Monthly Archives: March 2014

“The Girls at Home”: Three Local Women in the Civil War

When I was a lad in Rhode Island, our public library had a wall clock with an illustration in which a Civil War officer, orders tucked into his belt, stood beside an elegantly dressed young lady. He stretched his hand out to her, but she was turned away, Victorian anguish on her face, twisting a handkerchief in her own hands. The tableau was entitled, “Letting Him Go – The Hardest Thing a Woman is Ever Asked to Do.”
What were women doing while so many men were fighting the Civil War?  Women’s history is often invisible or hidden, but some women are telling us themselves, in their own words, across a century and a half.  Far too often they’re anonymous or overlooked — what women did wasn’t considered really important.  But we have extensive letters from Maryett Kelly, a farm wife and mother in Fremont… another set of letters from Rhoda McConnell, teaching school in the Prattsburgh area… and a diary from Adelaide Church of Bath.
At the final Steuben County Historical Society Winter Lecture (4 PM Friday, April 4), a panel of three modern women will report on the experiences of these three nineteenth-century women.  Sarah Love will report on Adelaide Church, and Jean Doherty on Rhoda McConnell.  Helen Kelly Brink will tell about her great-grandmother, Maryett Kelly.”
The three women experienced the war differently, of course.  Maryett wrote in 1863, “Scottie is as busy as a bee finding all the mischief he can get in to.  He comes in once in awhile and lays down on the floor and says ma I am tired.  He is a grate deal of company for me theas long lonesome days and sis is as good as she can be.  John, how I do wish you could see her.  She is as fat as a little pig.”

Maryette Babcock Kelly 001

On the other hand, Rhoda McConnell in 1865 wrote from her teacher’s desk, “Oh Dick, Angi Riman has sent her baby about 2 years old down to school today and I don’t thank her for it. For I have enough trouble without being bothered with such little rats and I’ve a mind to send it right home….”
Teaching one-room schools was not as idyllic as we’d like to think. But at least her soldier friend came home (albeit without the use of one arm), and, in his own description, they married to live happily ever after. John Kelly came safe home as well.

Rhoda McConnell

Adelaide Church was from a different economic stratum and at a different stage of life than the others, at finishing school in Buffalo as the war drew on. In many ways she seems not to have noticed the great calamity much… in one diary entry she gives equal weight to a game of chess, and the fall of Fort Sumter.

Adelaide Church

Henry Clay Work, who lived near the end of his life at the Bath Soldiers’ Home, wrote a wildly-popular song pointing out that while patriotism was mighty important to the solders, they had other things on their minds as well.

When the shadows dance on the canvas walls
And the camp with melody rings;
‘Tis the good old song of the Stripes and Stars
That the fireside circle sings.
Of the Stripes and Stars, the Stripes and Stars
For love of which they roam;
But the final song and the sweetest one
Is the song of the Girls at Home.
So – what was life like for the girls at home? Women experienced the Civil War much as they experienced the two World Wars. They tended the kids, and the farms, on their own. They staffed the war factories. They took over jobs that were always considered men’s jobs, and they lost them when the men came home. They nursed casualties. They tried to sleep while agonizing over the next arrival of casualty lists.
Far too often, of course, those lists brought bad news. Everybody in America knew men who died in the Civil War. For some it was far more personal… a husband, brother, father, son, fiancee. That illustration from my childhood library may have been hokey, but it reflected a horrible reality. Henry Clay Work wrote another song, this one about a mother who doesn’t understand the big war or its big words.

And these are the britches he used to wear,
The very same stitches, the patch, and the tear,
But Uncle Sam’s give him a brand new pair,
When they grafted him into the army.
Oh, Jimmy, farewell,
Your brothers fell,
Way down in Alabammy.
I thought they would spare a lone widder’s prayer –
But they grafted him into the army.

Not every woman was willing to “let him go,” and whether they did or not, they didn’t just sit around waiting for casualty lists. They had lives to get on with, and they even took time to write about it, so we can look over their shoulders.
The presentation at the Bath Fire Hall is free and open to the public.

Many Histories, One Community: Chemung County Historical Sociey

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Our county historical societies are regional treasures, and Chemung County Historical Society even has a treasure vault.
Bank vault, anyhow. The Society’s home (and its Chemung Valley History Museum) are in the 1834 Chemung Canal Bank on Water Street in Elmira, where the vault is a showplace for an ever-refreshing exhibit of new acquisitions.
Just this month the main gallery reopened following a redesign and re-creation. Now there are two major exhibits in that space, beginning with “In the Valley of the Big Horn: A History of Chemung County.” Chemung derives from a Native expression naming the place where the horn was found – the “big horn” being a mammoth tusk… and a huge 11,000 year-old tusk, with its elegant curve, anchors the gallery.
The exhibit starts with Native life and its cruel disintegration during Sullivan’s invasion, and of course also includes Elmira’s time as a Civil War depot and prison camp. Visually striking are a HUGE canal lock key, a board from the old plank road down to the state line, and a model of Webb’s grist mill in Southport. A brick marked HH came from Horseheads Brick Company – and was used to build a building at Elmira College.
Even the 1950s are now history, as shown by the Airline console TV from Montgomery-Ward. That was fun, but I really enjoyed seeing the far older Trolley Card Game and the Telegraph Boy Game.
The other major exhibit here is “Mark Twain’s Elmira,” which besides showing the novelist himself also shows community life during that Gilded Age (to use a term that Mark Twain coined).
The Brick Barn Galley has a special exhibit, “’Til Death Do Us Part: Wedding and Funeral Customs in Chemung County.” This is a great visit for anybody who wants to think about the county’s past, but also about what it’s like today and what it will be like in future days.
Wedding clothes from the Victorian age and even earlier are joined by a small notebook in which Reverend Joseph Riggs recorded the weddings he performed as a traveling minister in the Twin Tiers, back before the Civil War. There were no official records back then, so notes like this might be the only way to know who was married to whom (and where, and when, and how much they paid for the ceremony).
A chuppa on loan from Congregation Kol Ami made me think of an acquaintance of mine who married her fiancee in a rail yard in Poland as they were being taken to concentration camps. She said, though, that it wasn’t a real wedding, as they didn’t have a canopy. She never saw him again, nor any of her family, nor any of his.
Muslim and Hindu weddings are being conducted in Chemung these days, and both are represented here. The Hindu wedding includes a flame (false flame in the exhibit). There’s also a miniature of a Hindu wedding.
Not being Catholic, I had never thought about a crucifix such as I saw from the 1942 Bednarchik/Novick wedding in St. Casimir’s. Presented at the time of the wedding, it includes candles and oil to be used one day for extreme unction, a feature that I found deeply moving.
The Brayton Education Room had “Elmira Will See it Through! World War I Fund-Raising Posters.” This was the golden age of the poster, guaranteeing an eye-popping exhibit. ‘Beat Back the Hun’ and ‘Remember Belgium’ appeal on the basis of German atrocities… and while propaganda blew them up, they were all too horribly real. ‘Stamp! Stamp! Stamp! The Boys Are Marching’ plays on an old Civil War song (‘Tramp, Tramp, Tramp’) to sell savings stamp. A 1919 sheet showing suggested ways to display posters uses for examples the very posters to either side. That was fun to see.
And then there was what we actually came for: “Stitched Across the Valley: A Cross Cultural Embroidery Exhibit.” This developed five key themes – social status; national and ethnic identity; industrial and domestic production; family stories; and tradition and individual innovation.
I would have liked to see the technique of each piece identified, and my observation is that making a label in 12-point type, then placing it at the foot of a dressmaker’s dummy, is an exercise in futility. But those are minor matters. All of it was interesting, and some of the pieces were arresting. I had never even heard of double-sided stitching on a sheet of transparent silk. I’ll just repeat what I wrote in my notebook: wow!
I also was not familiar with the Peruvian apiller technique, with its rounded figures and its frequent use for family and community histories. “Never Forget” commemorates the 1980-2000 deaths at government hands.
Besides advanced and unusual techniques there were printed embroidery such as a simple picture of the Fatima appearance, a historic cross-stitch sampler, a crewel scene of a barn in winter. While I liked the barn, and was staggered by the doubled-sided silk, my favorite was Aniko Farkas’s brightly-colored flowers in Hungarian kalocsa style, followed by a flowered white skirt and blouse by an unknown Polish artisan.
So – our communities are varied, and their histories are long. Drop in at the museum on Water Street, and expand your horizons.
Stitched

Changing Views and Enduring Legends: Three Special Exhibits at Rockwell Museum

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One thing great about the Rockwell Museum is its rotating schedule of special exhibitions. So even if you’ve been there… even if you were there last year… there’s more worth seeing.
Just now there are three specials up, so my son Erik and I ambled in to have a look, and we were glad we did. First off, Erik discovered that he had met one of the featured artists.
This was Judy Abbott, one painter in a three-artist show called “Painted Journeys: In the Spirit of the American West.” Judy, Eva van Rijn and K.L. McKenna are all Woodstock-Hudson Valley artists who together were the first Artists in Residence at the Museum of Northern Arizona, and this exhibition flowed from their year there.
They have three divergent styles, and we quickly agreed that we liked Judy’s best. It’s closer to a photorealist style, for instance in her paintings of a great horseshoe bend.
But… while sticking to my original thought on what-I-like-best, once I stepped back a few paces I was again and again captivated by Eva van Rijn’s canvases – Blues of Black Canyon; Vermillion Cliffs; Capturing Dawn # 2 (with a distant photographer and his tripod doing just that); and Fence Line, with its mare and colt stepping along. It seemed to me that Eva was relying more on color than on line (though Judy had some outstanding colors too), and the impact of the two painters’ works varied with the viewers’ points of view.
K.L. McKenna’s pieces also placed strong reliance on color, and far less on line or realism. “My life’s work is to illuminate the mind in an exciting new way,” she says… “not to defy tradition, but to expand associations.” Stone Mountain From Above presents the viewer with vivid coloring and a bold free hand in depiction, with four horizontal bands – grass, foothills, mountains, and sky.
Up one floor in the Members’ Gallery, I really enjoyed “Untouched by Chaos: Karl Bodmer and the American West, 1832-1834.” Bodmer accompanied German Prince Maximilian on a journey up the Missouri, largely following the Lewis and Clark route, seeing that part of the world (and its peoples) before the white invasion went from a trickle to a tidal wave. Bodmer’s detailed and energetic aquatints became engravings to accompany the prince’s book.
Fort Union on the Missouri shows the four-square palisaded fort and the surrounding Indian town, with travois (both horse-drawn and dog-drawn) and horsemen to enliven the stunning setting. One lively scene is entitled Horse Racing of the Sioux Indians Near Fort Pierre. This was actually a relatively recent development, since it took centuries for escaped stock from Spanish settlements to build up population and reach the northern plains to be adopted by the people there. Hunting the Grizzly Bear, July 18, 1832 also captures the intensity of the moment.
Many artists have portrayed Indian fights, but Bodmer had an advantage; he’d actually been in one, as Assiniboine and Cree attacked the Blackfoot in Fort MacKenzie’s shadow. And a montage of Indian Utensils and Arms has art within art, with a clear and detailed rendition of a painted buffalo robe depicting the exploits of Mato-Tope. Interestingly, the robe documents fights using bow and arrow, shield, spear, tomahawk, and long gun.
Which leads us to an exhibition of firearms from the collection of Robert Rockwell III. This goes back to the early 18th-century Brown Bess musket and its cousin the Charleville musket, each type used in the American Revolution, along with the slower but more accurate “Kentucky” rifle. The Spencer repeating rifle was a large factor in Union victory during the Civil War, though the 1873 Springfield didn’t do Custer much good at the Little Big Horn. Marines were still using the bolt-action 1903 Springfield at Guadalcanal forty years later.
I enjoyed looking at the Civil War-era Starr army revolver and its cousins, though in fact it’s the long guns that really conquered the west. Despite the movies, the short-range and inaccurate hand guns were most effective for duels and assassinations (and killing pigs, of course), and many towns simply banned them.
Which leads to a couple of newer works now on exhibit by Jason Cytacki, emphasizing our “constructed” view of the west – that we don’t really see it as it actually is (or was), but according to a legend that we’ve chosen to enjoy. His painting See the U.S.A. (From Your Chevrolet) features mountains made of cardboard, and when you go, look closely at the Chevrolet. Though properly sized for the scene, it’s actually a child’s toy truck. Even though I have the “handicap” of being a historian, I also appreciate the legends – and the chance to look behind the legends. That’s why I always enjoy the Rockwell.

Riding the Rails

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When I want to take the train to see my family in Rhode Island, I need to start out by driving 80 miles in the wrong direction– from Bath to Rochester – and get on board at the Amtrak station by the Inner Loop. Life would be much simpler (and I’d go much more often) if I could board in Bath… or Corning… or Elmira… ride to New York City, and change for the Northeast Corridor.
Well, once upon a time you could, and it wasn’t that long ago.
When DeWitt Clinton started work on the Erie Canal, he transformed the state, the nation, and New York City. Little no-account shanty towns like Syracuse, Buffalo, and Rochester started to boom. But part of that transformation entailed drying up the old Conhocton-Chemung-Susquehanna water traffic. Clinton promise that once the canal was finished (1825), the Southern Tier would get its own major transportation project.
Connectors such as the Crooked Lake Canal and the Chemung Feeder Canal soon tied Keuka Lake and the Chemung River to the Erie system, but by then a new technology was beating on the door. The Southern Tier’s major project would be a Lake Erie-New York City train line – what came to be called the Erie Railroad.
By 1851 the line was complete. President Millard Fillmore, a loyal western New Yorker, rode the ceremonial first train, shrewdly bringing along the far more-popular Daniel Webster. The story is that Webster sat in a rocking chair on a flatcar, waving to the crowds along the way.
The Erie came to Corning, then headed through Addison, Canisteo, and Hornell on its way to Dunkirk. Critically for Steuben County, the Erie’s Rochester Division also branched off from Corning, heading through Savona, Bath, Kanona, Cohocton, and Wayland. Both lines became conduits for growth.
There are 32 towns in Steuben County, and two cities. Neither city would exist without the railroad.
The Erie selected the hamlet of Hornellsville for its main repair shops, where eventually they could work on two or three dozen units at once. In 1835 the Town of Hornellsville (then much larger) had 1850 residents. Twenty-five years later it was 3843. In the 1890s, the even more-populous City of Hornell was separated out and given its own government.
Marty Muggleton, who used to be director of the Corning Chamber of Commerce, once told me, “If it hadn’t been for the Glass Works, Corning would probably be like Angelica – a pleasant little town in the valley.”
But if it hadn’t been for the railroad, the Glass Works never would have come up from Brooklyn. Corning had that Erie main line to ship product out. But the other piece of the puzzle was a short-line railroad running up from Pennsylvania, bringing coal and sand IN. Without that junction, there never would have been a Corning Glass Works. In 1835 the Town, then much larger and still called Painted Post, had a population of 1619. By 1869, a smaller Corning had 6334. In 1890 the new City alone had 8530.
By 1882 another major line, the Delaware, Lackawanna, and Western, also ran through our region, often just a few feet away from the Erie tracks. Smaller railroads such as the Shawmut, or the New York & Pennsylvania, also crisscrossed the landscape. One-track short lines joined Kanona with Prattsburgh, and Bath with Hammonsport.
Possibly Hammondsport would be much the same today if the B&H had never existed, but the INTERIM would have been very different. It’s hard to imagine that the grape and wine business would have developed so dramatically without the train to ship out product, though possibly they’d have used the steamship connection with Penn Yan. But none of us today would have heard of Glenn Curtiss. Without the rail line to send out engines, airplanes, and motorcycles, Glenn would have lived out his life in the bike shop – or else he’d have moved away from Hammondsport altogether.
So without the railroads: no Corning; no Curtiss; no Hornell; and at best a much smaller grape and wine business.
Passenger travel is, alas, no more in our region, but the railroads still run. According to Steuben County I.D.A., in that county there is one major (Class I) operator, the Norfolk Southern. They maintain that major rail yard in Gang Mills, and run 18 to 20 trains weekly on the Binghamton to Buffalo Southern Tier Line. They also have one train a day to Geneva on the Corning Secondary Line.
Then there are three smaller (Class III) operators. BH Rail Corporation (successor to the B&H) operates between Wayland and Painted Post. Western New York & Pennsylvania runs between Hornell, NY and Corey, Pennsylvania. The Wellsboro & Corning Railroad also crosses the state line, joining those two communities.
There’s always potential for more. There’s current public discussion about upgrading part of the old B&H line (now used as a siding) to the Steuben County Industrial Park north of Bath. And there’s certainly potential for excursion tours catering to tourists… though success has been spotty in the past. But no one seems to be picking up on my hopes for passenger travel to New York City. Oh, well. A man can dream.

Backyard Bird List

On our refrigerator is a yellow slip with a long list – all the bird species that we’ve seen on, from, or over our place just outside Bath village.
We started keeping a Backyard Bird List maybe thirty years ago, when the kids were little and we lived outside Allentown, Pennsylvania, and we still keep it up today. I tot up over 30 species on our list, without our having made any really vigorous efforts. We do keep up bird feeders in that Thanksgiving-to-Easter bear hibernation season, and we also have a little pond across the road from us.
Because of the pond, our “backyard” list includes the great blue heron, a four-foot wading bird that stalks about the pond seeking whom it may devour, then darting its spear-like beak for a fish or a frog. Great blues are beautiful and terrifying all at once.
Then, also thanks to the pond, there are the ducks: mallards, buffleheads, ring-neckeds, goldeneyes, and American wigeons. If I really spent some time with my binoculars, I imagine I’d turn up black ducks as well.
That little pond certainly gives us a head start on waterfowl and wading birds, but just about everybody in our region could add Canada geese to their own lists. These beautiful birds pass over in dozens or in hundreds. If we were sending audio files to extra-terrestrials, and we wanted one single sound to define North America, we would send the cry of the Canada goose in flight.
Where we live, we’re also treated to regular flights by flocks of rock doves… or, as most of us call them, pigeons. They fly from the barn a quarter-mile up the road to the silo a quarter-mile down. And back. Again. And again. And again.
Their cousins the mourning doves graze around under our bird feeders, content with whatever droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven upon the place below.
We put out thistle seeds, peanut halves, suet, and black-oil sunflower seed, bringing in the usual feeder crowd for our part of the country. Goldfinches come in little flocks, and we watch the passage of the seasons as their yellow plumage wanes and waxes. Tufted titmice come in small groups, while chickadees dart in and out from the foliage. Juncos, like the mourning doves, tend to stay low. So do flickers.
We get the house finch and the purple finch, the house sparrow, chipping sparrow, song sparrow, white-throat sparrow. Cardinals come in pairs, blue jays in twos or threes. Starlings, of course, may show up in flocks at almost any time. Did you know that they have a beautiful song? Every once in a while, though, they throw in a grawk, just to remind you that they’re starlings. Crows flap all around, of course.
Our suet and peanuts bring in both the red-breasted nuthatch and the white-breasted nuthatch. These cute little guys like working their way down a tree trunk upside down, hunting for bugs in the bark. They tackle the suet the same way, clinging to the cage and eating away head down.
Woodpeckers like the suet too, but they prefer to say upright. We get the downy with its black-and-white coat, and the red-bellied, with its dramatic red head. (The names were made up centuries ago, by guys who shot the birds and then studied them in dissection pans with magnifying glasses. You can’t really spot the red belly in the field.)
We’ve enjoyed some specialty sightings, too, of birds who aren’t really regulars, at least with us: the bluebird, the northern oriole, and the ruby-throated hummingbird.
And of course we have our hawks and their cousins. The kestrel is a small darting bird, and the harrier a larger creature with more deliberate movements. Both of them hover when they’re zeroing in on prey. The sharp-shinned hawk is between them in size, while the big turkey vulture soars lazily, often in big creepy flocks, sniffing out carrion miles away.
And all that’s just from the yard, with no more effort than some bird feeders and a pair of binoculars. If we put in some time after dark, no doubt we’d score some owls, while with five minutes of driving we could pick up bald eagles, osprey, swans, and wild turkeys.
Apart from kangaroos, birds and us are the only creatures that go on two feet. And they’re ALL around us! Anytime we step outdoors… anytime we look through the window… we’re with the birds. In apartment blocks… or office blocks… birds remind us that we’re only barely keeping nature at bay. Which, when you think about it, is one of the best things about our lives.
*****
Join us 4 PM Friday, March 7 for the illustrated talk SPRING MIGRATION: BIRDS OF STEUBEN COUNTY, by Dr. Randy Weidner — Steuben County Historical Society Winter Lecture Series, free and open to the public at Bath Fire Hall.