The town was founded in 1610 by Nicolas Patricio. He led them towards the realization of their obsession. His ideas led them where his heart follows. In grateful recognition of his sacrifices and excellent leadership, the people christened the town after his name and adopted San Nicolas de Tolentino as their patron saints.
In the beginning, long before the coming of the Spanish missionaries and soldiers to pacify and conquer the pristine Upper Agno Valley and the Tierras de Montaños of Northern Luzon at the latter part of the 16th Century, native villages has been in dotted existence within the breadth of what to become the territory and geopolitical entity known today as the town of San Nicolas.
As early as the second decade of the 17th Century, Spanish Missionaries and Historians had already been mentioning in their chronicles, localities which can be considered as the mother places that had spawned today’s town of San Nicolas.
Villages such as the Ambayabang (Balungao) of the legendary native chief Cayon Dagarag, Maliongliong (Mallilion) that later housed the Dominican mission of San Josef in 1732, as well as that of Apsay (Agpay) of the present Agpay Eco-tourist fame, can already be found in the old maps, some dating as far back as the year 1625.
The gradual development of the said villages, as they later opened to Spanish interactions and incursions, especially of Ambayabang and Maliongliong, were the intertwined genes that had formed the nucleus of the town.
It was mainly the establishment of religious missions that had paved the road towards the founding of San Nicolas as a town.
The alternating missionary activities of the Dominicans and Augustinians in the area, beginning in the year 1607, engendered two major missionary routes to the genesis and evolution of the town of San Nicolas, from an informal mission community of the early Spanish period to an independent and vibrant pueblo nuevo of the 19th century Pangasinan.
First of the two routes mentioned earlier that led to the founding of the town was one that came from the Dominican central Pangasinan towards the northeastern part of the province through the establishment in 1732 of the San Josef Mission in Maliongliong (Mallilion).
The other route was one that came from the southeastern Augustinian mission areas embarking from Ytuy and Baler of the Pampanga delta and Sierra Madre region through the San Nicolas de Tolentino Mission in the village of Ambayabang (Balungao), founded by a very young Augustinian friar named Agustin Barriocanal sometime in the late 1738 to early 1740s.
In due course of times and events, the two paths eventually met and from that point was born a town with a history to etch in the unadulterated pages of fate and destiny. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Nicolas,_Pangasinan