Monthly Archives: June 2014

Finger Lakes Boating Museum — At Last!

At last! On June 21 I got to do what I’ve been wanting to do for a longtime – walk into the Finger Lakes Boating Museum!

FLBM has been sort of a local Flying Dutchman for 15 years or so, ever wandering without ever finding a port. It’s been famous as the museum with a collection (and a pretty good one, too), but no place to put it.

When I was director a Curtiss Museum, I let them keep some of it there. Besides being neighborly, it added another exhibit dimension for our own visitors. Another boat here, another boat there, and it started to add up. Eventually I said they could bring a new one in, as long as they took one out. They brought in a good-sized sailboat, and took out a dinghy.

Actually, I thought that was hilarious, and of course I was also a Boating Museum member. But now the museum has a place of its own, and a goodly collection of these marvelous watercraft is on exhibit for the public at last.

FLBM is at the old Taylor winery (originally Columbia Winery) in Pleasant Valley, just about across from the Great Western Visitors Center. So the region’s newest museum experience is located in one of the oldest museum structures – a 19th-ventury winery with a very European feel.

The main level has the ship’s store, the boat workshops, and several large galleries of boats on exhibit. Wandering chest-deep in classic boats, for all the world like a swimmer near the dock, the best description I could come up with was: a dull gleam. That may seem self-contradictory, and perhaps a dignified gleam would be better. Most of these boats are wooden – sanded, varnished, and polished to a shine, but it’s the shine of maturity – the amused faces of creatures who’ve seen more years than we have, and who have weathered the storms.

Unsurprisingly there were several Penn Yan boats. Penn Yan was the most prolific maker on our inland lakes, and had just about the longest history. There always seemed to be crowds around the 1931 Penn Yan Imperial Runabout J1 inboard. Not only does it have a close-at-hand local interest, but many visitors can remember good times in Penn Yan boats.

The oldest boat on exhibit was a 1905-1914 Sutherland double-ender, made in Branchport. The newest was a 1990 Sutherland, built to reproduce a 1906 model. Five generations of Sutherlands have made boats on Keuka Lake.

While the double-ender can be readily rowed in either direction without having to turn, others among the rowboats and troutboats have the more typical slightly-arched rear deck often found on boats made near Keuka Lake. This deck is bordered by a half-round metal molding, to keep metal fishlines from scoring the wood as the fisherman trolls.

Besides the Penn Yan and Sutherland products, I also noted boats by Emmons; Dundee; Mitchell; Morehouse; Charles Ernst; and George Pragel. Pragel, who had plenty of experience working wood at Gunlocke, made boats for 40 years in Wayland – not usually thought of as a center of Finger Lakes boating.

Besides the canoes, rowboats, sailboats, and power boats, there’s also an exhibit space for Finger Lakes steamboats. The biggest boats have the smallest room, but it couldn’t be otherwise. Those huge vessels that carried hundreds of tons of grapes and tens of thousands of passengers are represented mostly by models.

Also on the third-floor main level are the boat shop and finishing room. Obviously maintenance, conservation, and restoration are vital activities here. But in addition to that the museum is putting a large emphasis on education – hands-on education – in creating and caring for boats. This museum has reached the point where it too must be considered a manufacturer of Finger Lakes boats.

On the lowest level are the old caves and vaults with their giant wine vats. The Boating Museum recognizes that it’s a steward for the winemaking heritage of the facility. Among other things, they expect to rent this space out for small groups and meetings.

It’s exciting to be in on an opening day, and exciting to think about the future. The museum will develop and mature its exhibits, but it is already taking its place as part of the Hammondsport tourism offering. Right in the immediate village environs are the Boating Museum, the Curtiss Museum, the Great Western Visitor Center, and the Greyton Taylor Wine Museum at Bully Hill – adding up to quite a few reasons to spend time in Hammondsport… not even counting the lake, the village, the other wineries, and the great outdoors.

Anyhow – congratulations to the folks at the Finger Lakes Boating Museum – home at last!

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Meet the Neighbors: Eagles and Ospreys

A couple of weeks ago I was walking trails in the Spencer Crest Nature Center at Corning Community College, and stopped to watch a hawk spiraling upward above me. Moments later the hawk swooped downward after a bald eagle passing by, and pestered it out of sight.
The next day I was stopped at the Washington Square traffic light in Bath, looking southward along Liberty Street. In the distance, out of the village, past the Conhocton, under Mossy Bank, an eagle rose spiraling into the sky, gained altitude, then glided off eastward just above the ridge.
I was well into my thirties before I saw my first eagle, soaring past almost in arm’s length at Hawk Mountain in Pennsylvania, where my family and I spent many happy hours. I had been in my twenties when I first saw an osprey, a great bird with a wingspan almost matching an eagle’s, and like the eagle a bird whose favored prey is fish.
Both, as I grew up, were rarities plunging toward extinction, partly due to habitat devastation and partly due to massive overuse of DDT – a persistent broad-spectrum pesticide that collects in fish, then builds up in these great birds that eat the fish, thinning out their eggshells so that scarcely any stay intact long enough to hatch.
Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring went a long way toward alerting us to this tragedy, and provoking change. By the way, in certain circles there’s a propaganda that Rachel Carson was an anti-business fanatic with the blood of millions of malaria victims on her hand, because she inspired the banning of DDT. But Carson, a rare woman scientist of her day, never called for banning DDT, and in fact it isn’t banned. She called for using it more narrowly and more wisely, so that we would no longer have, for example, children walking to and from school in clouds of the stuff being laid down from airplanes, and being told it was perfectly harmless. It wasn’t.
In the late ‘eighties I was a volunteer field researcher for the Pennsylvania Atlas of Breeding Birds. Over a seven-year period we confirmed a total of seven breeding eagle pairs for the entire commonwealth. That same study for the same period found eight active osprey nests in Pennsylvania, although some may have been used in more than one year.
Much has gotten worse environmentally in the 25 years since then, but eagles and ospreys are doing better. I wouldn’t be surprised if our immediate area had as many breeding eagles and ospreys today as all of Pennsylvania had back then. One site in Bath has an eagle nest and an osprey nest within sight of each other, although the osprey aren’t using theirs this year – one may have died. Steuben County, with its waters, cliffs, and extensive forests, is currently a growth area for nesting bald eagles.
These are BIG creatures. A bald eagle’s wing span can reach 90 inches, whereas an osprey must be satisfied with a “mere” six feet. The turkey vulture is our only other hawk-like bird in their league. Of these three, the osprey is the most streamlined, the eagle the most robust, with massive beak and talons.
Both of these marvelous birds, as we say, love to feed on fish. The noble eagle actually specializes in picking up carrion. The osprey (formerly called fish hawk) is a more aggressive hunter. What a sight it is to see a huge osprey plunge from a height into a lake or stream, disappear for a few seconds, and then suddenly fly up out of the water into the sky, bearing in its talons an utterly bewildered fish. Once while canoeing on the Delaware I got to see what I’d only read about before – a flying osprey fiddling its fish from talon to talon until he got it facing head into the line of flight. This seems like a waste of attention and energy, but I suppose it’s more aerodynamic that way.
Once they were hunted out as vermin, but today it’s illegal (and rightly so) to harm these marvelous birds, to keep one, or to possess even a feather, with certain exceptions for rehabilitators and for ceremonial use by Native Americans. We are honored to have the eagle and the osprey as new-immigrant neighbors. Keep your eye peeled for a sight of them.

Finger Lakes Boating Museum Has a New Home in Pleasant Valley

The Finger Lakes Boating Museum finally has a home, set to open for the public on June 21. The Meade family has gifted the museum with part of the old Taylor Wine facility in Pleasant Valley.

The extension of the vale of Keuka Lake, Pleasant Valley connects the north-south lake (at Hammondsport) with the east-west Conhocton River (which eventually flows to the Chesapeake) at Bath.  Long before the coerced dispossession of the Seneca, a significant Indian trail ran through the valley, roughly following our current County Route 88, then divided down each shore as do our current state routes 54 and 54A.  Once the Crooked Lake Canal was established (1831), the produce of five counties traveled down Pleasant Valley to Hammondsport (a true port in those days) for transshipment northward into the Erie Canal system.

What’s now Route 88 was the main road between Bath and Hammondsport… the road on which teen-aged Glenn Curtiss pedaled his bicycle, and along which Alexander Graham Bell motored to inspect Curtiss’s pioneer airplanes.  The Bath & Hammondsport Railroad followed the same route.

The little hamlets of Rheims and Pleasant Valley were communities of their own in those days, with a grange, a depot, a cemetery, and a school… first a plank structure, then an octagon, then a lovely four-room school which operated until about 1960.  Land agent Charles Williamson donated the school-and-cemetery lot (on behalf of the investors in Britain) back in the 1790s.  The grange and the Rheims depot still stand, along with the Stony Brook Farm barn, made world-famous as the backdrop to Curtiss’s dramatic flights in 1908.

The grape-and-wine story starts in earnest in the late 1850s, and when it came, it came quickly.  The 1860 state gazetteer makes no mention at all of grapes on Keuka Lake, but the 1868 county directory shows 110 vineyards in the town of Urbana alone!  In addition, of course, are coopers, basketmakers, and a whole panoply of support services.

And there are the wineries themselves.  Pleasant Valley Wine Company (1859) was almost the first, and is now the oldest — still US Bonded Winery #1 for its state and federal district.  An Ohio wine industry had started about a decade earlier, importing European winemakers to take the lead.  Blight wrecked the Ohio vineyards just as the Keuka vineyards were getting started, making those winemakers suddenly available… and helping to explain the European feel of the oldest buildings.

The companies bought and sold each other (and their structures) over the years.  Names waxed, waned, revived, and changed.  For the FLBM property, the most significant names are Columbia, Taylor, Great Western, and Pleasant Valley.

In 1919, as World War I was ending and Prohibition beginning, Walter Taylor bought the Columbia Winery; he would sell the Bully Hill homestead ten years later.  Since so much of his business was in grape juice and sacramental wines, he was somewhat insulated from Prohibition.  Son Greyton proposed the famous “Taylor Wine Juices” promotion, which were kits for legal home winemaking.  Greyton’s brother Fred was one of five new owners who revived the Bath and Hammondsport Railroad after the catastrophic 1935 flood.

The original Walter Taylor died in 1934, and the firm continued as a private family company.  In 1936 they began the manufacture of champagne, and in 1940 dropped non-alcoholic products.   A stock offering in 1961 raised capital to buy the Pleasant Valley Wine Company, with Greyton as manager.  Eventually the family sold out to corporate ownership, and for a time Taylor was the largest employer in Steuben County, after the Corning Glass Works.  But a succession of corporate owners neglected and finally closed the operation, perhaps to reduce competition.  Mike Doyle, who had been part of the operation, bought the PV label and revived it once Mercury bought the properties.

Pleasant Valley is a very special place, and it’s always been recognized as such.  Finger Lakes Boating Museum will make an outstanding addition to the community.

The Trials of Canandaigua — William Morgan and the Masons

In September of 1826, William Morgan was arrested on trumped-up charges in Genesee County. Instead of being jailed locally, though, he was then hustled to Canandaigua for trial. But before the trial he was released by night into the hands of a shadowy stranger who supposedly had paid his bail. The stranger took Morgan into a closed carriage and…
… Morgan was never seen again.
This incident, so reminiscent of the after-dark “release” of Goodman, Schwerner and Chaney before their murder by Mississippi police in 1964, made Canandaigua the pivot for yet another significant 19th-century legal case. In previous weeks we’ve looked at the 1800 trial of Jemima Wilkinson for blasphemy; the 1842 drumhead court-martial and hanging of young Canandaiguan Philip Spencer on the high seas; and the 1873 conviction of Susan B. Anthony for the crime of voting.
In every one of these cases, the surface charges were surrogates for deeper motivations. The issue with Morgan was not his debts, nor the charge that he had stolen a shirt and tie. The issue was that he was fiercely opposing the Masons.
That may seem bewildering in a day when Freemasons are largely looked on as community supporters with rituals that outsiders consider silly but harmless. But in the 1700s and 1800s Masonry was much more widespread, and at the same time more selective. Since it was a SECRET society, feverishly lurid tales were told of what they did behind closed doors. And since members were often among the most prominent in the community, the resentful suspicion grew that Masons rigged the hirings, the promotions, the financial affairs, and the elections.  They seemed to form an elite in a country that was becoming increasingly anti-elite.
There were also religious reservations about the Masons; their acknowledgement of an undefined Supreme Being was far too vague for many believers. And indeed men who disdained traditional religion (George Washington and Benjamin Franklin, to name two) may have found Masonry’s indefinite religiosity an acceptable substitute. Mormonism didn’t exist yet, but its later ties with Masonry wouldn’t enthuse the orthodox, either.
Morgan’s beef at first wasn’t about any of these things. He wasn’t out, and wanting in. He wasn’t in, and deciding to get out. He wasn’t out, and happy to stay out. Morgan was in and wanted further in, but furiously found himself blocked.
Morgan had been admitted to the lodge in LeRoy, but wanted to transfer to the more-prestigious lodge in Batavia. Batavia wouldn’t have him – some say because of drink, or possibly he wasn’t considered refined enough. Whatever the reason was, the enraged Morgan, now soured on the order, set to work on a book exposing (and condemning) the secrets of Masonry.
To those who took their oaths of secrecy seriously, this was their worst nightmare – the insider who could spill the beans. Moreover, the fact was that Morgan could print any horror story he wanted. Bound by their oaths, they couldn’t set the record straight. And, of course, if they WERE in fact using the lodges to grease the wheels of commerce and power, that would come out too. Ads against Morgan appeared in the papers, and arson was apparently tried against the publisher.
So… arrested and jailed in Batavia, bailed out by his publisher, re-arrested almost immediately and haled to Canandaigua, released in mysterious circumstances in the dead of night – what happened to William Morgan?
The mysterious carriage reportedly appeared at Fort Niagara, and rumor spread that Morgan was immured there. Rumor ALSO said that he had been taken out into the Niagara River and dumped overboard. In October Morgan’s wife (25 years his junior) identified a body washed ashore – but a Canadian woman identified the same body as HER husband. Newspaperman Thurlow Weed, who was ramping up an anti-Masonry campaign, declared that the body was “a good enough Morgan,” and unleashed the presses against the murdering, secretive, un-American lodge.
Canandaigua’s John Spencer – coincidentally father of the Philip Spencer later hanged at sea – was appointed special prosecutor to investigate the disappearance. Governor DeWitt Clinton vainly offered a $1000 reward for news on Morgan’s whereabouts. Masons insisted that Morgan had fled the country to start a new life under an assumed name, but that story didn’t find many buyers. Three Masons were convicted of kidnapping Morgan, and served prison sentences for the crime.  Most contemporaries, and most historians since, figured that they also murdered him.
The Morgan mystery only fueled sales of the book, and Thurlow Weed’s campaign gave birth to the Anti-Masonic Party. Many Anti-Masonics later drifted into the Whigs, and eventually became Republicans. During its heyday, though, the Anti-Masonics created the national nominating convention, and the party platform. They elected two governors of Vermont. Millard Fillmore, William Henry Harrison, William H. Seward, and John Quincy Adams all ran for office on the Anti-Masonic ticket, which ALSO opposed well-known Mason Andrew Jackson. Jackson was one of 14 or so Masonic Presidents, with Washington the first and Gerald Ford the latest.
Canandaigua’s role in the affair was brief and tangential, but it set western New York ablaze, and changed the course of American politics, government, and history.