Philip Thomas was among the first settlers of Erin, NY and settled along the Red Chalk Section with a few other families (John Banfield, James Elya, Abraham Elston, Daniel & Gabriel Curtis, James Van Houter & his brother Thomas) where many of his descendants grew up. He married Rachel Boyer, daughter of fellow settler Isaac Boyer, and had eleven children with her. 

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His father was a fellow named Joseph Thomas, who moved from Connecticut to Wyoming, PA, later moving to Newfield in Tompkins County and subsequently passed when his son, Philip was just a small boy at six years old. Philip was apprenticed out to a local blacksmith & miller, and learned the milling business and produced flour.

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A many-tongued tradition claims that a man named Mr. Thomas, supposedly that of Joel or Joseph Thomas, the father of Philip Thomas, of Erin, was the first settler of the territory now known as the Van Etten township; that about the year 1795 he located on the creek south of Van Ettenville village, near where the white grist-mill stood. This claim is unconfirmed - maybe with research I'll prove it.

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By the time Philip was merely 18 years old, he was hired as the chief of the Tioga Point Grist Mill owned by John Shepherd, a local business tycoon who built up Tioga Point.. Philip met Ms. Rachel in Newfield on a job when the Boyer family had moved to New York, supposedly from Kentucky according to family story. He purchased a part of the old homestead of Mr. Pompelli in Oswego, then known as Red Chalk and today located within the limits of Erin, NY.  

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He moved to his Erin estate years later, in 1816, securing 200 acres of land in Erin/Breesport. It’s stated by Philip himself that in his first two years residing on his Chemung farm, he paid but 75 cents a year in taxes (probably because he'd had little more than a shack on the land to live in all alone in the wilderness with his wife). The book written in 1879 also mentions Philip living as a healthy 86 year old man. He died in 1895 and is buried in the Cayuta Cemetery on route 224 on the east end of modern day Cayuta, alongside his family.

 

*Note - I have tried to line up maps to verify where this homestead used to be, but much has changed. Will update once it's found, currently i believe its along red chalk on the way to park station.