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Title edit
Madison County
Description edit
About Madison County
Madison is an upstate rural county with an area of 661 square miles located approximately 20 miles from both Syracuse and Utica. Pratt's Hollow, in the Town of Eaton, is considered to be the geographic center of New York State.
The County is divided into two physiographic regions. The Oneida Lake Plain in the north has a generally level to gently rolling topography, and the remainder of the County consists of rounded hills and broad, deep, and steep-sided valleys typical of the Appalachian Uplands. Oneida Lake is the northern border of the County. There are 14 other lakes, six of which are reservoirs built during the early to mid- 800's to serve as water supplies for the Erie and Chenango Canals.
Since its beginning, Madison County has had an economy dominated by agriculture. In the 19th century its climate, soils, topography, and location gave rise to a flourishing hops industry. Over time that has been replaced with a strong dairy industry dependent on the same factors-there was a tie between the two industries, in fact, as a local entrepreneur imported the first Holstein-Frisian cattle into the U.S. to provide fertilizer for the abundant hop fields.
