It seems that one hot Sunday afternoon in 1891, John M. Scott, the pastor of the Unitarian Church, and one of his faithful parishioners, Chester Platt, repaired to the latter's drug store for some refreshment and a review of the just concluded sermon. At his store, the Platt & Colt Pharmacy (located at what is now 216 East State Street), Mr. Platt got two dishes of ice cream from Miss DeForest Christiance, who was tending the soda fountain. He plopped a candied cherry on top of each dish of ice cream and covered the whole thing with cherry syrup, "on a whim".

What resulted not only looked good, it tasted great! The naming thing came next. What to call such a thing? Mr. Scott suggested "Cherry Sunday" as a gesture towards the day. Mr. Platt, the businessman, liked the name and from then on, his soda fountain featured Cherry Sundays. Other flavors followed and soon other soda fountains joined the parade.

Cornell University students took the dessert home with them on vacations and their local soda fountains added to the art of the Sunday. The name was also seen as "sundae", "sundi", and Sundai" as competing syrup makers got into the act of providing the sweet stuff to top local ice creams.

Other towns have claimed invention of the ice cream sundae over the years, but none have been able to show documentation back as far as the 1890's like Deforest Christiance' eyewitness account which showed up in letter form and newspaper accounts (Ithaca Journal, April 11, 1892).

Source: "The Ice Cream Sundae" by Gretchen Sachse, Tompkins County Historian, July 25, 1996