Blood, Trauma, and Biohazard Cleanup in Oriskany, NY

Oriskany is a village in the town of Whitestown in Oneida County, New York, sitting southeast of Rome along NY Route 69 just south of the Erie Canal.

The village takes its name from an Iroquois word for 'nettles,' and it grew on the site of Oriska, an Oneida village that stood at the confluence of Oriskany Creek and the Mohawk River before 1766.

On August 6, 1777, the Battle of Oriskany was fought in a ravine about two to three miles west of the village, where General Nicholas Herkimer's Tryon County militia was ambushed on its way to relieve besieged Fort Stanwix, in what is considered one of the bloodiest battles of the Revolutionary War.

The battlefield is preserved today as the Oriskany Battlefield State Historic Site, and a monument erected in 1884 marks the spot.

Colonel Gerrit G. Lansing, who settled on a 400-acre tract here in 1802, is generally considered the founder of Oriskany, and in 1811 he helped found the Oriskany Manufacturing Company, a textile firm whose incorporation year is commonly cited as the resettled village's founding date.

Oriskany's mills became known for paper makers' felt, and the old manufacturing company site later operated as the Waterbury Felt Mill, while the iron industry was established in the village in 1879.

The Erie Canal once passed directly through Oriskany, and after the canal was superseded by the New York State Barge Canal, the old canal path through the village became State Route 69.

Oriskany was incorporated as a village in 1914.

The 2020 census counted 1,315 residents in Oriskany, down from 1,459 in 2000, packed into a village of just 0.79 square miles.

The aircraft carrier USS Oriskany (CV-34), named for the 1777 battle, served the U.S. Navy from 1950 to 1976 and was sunk as an artificial reef in the Gulf of Mexico off Pensacola, Florida, on May 17, 2006.