Most every community has its own personality. Sometimes this derives from the circumstances of its founding, or from the nature of the work done there, or from its religious and ethnic groups. Larger communities have a different feel than smaller ones, and communities blessed with the experience of many varying people are far healthier and happier than those where a great sameness prevails.
Even similarly-sized communities in the same county — Bath, Corning, Hornell — each have their own personalities. Addison, Canisteo, and Hammondsport likewise are each distinct from the other.
Arch Merrill called Bath the Queen City of the Southern Tier, an observation that would have warmed the Scottish cockles of Charles Williamson’s heart.
Williamson was one of those men who decided early in life that if you were going to dream, you ought to dream big. Where most people saw a huge forest recently stolen from the Iroquois, Williamson saw great cities and vast estates. Where most people saw a small clearing hacked by hand from the trees along the Conhocton, Williamson saw an elegant capital.
The space he cleared is now Pulteney Square in Bath, and he kept the faith even though the first person interred in the nearby Pioneer Cemetery was his own young daughter. The Land Office he set up in 1793 didn’t finish selling off 1.3 million acres until almost 1910, but the site did become the seat of a brand-new county in 1796.
Until some busybody went and put in the Erie Canal (elevating no-account shanty towns like Syracuse, Buffalo, and Rochester), the river chain of Susquehanna, Chemung, and Conhocton was the key travel route. Williamson foresaw Bath as the great metropolis of the region, endowing it with straight broad boulevards and green grassy squares. Metropolitan dreams died, but the layout lasts to this day. In its tiny scale it seems to echo the layouts of Paris and Washington… except that Bath had its layout long before Paris and Washington did.
So the history, the lovely layout, and the county seat all contribute to Bath’s personality. So do two great institutions begun during or after the Civil War… the Davenport Asylum for Female Orphans, and the New York State Soldiers and Sailors Home.
The “Davenport Home,” by all reports, furnished a true home for something like 800 girls over 90 years. “Alumnae” relate, for instance, that young men frequently came calling, and not just because it is in the nature of young men to pay such calls. They often arrived at a time when they knew they’d be invited to dinner, and everybody ate very well at the Davenport Home. Even during the Depression the girls rode horseback, played tennis, went camping, visited amusement parks, had their own Girl Scout troop.
In 2004 Chuck Mitchell and I published “Bath,” a book of historic photos in the Images of America series. For the cover image, publishers selected am 1892 photo of the girls gathered on an ornate set of steps, seated primly and properly, clad in uniform and, of course, entirely covered save for head, neck, and hands.
The photo of a similar gathering 50 years later shows the girls variously dressed and casually seated, little ones in sun suits, older girls in shorts and short sleeves, or even sleeveless. Women by then could vote and hold office. They could work, and largely control their own income. They could even join the army, and even as girls they were increasingly free from rigid convention.
That other great Bath institution, now the VA, started as a way to care for New York’s Civil War veterans — and some of them were furious when Spanish War veterans were admitted after 1898! Now much of the facility’s work is treatment for alcohol and drug problems. Stones in the national cemetery now feature symbols identifying the honored dead as Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, Wiccan, Bahai, and more, in addition to the traditional crosses and Magen Davids.
In doing our book we dedicated a combined chapter to the Girls Home and the Soldiers Home, and another to the Steuben County Fair. Not many towns have a fairground right in the center of things, but it’s part of the busy-ness of Bath.
We also found photos of pioneer pilots, bicycling postmen, and the Old-Timers Band, which played for the departure of Bath’s draft contingent every month through World War II. Bath is still a busy place. Arch Merrill would approve, and “Charles the Magnificent” would be delighted.

“Davenport Girls” in 1892