The Village of Deposit in upstate New York on the Delaware River and encompasses a 1.3 square mile area.  Deposit is located within Broome and Delaware County.  The village became incorporated in 1851.  The name Deposit is derive from its status as a lumber center, when it was the place at which logs were "deposited" into the river for transport south.  As of 2000, the village had a population of 1,699 residents.

Before the coming of the white settlers, this part of the Delaware River Valley was inhabited by Indians of several different tribes. The Lenni-Lenapes or Delaware were most numerous, but the Mohawks held the upper hand. There were also some Oneidas and Tuscaroras.  The Indians knew this as coke-ose,  meaning "place of the owls."  But to the early settlers this was so distorted that for many years the settlement was known as "The Cookhouse."

The first permanent settler of Deposit was John Hulce who came from Orange County in the spring of 1789 and settled on the west side of the river at the northerly end of the village. Next was Philip Pine who came from Fishkill on the Hudson in 1791.  Other settlers came including Jonas Underwood and Henry Evans. In 1811 the village, with just 12 dwellings on the westerly bank of the river in Delaware County, was incorporated as the Village of Deposit.

In 1790 Captain Nathan Dean, a Revolutionary War officer from Taunton Massachusetts, moved to Kortright, Delaware County, where he remained until June 1791.  Then, as there were no roads, he lashed two canoes together and floated down the river to Cookhouse where he found an empty log house.  He lived there until he could build a home on his 400 acre farm west of the Fort Stanwix Treaty line covering what is now the Broome County side of Deposit.  When his family transformed the farm into laid out streets, it became known as Deansville.

In 1851 the charter of the Village of Deposit was amended to include Deansville. Thus Deposit became a village in two counties.

For more information about our community’s history, please visit The Deposit Historical Society website at www.deposithistoricalsociety.org.