Monthly Archives: September 2014

The Birds We Used to Have

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Four years ago Game and Fish Magazine named our area as a November hunting hotspot… “where the ruffed grouse still reigns as the king of game birds.”
Hunters, birders, and the grouse themselves had better enjoy it while they can. In the time between 2000 and 2020 scientists are seeing our area degrade as a suitable winter range for the ruffed grouse. By 2050 it will be marginal at best, and by 2080 the explosive flutter of the grouse will be something old people tell their grandchildren about. Hunting’s a big sector of our local economy, but grouse won’t be part of it.
The National Audubon Society has completed a massive seven-year study examining a century of bird and climate records, and working up our best understanding of future trends. One of the things they’ve found is a disaster for the ruffed grouse. It will probably lose over half of its current range because the climate will make it unsuitable – without having anyplace to go.
Ducks Unlimited recently enthused about the vast flocks of black ducks, mallards, and pintails at Montezuma National Wildlife Refuge. Our region still looks pretty good for mallards (they’re very adaptable) and pintails by 2080. But black ducks would find it hard to hold on in those winters.
It’s not just game birds, either. By 2080 our area will no longer be suitable summer range for the bobolink, that lovely songbird, celebrated by Thoreau, whose flocks I’ve found on country lanes in Urbana, Bath, and Tuscarora. Gone as well will be the ovenbird, with its teacher-teacher-teacher call in the woods. Scarlet tanagers will not come to our feeders. Common mergansers who come here will be teetering right on the edge of their range.
We have already seen changes wrought in the wildlife by the warming of the world. In the early 1970s cardinals were an uncommon sight in my home town of Hope Valley, Rhode Island. They were unseen 35 miles north, where I went to college in Providence. Now they’re common sights at our winter feeders here, even farther north. It used to be that the cardinal and the mockingbird greeted you when you crossed the Mason-Dixon Line.
There are 588 native species of birds in North America. The Audubon study projects that over the next 66 years 314 will be in serious trouble because of the climate. From that group 188 species will lose more than half of their range, though with potential to gain some territory elsewhere (climate-threatened). The other 126 will suffer a net loss of over 50% (climate-endangered).
Of course, that’s ONLY looking at climate. The fact that a new range may be climate-suitable does NOT mean that it has the right food, or suitable nesting sites. And it does NOT take into account competition with other species who may also be crowding into the lifeboat.
It also does NOT take into account other changes to the range. For instance, right here in our area, look at the space south of Mossy Bank, Spencer Hill, and Harris Hill, running across the state line into Pennsylvania. It’s a high, heavily-wooded plateau, and might be suitable for any number of woodland species under new climate conditions.
BUT… what if, over the next 66 years, large sections of that forest become housing developments? What if it’s checkerboarded by gas drilling operations? What if there’s a major forest fire? What if there’s extensive lumbering?
In those cases, all the suitable climate in the world won’t matter to those woodland species. And stuff like that WILL happen over 66 years – maybe here, maybe elsewhere, maybe both.
For all our long history as human beings, we’ve had a very successful response whenever we’ve used an area past its limits: move. That worked, more or less, when OUR range and our population were small – there was always plenty more space. That doesn’t work any more. There’s noplace left to go. Our trash has caught up to us. It might be invisible, but it’s there in the air we breathe. We’ll watch the results, right outside our windows, and tell our grandkids about the birds we used to have.

Welcome to the Yearbook Office!

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A few weeks ago an older couple came into the Steuben County Historical Society headquarters at Magee House in Bath; they wanted to look at Bath-Haverling yearbooks.
After perusing them for a spell, the lady asked to buy several issues from our duplicate stock. I got them for her, she paid us $20 apiece, and they left happy.
The next morning they came rushing back in, greatly excited. “Do you know what you did?” she asked. “You sold me my own yearbook back – 61 years later.”

While it’s well-known that Steuben County Historical Society dedicates a lot of time and effort to documenting almost 400 one-room schools — we have a whole shelf of town-by-town binders for that purpose — many people don’t realize what a tremendous resource our yearbook collection is.
This occupies almost an entire wall in the Reading Room at Magee House, and runs to about 800 volumes. Though we have a few junior high yearbooks, our focus is collecting yearbooks (or earlier equivalents) from Steuben County secondary schools graduating a senior class.
Interesting, you may say, and even impressive, but is it useful? The answer is yes. Among the projects we have used our yearbook collection for:
*Using the ads to establish Liberty Street businesses for the Heritage of Bath bicentennial book.
*Providing photo scans of an athlete for a birthday present.
*Helping reunion planners find classmates.
*Determining World War II dead to create the Hammondsport School Gold Star memorial wall.
*Helping two branches of a family locate each other.
*Using the ads to identify an optometrist whose name was found on a turn-of-the-century eyeglass case.
*Checking the dates that particular administrators have served.
*Putting together a presentation on Corning in the 1950s.
*Information on school athletics, including what opportunities are available for men and women.
For any issue, we try to keep the best copy we can find in the collection. Any extras become sales stock, with the proceeds helping support the society, or trading stock to obtain missing issues. A few schools pass on a copy of each new issue.

Here are some interesting items about our collection.

Oldest issue Bath-Haverling, 1891
Longest complete run 95 years for Bath-Haverling, 1905-2000
Longest gap Canisteo, 1923-1956
Oldest hardcover Hornell Volcano 1932
Recent important acquisitions: a nearly complete set from Christian Learning Center/Corning Christian Academy; 36 Hornell volumes from the duplicates at Hornell Public Library; a 1926 North Star (Corning Northside) from Corning Community College.

Some curios
The 1952 Anovas from Savona is printed in Bath on single sides, from typing rather than typesetting. Typed originals are fairly common for small schools until the 1950s.
The 1963 Poster from Painted Post is the final issue for that school.
The 1949 Poster has a space travel theme.
The 1939 Hornell Maple Leaf has a New York World’s Fair cover. Hornell’s yearbook was titled Volcano until 1932.
Noted comic book artist Dick Ayers made his first publications in the Hammondsport Vintage during the late 1930s.
Someone in Bath was keeping an eye on current events at the turn of the century. Titles of senior publications include The Columbian Senior (1893 — year of Columbian Exposition in Chicago); The Senior X-Ray (1896 — X-rays described and named in 1895); The Haverling Radium (1910 — radium isolated as a pure metal that year); The Blue and the Gray (1912 — semi-centennial of Civil War); The Haverling Bugler (1917 — US enters World War I); The U-18 (1918 — u-boats menace shipping); NC-19 (1919 — Navy-Curtiss flying boat NC-4 makes first flight across the Atlantic)

If you have Steuben County yearbooks you’re not sure what to do with, check with us to see whether they’re copies we need! The information in your donation might make a big difference. Or, if you’re missing a copy, maybe we’ve got a duplicate for sale!

“The Roosevelts”

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Many folks locally and around the country have been dedicating evenings lately to “The Roosevelts: An Intimate History,” the new Ken Burns documentary series on PBS.
No question that Theodore, Franklin, and Eleanor among them shook the world. But before they were President, Franklin and Theodore were each governors of the Empire State. Before she was first lady of the world (in Harry Truman’s phrase), Eleanor Roosevelt was first lady of New York.
So some of their effect on us locally was direct and personal. There are persistent stories about Franklin stopping at one of the resorts on Keuka Lake, though I’ve never been able to verify them. We were also on the campaign hustings, a route which ran along the railroads in Theodore’s day. In 1898 he spoke to a large crowd at the Erie Depot in Corning, where T.G. Hawkes employees attended on company time. Two years later he was back in Corning, running for the vice-presidency.
When Theodore’s campaign train stopped at Cameron Mills, he spotted the milk station manager with his nine children on the loading dock. “This is the most prosperous place I have been to yet,” TR quipped (he only had six himself). I believe he also spoke at least once in Bath.
By the time Franklin ran for governor in 1928, auto was the way to go. Since his calamitous bout with polio seven years earlier, worries about his strength and health were pervasive. So he barnstormed every county in the state by car, starting in Middletown and running across the Southern Tier, then up along the lakeshore and down the Hudson to New York City. In one day he woke up at Elmira and raced to Olean (largely over dirt roads), speaking at both places – not to mention at Corning, Bath, and Hornell along the way. Besides blasting Republican leaders as “stupid,” and promising continued Progressivism and reform, Roosevelt jauntily asked every crowd, “Do I look sick to you?” and beamed as they shouted back their answer.
He won, of course, the grueling three-week campaign proving that he could do what even a fully healthy man would quail at, and smile the whole way.
While finding plenty of support in a union town like Hornell, out here in the west he was hampered by the hereditary Republicanism of many voters. Hammondsporters gave him their ballots for President in 1932, when he promised to repeal Prohibition. That accomplished, they went back to Alf Landon four years later.
Through the thirties many communities, including Corning, held balls on Franklin’s birthday to raise money for the fight against polio. On August 23, 1933, empowered by the new National Industrial Recovery Act, Corning Glass Workers finally got a union. This was apparently an idea whose time had come, since they voted 1650 to 113 in favor, with 180 abstentions.
A student once asked me if New Deal construction projects had been necessary. I replied that if you thought a dirt road was fine, with a bridge that could carry a horse and wagon, then they hadn’t been needed. But if you though that our bridges and highways should carry tractor-trailer trucks, that was a different story.
For some mystifying reason tradition describes New Deal jobs as do-nothing projects, and the workers as lazy bums who got paid for leaning on shovels. Some of the useless boondoggles accomplished by these bums include Hoover Dam; the Golden Gate Bridge; and LaGuardia Airport.
Locally we can thank the New Deal for Stony Brook Park; Dansville High School (now Genesee Community College); Glenn Curtiss Memorial School; the Painted Post post office – most of them still in use.
In the early 1930s a supervisor of the poor in Steuben County, while admitting that hundreds, if not thousands of desperate people were being helped by state and federal programs, grumped that these programs were making people lazy and dependent. These are the same people, of course, who fought through the Depression, won the Second World War, and built the biggest economic boom our country has ever enjoyed.
And they couldn’t have built that boom without the highways, harbors, bridges, airports, schools, post offices, and power systems of the New Deal. They couldn’t have bought their homes, or gotten their college educations, without Franklin’s G.I. Bill of Rights.
In 1996 Bob Dole campaigned for president, with the awkward task of running against peace and prosperity. One of his most memorable proposals was less meat inspection – an idea that stunningly failed to enthuse the public, who preferred living in Theodore Roosevelt’s world. On another question, after stumbling briefly, Dole finally told his questioners, look, this is America – we’re not going to let children go hungry… showing that he himself was living in Franklin’s world.
Every person who picks up a prescription, or buys a cold remedy, with confidence that they’ll be safe, is living in Theodore’s world. Every patient with pre-existing conditions who can now buy health insurance is living in Theodore’s world, for he campaigned on universal health care 110 years ago.
Every American who deposits money in a bank without worrying, or who gets a Social Security payment, or belongs to a union – or who buys a bottle of wine — is living in Franklin’s world. Every woman who thinks she should be able to think for herself, and plan her life without others confining her, is living in Eleanor’s world. Every African American who thinks he should have the same chances every other American has, is living in the world of the Roosevelts. Without their dreams, their ideals, their convictions, and their accomplishments, or lives would be very different.

Travel and Tourism — New Deal Style

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New Deal work programs built the Glenn Curtiss Memorial School, the Painted Post post office, the Arkport dam.  Civilian Conservation Corps crews developed Stony Brook State Park, and created soil conservation projects.
But also part of the New Deal were the Federal Artists Project (which created the post office mural in Painted Post) and the Federal Writers Project.
One notable accomplishment of the Writers Project was creation of lengthy hardcover travel guides for each state.  This gave the writers work, but it was also aimed to stimulate tourism business, and with it gasoline sales… not to mention work for printers, and revenue for booksellers.
The New York State guide describes power boating on Keuka Lake and the wineries, which “grow more famous each year,” at Hammondsport, besides including a photo of a champagne cellar at Rheims.
That’s all in the overview, but then the guide suggests numerous auto routes you can take on your own through the Empire State.  Four of them pass through Steuben.

One tour goes from Elmira to Olean, on what was then State Route 17.  The guide suggests visiting Corning and the Corning Glass Works, emphasizing this advice with a photo of a glass blower and another of the 200” disc (miniature discs sold as souvenirs).  The showrooms are open to the public, and the plant by appointment.  The Glass Works are famous for Pyrex, glass fibres (shades of the future!), and the “very fine decorative glassware” at the Steuben Division.
Your route then takes you to Painted Post, where people are largely employed by foundries, machine shops, and Ingersoll-Rand, and then through Erwin (a hamlet) and Jasper, where you find the junction with State Route 21.  That’s the end of the Steuben descriptions on this route.

A Penn Yan-Hammondsport-Bath tour runs along State Route 54, but this is primarily what we call 54A, the West Lake Road.  After working around Bluff Point and through Branchport, then heading south, the guide points out Keuka Lake’s connections with aviation history, pointing out Glenn Curtiss and his accomplishments.  Hammondsport “is proud of the title, ‘Cradle of  American Aviation.’”  The tour then passes Stony Brook Farm, mentioning Curtiss’s flights there, especially the July 4 June Bug flight in 1908.
Hammondsport, of course, is also “a center of the New York State champagne industry,” and the next feature along the route is Pleasant Valley Wine Company.  The guide treats us to a lengthy description of the champagne process before sending us by the Fish Hatchery and down to Bath, where the tour ends at the junction with U.S. Route 15.

A Pulteneyville-Naples-Hornell-state line tour enters Steuben at Wayland, the northern junction with U.S. 15.  It proceeds to Hornell, a town “made” by the Erie Railroad and then the home of 27-acre Elim Bible School, which the writers apparently considered a significant attraction all by itself.  “Outsiders come to watch the camp meetings….  The worshippers, sitting around in a circle, listen to the music of a three-piece orchestra, maintaining an unbroken posture for hours at a stretch with no outward sign of physical discomfort; here and there one rises, raises his eyes heavenward, and chants hymn fragments; then, eyes partly closed, mumbling as in a trance, several throw their arms above their heads, cry out, and roll on the ground in the hysteria of emotion; all become convulsed with joy, and even the onlookers take the contagion and smile at one another with unaccustomed cordiality.”
After giving some history on George Hornell and Benjamin Crosby, the guide directs us on through Canisteo (stopping for the tale of Kanisteo Castle in colonial days) to Jasper, where the Steuben information again ends at the junction with State 15.

Lastly there’s a Rochester-Bath-Painted Post-Lawrenceville tour.  This also enters the county at Wayland, the junction with State 21 and a stopping place on the old Elmira-Buffalo stagecoach route.  Once the Erie railroad came in, “German immigrants settled here and gave the place a reputation for hard work and thrift,” making Steuben “one of the greatest potato-growing counties in the country.”  Waylanders also raise peas, corn, and beans, besides operating chair and silk factories.
The route then takes you to Stony Brook Park, where a 25-cent parking fee will gain you access to 560 acres of rough, rocky country, then being improved by a federal work relief project.
On your way to Avoca (which we only skirt) you cross the site of a U.S. Soil Service soil erosion project, put into effect after the horrible 1935 flood.  Avocans, we are told, manufacture brooms, hockey sticks, spools, reels, and potato graders.  The writers also pass on the story of the farmer who discouraged theft of his firewood by adding in a little gunpowder.
Then you come to the rich farming area of Bath, where busy workers make saddlery, ladders, and knit goods.  Pulteney Square, we’re assured, is lined with business blocks and buff-colored county buildings.  After a few Charles Williamson stories we’re off to Painted Post, the junction with State Route 17 and the last mention of Steuben County.

“Over Here:” The Great War in the Small Town of Hammondsport”

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In Hammondsport, in June of 1914, sixteen year-old Katherine Masson, resplendent in her white dress, prepared to christen the Curtiss flying boat “America” with a bottle of Great Western champagne. “Mother often spoke of that day,” her son Charles Champlin later wrote, “and how someone had forgotten to score the bottle, so that the handsome naval lieutenant had to take it from her and break it.”
Just a few days later another teenager stepped off the sidewalk in Sarajevo and pumped bullets into the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, igniting a gigantic war… indeed, a series of gigantic wars would snatch out even thirty years later to send teen-aged Charles Champlin into combat.
Curtiss’s huge flying boat was a “hands-across-the-sea” project, aimed at bringing the continents together, but it was quickly shipped to England as a war machine.
The Great War, as they called it back then, transformed America along with the rest of the world. Corning Glass Works seized the market share of two products traditionally imported from Germany – lab ware and Christmas ornaments.
But no town locally was shaken as thoroughly as Hammondsport, where the British tossed Glenn Curtiss order after order for airplanes – first in hundreds, then in thousands.
It was clear right from the start that these orders could never be filled from the little Finger Lakes village, and by the end of the year the town quaked to news that Curtiss was relocating to Buffalo. Curtiss soon had TWO giant factories there, plus a Canadian division, plus subsidiaries, licensees, and contractors from Massachusetts to California. Willys-Morrow in Elmira made engines for Curtiss. Fay and Bowen in Geneva made flying boat hulls.
But the Hammondsport plant also kept humming, as a prototype shop and also making engines for export. Indeed, it vastly expanded its work force and ran shifts 24-6, soon becoming a cuckoo in the Hammondsport nest.
Curtiss built new houses for new workers, but it was a drop in the bucket. Rooms were soon packed to bursting in Hammondsport, and also in Bath. Five buses a day ran back and forth between the towns, plus B&H Railroad runs. The newspaper wonderingly reported that eight men from Avoca were driving to Hammondsport by auto – every day! – sixteen miles! – to work at the plant. After prolonged and bitter debate, the town permitted Sunday movies. Otherwise, one correspondent opined, the Curtiss men simply wandered the streets on Sunday, looking for something to occupy their attention.
Out on the hillside, near where the Curtiss Memorial School is now, rows of airplane engines ran day and night to be tested before shipping. At least one man was killed when he stumbled into a propeller, and when you came over the hill from Bath, you could hear the engines running in Hammondsport. What must it have been like in the village itself?
Two Curtiss workers were arrested for sabotage, and two former workers for espionage.
Admirals and generals circulated through town, along with future admirals and generals, and officials from around the world. A British cricket team squared off against an American baseball team, right where the high school ball field is now. By one report the future Duchess of Windsor was in town for a while, accompanying her naval officer husband.
Despite all these visitors, and the money they brought in, the village board rejected a proposal to number the houses. Presumably if you were a native you knew where you were going, and if you weren’t a native, the natives didn’t care. They DID start paving the streets, though. But Curtiss executives from Buffalo constantly carped about the Civil War statue in the intersection of Lake and Main Streets. When it went up in 1901, apparently no one gave the slightest thought to autos. Fifteen years later it presented a major traffic problem.
All this turmoil was bad enough, but at least it was lucrative. When the war ended abruptly in 1918 the Curtiss plant closed at the end of the year, never to reopen. On top of that, Prohibition went into effect. Hammondsport had had a wild ride with Glenn Curtiss for seventeen years or so. Now they got a head start on the Great Depression.
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I’ll be giving a presentation, “’Over Here:’ The Great War in a Small Town” at 4 PM Friday, September 5, in the Bath fire hall. This Steuben County Historical Society presentation is free and open to the public – please join us!