The Deposit post office opened in 1812, the earliest record of the town by name. Four smaller post offices, Barbourville (1833), Hale Eddy (1854) and China (1881), opened inside today’s town and later closed.
2020 census: 1,427214 years
Founding year: the first Deposit post office (Blevins & Helbock, CC0).The full story ↓
What stands out about Deposit’s past
Read from the archive, the National Register and the record. The page puts what stands out first.
The town name was derived from the deposits of logs made by lumbermen, prior to forming rafts to float down the Delaware River; usually to Philadelphia. The Town of Deposit was organized in 1880 from the western part of the town of Tompkins.
In the 1890s, Deposit was a center of publishing with the relocation of the Outing Publishing Company to the town (from New York). Several magazines, including The Bohemian, were published and printed from Deposit. The Outing Publishing Company went out of business a few years after the failure of the Knapp Bros. Bank in 1909. Charles J. Knapp was president of Outing and on the board of Knapp Brothers, which was run by his nephew, Charles P. Knapp.
The first permanent settlement in the territory included in the towns of Tompkins and Deposit seems to have been made l)y a Mr. Fitch, of Bainbridge, father of Jabez Fitch, who afterward became a merchant in the village of Deposit. He came to what is now called Stilesville in 178.'), and located on a small clearing made by tiie Indians near the nidiitli (if the .Vstraguntira (unw called ('(lid Spring Brook) two miles fnnii Deposit village. He built a log house for his family and erected a very rude saw mill
Text read by machine from the scan; it may contain errors.
The town of Deposit is too youuff to furnish anything'- like an ancient history of its early settlement. All the early records apply to the old town of Tompkins, wliich was organized Feb.
Text read by machine from the scan; it may contain errors.
Scans and text from the Internet Archive. Books published in 1930 or earlier, which are in the public domain.
By decade
Deposit, decade by decade
4 decades in the archive, from the 1860s to the 1970s. Scroll each row; tap a photo for its story.
Nothing in the archives for these yearsWeddings on Main Street, storms, parades, school pictures, the old store. If it’s in your family album, it belongs here.
Nothing in the archives for these yearsWeddings on Main Street, storms, parades, school pictures, the old store. If it’s in your family album, it belongs here.
Founding dates: Wikidata, Wikipedia, the U.S. post office records of Blevins & Helbock (CC0) and the Census. Homes by year built: Census ACS 2020–24. National Register of Historic Places: National Park Service (list of May 22, 2026). Old photos, postcards and papers: Wikimedia Commons, the Library of Congress and other public archives, credited on each item’s page. Maps: U.S. Geological Survey historical topographic maps (via Esri) and Sanborn fire-insurance maps (Library of Congress). History text and census tables: Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0). Places that used to be: USGS Geographic Names Information System (2021). How TownRatings grades history →
From Wikimedia Commons (6), Wikipedia, the US Post Offices dataset (Blevins & Helbock), the USGS Geographic Names Information System and old county and town histories (Internet Archive). Archive images are copied here with their credits and licenses, shown on each photo’s page. Refreshed monthly.
1976
1976