Monthly Archives: September 2013

The Way We Worked

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Last week we looked at the makeup of Keuka Lake towns back in 1835, and in 1860, thanks to statewide gazetteers published in those years. This week I thought we’d get a handle on how people live and worked in those days.
Farming and herding were overwhelmingly how people supported themselves, AND it’s the main thing that the gazetteers take notice of.
For instance, in 1835 the six towns had 13,194 cattle; 4275 horses; 53,674 sheep; and 13,445 swine. To look at it another way, the total human population (13,418) stood comfortably between the populations of swine and cattle, but was dwarfed by the flock of sheep.
This isn’t surprising, considering that many people, even if employed off the farm, still maintained some livestock as a sideline or for home consumption. It would be interesting to know how those cattle broke out — how many each for beef, draft, and dairy.
In most cases, any of the Yates towns beat each of the Steuben towns for numbers. Milo and Jerusalem usually took the lead, suggesting that local prosperity gravitated to the railroad, the Outlet and the canal.
The 1860 report covers the same categories, but this time distinguishing “working oxen and calves” from “cows.” Town by town breakdowns give us the bushels of grain produced (winter and spring), tons of hay, bushels of potatoes, bushels of apples, pounds of butter, and pounds of cheese. There’s no report on grape or wine production, each of which was just getting started in a big way. The Pleasant Valley Wine Company, for instance, was just incorporating, but for all anybody knew back then, this would prove to be just a flash in the pan. Ohio’s nascent industry had just been wiped out in a blight (which left winemakers available for jobs in the Finger Lakes).
The report DOES tell us about yards of domestic cloth produced, with a high of 846 in Urbana and a low of 230 in Barrington. Cloth production reverses the pattern of livestock and population; any of the Steuben towns tops any of the Yates towns.
While the facts-and-figures reporting is pretty straitjacketed, the 1860 gazetteer permits itself a little more latitude in the descriptive section. Urbana is “noted for the production of a superior quality of fine wool,” and “finely adapted to the culture of the grape.” Jerusalem “is well adapted to both pasturage and tillage.”
Perhaps without recognizing their significance, the gazetteer compilers take haphazard note of other forms of commerce. Milo has two newspapers and a bank. Urbana has “several manufacturing establishments.”
They wake up a little to the significance of transportation, noting a daily line of steamers between Penn Yan (in Jerusalem) and Hammondsport (in Urbana), along with a storehouse at Gulicksville landing in Pulteney. Penn Yan “is an important station on the Elmira, Jefferson & Canandaigua R.R.,” but there’s no mention at all of the Crooked Lake Canal, not even thirty years old and already overshadowed by the train. Hammondsport will not have rail service (the B&H, connecting it to Bath) until 1878.
While the 1860 gazetteer still makes no mention of grapes, an 1868 directory shows 110 vineyards in the Town of Urbana alone! Wayne has 10, and Pulteney 31… in fact, grapes were said to be the first thing Pulteney residents ever found to justify the taxes on their land. Oddly, the Pulteney folks are almost always described as “grape growers,” rather than vineyardists.
Many of these vineyards are small, and many owners were also farmers, lawyers, or ministers. But the wineries wrought radical change in Keuka’s economy and environment — in less than a decade.

Keuka Lake — Long, Long Ago

Because statewide gazetteers were published in 1835 and 1860, I recently took a detailed look at the Keuka Lake towns in those years. (That’s Pulteney, Urbana, and Wayne in Steuben County, with Milo, Barrington, and Jerusalem on the Yates side.)
Not only were those days very different from ours, they differed greatly from each other, even though separated by only 25 years.
In 1835 Lincoln had not yet been admitted the bar, nor Darwin returned from the voyage of the Beagle. By 1860 the pair (born the same day in 1809) were shaking the world. The United States in 1835 petered out along the Mississippi, with a vague claim to the northern Rockies. Twenty-five years later we were a feared aggressor nation, having swallowed Texas, stolen the southwest and California by war, and secured the Oregon country by armed diplomacy. The Erie Canal was ten years old in 1835, and the Crooked Lake Canal was two, but both were already being overshadowed by railroads. Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, Andrew Jackson, and John C. Calhoun dominated the news in 1835… by 1860 it was Lincoln, Douglas, and Jefferson Davis.
The two counties and six towns were already in place by 1835, though only just. Those three Yates County towns all exceeded the Steuben towns in population: Milo (including Penn Yan) was the largest at 3824, and Wayne the smallest at 1350. The gazetteer gives only county-wide breakdowns by race, but Steuben and Yates each had a small number of African Americans, and a handful of African American voters.
We know that Milo in those days had 443 militiamen, 18 schools, and 1010 scholars. Tiny Wayne had the smallest militia roster (136), but Pulteney had the fewest school students (397).
In no town were a quarter of the people eligible to vote, but in every case births far outstripped deaths. Bewilderingly, the gazetteer also reported on married females under the age of 45, unmarried females between 16 and 45, and unmarried females below 16… but does NOT have similar breakdowns for men. What in earth did they do with this information? Did people use it to calculate their chances of marriage before they decided whether to move? How would that help without corresponding figures for men? Or did officials want to estimate the reproductive capacity of a population? Anyhow, in case you were wondering, Milo had 443 marriageable women.
By 1860 Barrington and Wayne had each lost population, but that no doubt was because of territory lost to the new Schuyler County. Pulteney also lost ground, and Jerusalem stayed level. But Milo was up 500 and Urbana 300, suggesting that people were gravitating toward the villages of Penn Yan and Hammondsport. Farming was already becoming less significant, while services, manufacturing, and transportation were on the rise, especially in Penn Yan, served by a canal AND a railroad… not to mention being the county seat. Unmarried females were no longer reported, but many of those who were listed in 1835 would now have the horror of watching their sons march off to war.
As far as transportation’s concerned, 1835 saw the advent of “Keuka” (first of that name), that lake’s first steamer — doubled-hulled with a center wheel, and basically a single flat platform for carriage. The double hull allowed it to run right up onto the beach. In 1860 “Keuka” was gone, but the sidewheeler “Steuben” (also first of that name) had been plying the lake for 15 years.
While Barrington and Wayne went down, all the other towns saw significant increases in students. This was probably a factor of general population going up, more kids going to school in the first place, and students staying in school longer, especially with high schools (one each) now available at each end of the lake. And the gazetteer goes into great detail on the agricultural produce, down to the pounds of butter (106,673 in Jerusalem), but provokes us to a knowing, superior smile. It doesn’t mention one word about grapes. Which will very quickly become MIGHTY important.

September 1901: A Pretty Fair Month

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Hammondsport School was closed. On the streets and in the Square, scarcely a sound was heard. Shops stood idle, almost empty, and in some cases were even closed. In vain did the retailers peer wistfully through their plate-glass windows, hoping for a glimpse of potential customers. Hammondsport was empty. Everyone had gone to the Bath Fair.
Steuben County Fair was at the end of September in those days, and was so popular that school was indeed called off for Thursday and Friday of fair week, when the B&H groaned from carrying all those eager Hammondsporters down the line. Not only did the fair provide entertainment in a world with no TV, no radio, only a few hand-cranked gramophones, and only occasional crude movies; it was also an important educational showcase for agricultural products and techniques. Steuben County, like many rural counties, was still primarily agricultural in those days.
The State Fair in Syracuse ran from the 9th through the 14th; admission cost a quarter. September 11 was Carrie Nation Day at the Yates County Fair in Penn Yan.
There was another fair still going on in Buffalo at the time, of course—The Pan-American Exposition, or, as we would now call it, the world’s fair. Mr. and Mrs. C. G. Wheeler visited the Pan-Am from Catawba, as did Rua Gay and Elmer J. Orr of Rheims, not to mention Victor and Julia Masson of Hammondsport and a whole excursion from Steuben County Pomona Grange. The fair’s publicity director, former Hammondsporter Marc Bennitt, suavely recommended that visitors plan to stay at least two weeks, “to enjoy more fully this rare opportunity for pleasure and study…. No one who can possibly raise the money to visit the Exposition should for a moment think of denying himself this signal advantage.”
Admission was 50 cents, including all the grounds, the exhibit buildings, and the Stadium, where visitors could see athletic events, livestock shows, and vehicle parades. Midway concessions ranged from a dime to half a dollar. Fifty cents would get you comfortable lodgings, while accommodations closer to the Pan-Am ran as high as a dollar a night. Marc estimated daily expenses in Buffalo at no more than $2.50 “for those who want the best.” One visitor apparently decided to defray his costs by stealing the Mexican Liberty Bell.
President McKinley, who thoroughly enjoyed world’s fairs, visited and was shot on September 5. He later died of his wounds, as we aw two weeks ago.
Harvest was on the minds of many people. Delaware grapes were selling at $50 a ton, while potatoes got 65 to 75 cents a bushel, and peaches $1.50 a basket. Apple buyers paid $3.12½ to pick their own. Amos Roberts of Addison stated that “he never knew how uncertain things were until he invested in a vineyard.”
The baseball season was winding up, although “rowdies” from Penn Yan made an unfortunate presence in a game at Hammondsport’s Kinglsey Flats. Out on the lake, a tramp named Peter Gunning assaulted William Maxfield, an African-American fireman aboard steamer Halsey. When Gunning pulled a pistol, “Max” knocked him down with the flat of an axe. Gunning was subdued, trussed up, bustled off the boat in Penn Yan, and sent to Monroe County prison for four months. There was also considerable excitement at Sub Rosa landing, where a wharf collapsed and dunked 20 people waiting for a steamer, apparently without serious harm. More sedate excitement prevailed at Keuka College, which had just met its goal of raising $25,000, thereby qualifying for a $50,000 challenge grant from the Ball brothers, canning-jar magnates of Muncie, Indiana.
The plate glass for the new Hammondsport Opera House arrived damaged, which threatened to hold up the opening of the facility, but J. S. Hubbs’s new residence was proceeding on schedule. The Bath Fish Hatchery shipped 40,000 trout to Seneca Lake, while the Soldiers’ Home started its switch from female nurses to male nurses. Mrs. James Shannon of Mount Washington, whose husband had been killed by lightning in June, received her full $2000 from his life insurance policy with the Knights of the Maccabees Royal Tent #72 in Bath. Scientific American informed its readers that if you wore rubbers in a thunderstorm, and refrained from touching anything, you had nothing to fear. Do you think that would have helped Mr. Shannon?

Dropping in on Mr. Eastman

Well, we finally did it, after twenty years of living in western New York. We visited the George Eastman House. I had been in and out of the work spaces a couple of times, on museum business. But we’d never toured the site itself, until now.
For the day visitor, there are essentially three components: the house itself; the gardens; and the museum. (There are also two theaters, but they weren’t part of our late-morning experience.)
Mr. Eastman built his grand home back at the turn of the twentieth century, when Rochester’s East Avenue was still a dirt street. Eastman by then had amassed a staggering fortune, created a new pastime, and forever altered our experience of history, including personal and family history.
Eastman’s development of roll film put cameras and photography within reach of almost everyone. Suppose that for photography we STILL relied on a handful of professional photographers, painstakingly making a minuscule number of pictures, each requiring extensive chemical preparation and finishing. Wouldn’t our world, and our knowledge of the past, be utterly different?
But Eastman’s innovation (which also led to practical movie film) created an industrial-technical giant that over the years employed hundreds of thousands (including the teen-aged Glenn Curtiss), and financed a spectacular mansion for himself and his mother.
Out at the museum end, where we began, the current special exhibit is The Gender Show — photos exploring and testing the boundaries, definitions, and expectations of gender. We figured it would not really be our cup of tea… and we were right… but we all need to keep learning and experiencing new things, don’t we?
Of far more interest to us was the technology gallery, showing camera development over the years. Here we found the very Graflex with which Joe Rosenthal caught that image of six men raising the flag at Iwo Jima. A four-shot carte de visite camera, a drive-in movie projector, a Vitagraph, space-borne cameras, and home cameras such as the ones we grew up with, all grabbed our attention. But what really seized us was a Fisher-Price toy camera like the one our little boys used for imaginary picture after picture, flash cube spinning the while. One of those guys now has a sideline of professional photography.
The 50-room mansion itself is quite a pile, and clearly comes from the days before income tax. A large pipe organ graces the conservatory; Mr. Eastman hired a musician to play at a set time each morning, while Eastman made his entrance down the grand staircase.
As I passed artwork after artwork I asked myself: these CAN’T be real, can they? Yes and no. Mr. Eastman DID own these world-renowned paintings by old masters, but gifted them to Rochester’s Memorial Art Gallery. Those in the mansion now are reproductions.
The 45-minute garden tour, which took us almost all the way around the facility to the tune of cicadas, was impressive even in September. Unsurprisingly, the place was well documented with photography, and our docents used this resource to show us the development of the house, grounds, and gardens.
There are three main gardens — the West Garden, the Rock Garden, and the Terrace Garden. They had all been neglected, or even covered over, since Eastman’s death in 1932. Photography and archeology were used to relocate, recover, and restore them. All are popular sites for weddings. The pool in the Terrace Garden was heated in Eastman’s day, while an underground tunnel from the potting barn let workers bring blooms to the house in the depths of a Rochester winter.
One curiosity we noticed is that our docents several times referred hesitatingly to Mr. Eastman’s “death,” or “when he died.” Mr. Eastman was pushing 80 and had been in debilitating pain for years when he wrote a short note to friends and shot himself in his bedroom. This is widely known — why should there be any shyness about mentioning it? Our photographer son had the same experience with docents there, though he was chaperoning eight year-olds, so it makes more sense in that case. It seemed to us that it would be appropriate to be straightforward about George Eastman’s choice.
At any rate — we’re glad we finally got there. The house, the museum, and the gardens are definitely worth a visit.

Eastman

The Death of the President

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September 1901 turned into a month-long tragic drama as America’s President struggled unsuccessfully for his life. This world event had a western New York setting, and deeply affected the people of the region.
William McKinley was a gentle man and a gentleman, diligent rather than brilliant, soft-spoken, well-liked. He had entered the Civil War as a private at 18 and left it as a major at 22, after fighting gallantly at Antietam, Winchester, Kernstown, and a host of other actions under Rutherford B. Hayes. As a captain in one battle he had directly ordered a recalcitrant general to put his division into motion, and the general had obeyed.
After climbing the ranks of Republican politics, McKinley was elected President in 1896, defeating William Jennings Bryan, whose reform proposals, plus support for organized labor and small farmers, terrified the big-money men by then controlling the Party of Lincoln. McKinley conducted a “front-porch” campaign; while Bryan stumped the nation, the Republican candidate treated friendly delegations to set speeches at his home.
In 1898 America fought its “splendid little war” with Spain, taking over Puerto Rico, the Philippines, Guam, some smaller islands, and (temporarily) Cuba, besides picking up Hawaii on the side. Northern and Southern soldiers fought together, winning an empire in three months by spectacular victories and almost no loss of life. Orators enthused that the wounds of the Civil War had been healed, and McKinley beat Bryan in their 1900 rematch.
The national healing was, of course, a partial reconciliation of whites, made possible only at the expense of black Americans, including those who had fought alongside Teddy Roosevelt at San Juan Hill. Bryan, by the way, opposed imperialism, and ran the 1900 campaign on that basis. Even so, he had raised his own regiment of volunteers, which was assigned to guard Tampa for the duration of the war. McKinley may have been a gentleman, but he was no fool. Bryan would get no chance to do anything remotely heroic.
McKinley’s second inauguration was the last for a Civil War President. Roosevelt, his energetic young VP who had been given the second spot to keep him “on the shelf,” had been a small boy when he watched Lincoln’s funeral procession. Roosevelt had recently been governor of New York.
McKinley loved world’s fairs, and eagerly visited the 1901 Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo. Besides highlighting our domination of the hemisphere, the Pan-Am emphasized electricity. Most of the country had none at all, and many that did had it only part-time. With an inexhaustible supply being generated at Niagara Falls, Buffalo staggered the world with its oceans of lights.
On September 5 the President made a speech to 50,000 visitors, proclaiming that America’s era of isolation was over. On the next day he visited Niagara Falls, attended a luncheon along with his semi-invalid wife, then returned to the fair over the objections of his secretary, George Cortelyou, who worried about his safety. “No one would want to hurt me,” scoffed McKinley, who was determined to shake hands with visitors. Cortelyou stationed police who overlooked a bland young man with his right hand wrapped in a bandage. As the ever-courteous McKinley stretched out his left hand, Leon Czolgosz shot him twice with a revolver concealed in the bandages. Stumbling back, the President whispered to Cortelyou, “My wife—be careful how you tell her.” His next words, as police and spectators piled on the assailant, were, “Don’t let them hurt him.”
One of the bullets had gone deep, and doctors, ignoring an x-ray machine displayed at the fair, couldn’t find it. But they had high hopes, so Roosevelt and the cabinet, who had raced to McKinley’s side, dispersed several days later. On September 13, doctors recognized gangrene. Word was flashed to Roosevelt, vacationing in the Adirondacks (blackflies and all) 12 miles from a telephone and up a steep slope. Three driver working in relays rushed TR to the train along a narrow mountain road in the dark. But McKinley died, faintly singing “Nearer, My God to Thee,” before Roosevelt arrived to be sworn in as the youngest President America has ever had. Judge Hazel, who administered the oath, would later rule against both Henry Ford and Glenn Curtiss in acrimonious patent disputes. The train carrying both Presidents to Washington stopped briefly at Arcade before passing out of New York through Olean.
One of Roosevelt’s first acts was to declare Thursday, Sept. 19, a day of mourning. Schools and businesses closed, although Hammondsport Post Office stayed open to 11:00 because the morning mail arrived so late. The Presbyterian Church there held a memorial service Sunday night, but St. James Episcopal waited until Thursday, with McKinley’s brother Masons attending in a body. Hammondsport’s G. A. R. Post passed a resolution honoring its fallen comrade. The loss was traumatic to Americans who had already endured the assassinations of Lincoln (1865) and Garfield (1881). The equivalent for us would be having had Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama killed. Robert Todd Lincoln, son of Abraham, endured the agony of being on hand for all three assassinations.
Czolgosz, an anarchist, had shot McKinley simply because he headed the government. Emma Goldman and other outspoken anarchists were clapped into jail, then truculently released when it became clear that Czolgosz had acted alone. The law moved swiftly back then. Czolgosz’s trial opened September 24. He was electrocuted at Auburn within the month, and quickly forgotten.
Attention turned to the vibrant, not to say hyperactive, new President, who quickly thrilled or scandalized the nation by inviting Booker T. Washington to lunch at the Executive Mansion. United States Senator “Pitchfork Ben” Tillman of Georgia screeched that the South would have to lynch a thousand Negroes to force them back into their place. McKinley’s friend and campaign manager, Mark Hanna, steamed, “Now that cowboy is in the White House!” Teddy Roosevelt would set the standard for 20th-century presidents; his activist example would not be lost on Teddy’s niece, Miss Eleanor Roosevelt, nor on their distant cousin Franklin, who was in 1901 a student at Harvard.
One structure remains from the Pan-Am… the Buffalo and Erie County Historical Society, which is worth both a visit and a separate blog entry (stay tuned). The Buffalo home where TR took the oath of office is now Theodore Roosevelt Inaugural National Historic Site.