The town of Randolph sits on the vast tracts of land which were originally owned by the Holland Land Company and was created on February 1, 1826 when it was separated from the adjacent town of Conewango. The first settler was Edmund Fuller, who arrived from Oneida County in 1820 and built a log cabin near where the town cemetery now stands. On March 7, 1826 the townspeople assembled for their first annual meeting to select the town supervisor and other officials.
Randolph was on the route of the original New York and Erie Railroad in the surveys of 1834 and 1836, but in 1849 Silas Seymour was ordered by the company to re-survey the route and recommended a new route that went from Salamanca to Dunkirk via Little Valley. The people of Chautauqua County protested mightily and the company appointed McRae Swift to re-examine the route yet again. He endorsed Seymour's route and Randolph was left without a railroad.
Being bypassed by the New York and Erie spurred the people of Jamestown to action and on June 30, 1851 a group of Jamestown residents petitioned the New York State legislature for a charter for the Erie and New York City Railroad. The road was to be built from West Salamanca, through Randolph and Jamestown, to the Pennsylvania state line. Work began on the line in Randolph on May 19, 1853, but was abandoned on January 5, 1855 for lack of funds.
The Erie and New York City Railroad was never completed and was purchased in 1859 by the Atlantic and Great Western Railroad Company of New York. Construction began in May 1860 and by September of that year the line was complete to Jamestown.
In 1864/65 the A&GW began grading for the Buffalo Extension of the Atlantic and Great Western Railroad Company, an extension north from Randolph to Buffalo through Napoli, New Albion, and Otto. This was planned as a route into Buffalo independent of the Erie connection at Salamanca. During the winter and spring of 1864-65 considerable work was done in grading and preparing for extensive work. The work was soon abandoned.
The 1866 book "Over the Atlantic and Great Western Railway" describes Randolph thus:
"Westward from Salamanca, and between it and Meadville, there are several stations, but the most important are Randolph, Jamestown (New York), and Corry. The first of these, Randolph, is the proposed point of extension to Buffalo, the Great Lake City, from which New York, at second hand, chiefly receives its supply of grains. As yet Randolph is a small town, the population probably not exceeding 2000; but it is pleasantly situated, and, with the Buffalo extension, there is little doubt that it would speedily become one of the most important towns on the Atlantic and Great Western Railway east of Cincinnati. It would become to Buffalo what Chalk Farm is to Euston -- the coal, lumber, and general merchandise depot, at which transfers would be made for Buffalo; for New York by way of Buffalo and the New York Central Railway; and for New York, by way of Salamanca and the Erie Railway. Necessarily, round such a place a numerous population must soon gather; and, of course, much the same reason would exist for local manufacturing industry as at Salamanca and elsewhere."
Alas, the Buffalo Extension was never built and Randolph remained a small village, smaller today than 130 years ago. It is interesting for me (who grew up in Randolph) to imagine how different it might have been if the Buffalo extension would have been built.
Randolph was situated in the only stretch of single-track mainline along the entire Erie route from New York to Chicago. For an unknown reason, the section of track from RH (Red House) Tower at Milepost 12.7 (from Salamanca) to Waterboro at milepost 23.2 remained a single-track. There was talk of relocating the track out of the village and expanding it to double track to handle the traffic demands of World War I, but that plan was never implemented and the route remained single-tracked.