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!