may not have been all that pleasant. My number one rule of the road is...today's disaster is tomorrow's great story. My travel experiences have appeared in about twenty magazines and newspapers. I've been in all 50 states more than once and more than 50 countries. Ruth and I love to travel internationally--Japan, Canada, China, Argentina, Hungary, Iceland, Italy, etc. Within the next 2 years we will have visited all of the European countries. But our favorite destination is Australia. Ruth and I have been there 9 times. I've written a book about Australia's Outback, ALONE NEAR ALICE, which is available through both Amazon & Barnes & Noble. My first fictional work, MOVING FORWARD, GETTING NOWHERE, has recently been posted on Amazon. It's a contemporary, hopefully funny re-telling of The Odyssey. View all posts by roadsrus
This entry was posted on Saturday, May 2nd, 2020 at 7:43 pm and posted in mostly unexplored places. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.

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