Monthly Archives: November 2014

Spanish Flu Devastated Our Area, Almost a Hundred Years Ago

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Some years ago, while studying how Hammondsport experienced the First World War, I read through all the 1917-1918 issues of the Hammondsport Herald. I was puzzled to see that while there was much discussion of the so-called Spanish influenza, the Hammondsport region appeared to have been spared any deaths.
While this was possible, it also seemed to be awfully unlikely. By some calculations, this global pandemic killed one human being out of every twenty on earth. It was one of the greatest natural disasters ever, killing as many (or more) in four months than the Great War did in four years. It was a catastrophe on a par with the “Black Death,” or Native America’s population crash under European diseases. The Curtiss plant with its hundreds of overcrowded employees, and officials visiting from around the world, meant that the flu surely hit Hammondsport hard.
I later learned that information about the flu was often kept quiet — either because the whole thing was feared to be German biological warfare, or at least to prevent the enemy from learning how debilitated our forces might be.
Of course the Germans were suffering just as badly, and behaving with equal suspicion. This helps explain why the flu became Spanish. Spain was the only large neutral country in Europe, and so the only one without censorship — lots of flu news came from Spain, while everyone else was playing it close to the vest.
Also making it hard to sort out information is the fact that death certificates often specified pneumonia as the cause, which was functionally accurate, but ignores the fact that the pneumonia had been caused by the flu. The whole secrecy thing may also have encouraged pneumonia diagnoses.
Having had no luck in 1997 with the Hammondsport Herald, in 2014 I struck it rich with the Steuben Advocate, one of two weekly papers in Bath at the time and since merged with the Courier. Like today’s paper, the Advocate covered a wide circulation area, including Hammondsport.
There were two major spikes of the disease, one in early 1918 and another, even deadlier, in August through November. I looked particularly at the period which seemed worst locally — the issues of October 16, October 23, and October 30.
Screening out deaths from military causes, and deaths that were obviously not flu-related, I totted up the deaths reported in these three issues of the weekly paper, and I found deaths ascribed to:
Pneumonia 25
Influenza 14
Unstated 42
Or 81 deaths, not counting those excluded above. (In some cases these were local folks who had died elsewhere.)
By comparison, in 2014 the last three October issues of the Courier listed 11 deaths.
During this period of 1918 schools closed in Bath, Avoca, Corning, Hammondsport, Savona, and parts of Wheeler. Churches canceled services in Avoca, Corning, Prattsburgh, and South Bradford.
In Mount Morris, horse-drawn scrapers were digging graves for multiple burials. Dansville and Bath were reported as being hit hard.
Public places were closed in the Corning area, where about 3500 became ill and something like 70 died. Emergency hospitals were set up in Corning and Painted Post… the latter unit supervised by Ingersoll-Rand.
Hammondsport school children were ordered to stay on their own premises under pain of arrest. Quarantined families were kept alive by neighbors leaving food on doorstep. Churches and lodges were asked to close — BUT a suggestion to close saloons and pool rooms “met no response.” One newspaper grumpily observed that the government’s call to conserve coal conflicted with the government’s advice to keep warm and avoid the flu.
Although cases would continue for months, the worst outbreak tailed off so quickly it was almost bewildering… perhaps due as much to mutation in the virus as it was to the quarantine. By November 6, the Hammondsport flu quarantine was lifted (November 8 in Bath), just in time for jubilant crowds to celebrate the Armistice, on the eleventh day of that eleventh month.

Holiday Miniatures Show Returns to Curtiss Museum

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Twenty-four. The number of Christmas Eve. The number of days “until,” once December starts. The number of little windows on the Advent calendar, until the big one is opened.
Twenty-four. The number of miniatures shows at the Curtiss Museum, ushering in the holiday season. It’s part of our regional holiday. People who were not year born when the first show opened (in the “old” museum) can now bring their children.
That original show was a dollhouse show, but now the exhibit also includes models, miniatures, and antique toys and dolls.
Roll into the lobby, for instance, and you’re seized by Lanny Wensch’s large sawmill operation, circled (ovaled?) by a garden-scale railroad. To its left is Jim Sladish’s little Christmas village, with its two tracks of trains and Santa sleigh circling overhead. To the sawmill’s right is one of the late Carroll Burdick’s miniature carousels, music and all.
Each of these is operational; the trains run, the carousel circles, Santa’s sleigh flies, the sawmill equipment does its thing. They also show some of the range of this exhibit. The little stores and houses of the Christmas village are mostly available commercially, as of course are the trains. Likewise the sawmill’s big train and tiny engines are commercial products, but the sawmill and its setting are home-built. There’s also some repurposing. The burly millworkers started out in life as action figures of the “He-Man” type. The carousel, at the other end of the range, was largely constructed from scratch.
Range and variety are hallmarks of the show. Still in the lobby a case of large electric trains sits next to a case of paper dolls from the 1920s. A few steps away are a fleet of die-cast airplanes, and an enthralling n-gauge model railroad layout.
Out of the lobby into the main museum are case after case of dollhouses – some commercially made, some scratch-built, some assembled from kits, and some “kit-bashed” – using the kits as starting points, and going wild from there. Some are actually toys, others are works of artisanship, some are perpetual-motion hobbies, always improving but never quite finished. Many are homes, some are farms, some are stores.
And some are not true dollhouses. These are the room boxes, about the size of the proverbial breadbox. Room boxes are artisinal creations, usually in fact focusing on a single room, be it hat shop, colonial kitchen, or comfy living room.
Some of the doll houses and miniatures go back to the 19th century. Others were being finished just as the exhibit case was closed.
Running the gamut from mid-19th century to mid-20th century is a substantial exhibit of toys and dolls (see if you can find Donald Duck, and Charlie McCarthy). Our family exhibits a pressed-board toy store – a gift to my father, in the Great Depression. There are the inevitable war toys, the toy airplanes, the blocks and bowling pins. Take a look at Eva Stickler’s 19th-century doll collection. She cut material from her own dresses to make dresses for her dolls.
Of course you can always wander away to look at the airplanes, motorcycles, workshop, and other permanent museum features. But before you can do that, see if you can find:
*Will Parker’s crystal-laden railroad layout.
*Two cardstock cathedrals.
*Several dollhouses from Marie Rockwell’s collection.
*Miniatures made from toothpicks.
*Toy cars from famous movies and TV shows.
*Creations by Mickie Vollmer, who’s also operating the museum’s upcoming dollhouse and miniatures vendor show.
*A antique-Buick kiddie car, lent by Guy Bennett Jr.
*An original Studebaker sleigh – just waiting for Santa Claus!

A Decent Drive

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We took a ride on Veterans Day. We had a destination, and some business to do, but it was a beautiful warm sunny day, maybe the last gasp of fall before winter creeps in, and so it was a pleasure drive as well. We drove from Bath to Canandaigua, along what some have called “the road to the grapes and the pies.”
We could have gone along Route 415 out to Kanona, and then north on 53. But we elected the more direct course, along County Route 13, or Mitchellsville Road. This takes you out of Bath proper through three-generational Bluegill Farms, with its small apple orchard, small fock of sheep and some cattle, amongst extensive planted fields. It’s like someone drew a line with a ruler as you pass from the built-up village to farm country. Deer pass in and out pretty frequently (one bumped into Joyce’s car one evening, with no damage to either). Coyotes howl at night, and the occasional bear lumbers through.
The harvested fields are a magnet for flocks of geese and gulls, especially at this time of year. A little quieter just now is Hickory Hill Camping Resort, which just a few weeks ago was humming with dozens of RVs and campers, not to mention the cabins, pools, pond, and miniature golf. A spur trail here climbs straight up the slope to join the Finger Lakes Trail along the ridge.
We cross the FLT main trail just before reaching the hamlet of Mitchellsville with its little cemetery and its Methodist church. We’re now in well-wooded Wheeler, and we pass several ponds that are well-loved haunts of muskrats and waterfowl before crossing the Bristol Hills Branch of the FLT. When we come out at State Route 53, where we’re back in farm country.
Since we’re turning north here we just miss the hamlet of Wheeler with its Methodist church, Grange rooms, town hall, and monument to Marcus Whitman. A hundred years ago and more Wheeler was tobacco country, and if you look sharp you may spot an old tobacco barn set back from the road.
As we cruise on northward along a pretty nice road we pass the Wheeler family cemetery, where town namesake Silas Wheeler, a Revolutionary War soldier, lies buried with his kin. Passing farm after farm we keep a sharp lookout, for we are now in horse-and-buggy country. Conservative Anabaptists have been taking up the hill farms that modern folks find uncompetitive, building up Wheeler’s population and economy.
Driving toward Prattsburgh we pass an egg farm and an octagon house (popularized by Orson Squire Fowler of Cohocton) before reaching the village itself, with its pioneer cemetery and its fine tree-lined square, long the scene of parades, footraces, and all sorts of community celebrations.
Captain Pratt was another veteran of the Revolution, and the square in his namesake village is now lined with churches, businesses, the library, the post office, and the school. Franklin Academy is a venerable institution. It goes back to the early 1800s – in the same spot on the square, I believe, though not in the same building of course. Franklin boys marched off to the Civil War in huge numbers, and to the big wars of the 20th century. Narcissa Prentiss Whitman was an alumna, and her nearby home is now open to the public.
Leaving the village we climb an impressive hill, and as we reach the top Joyce reminisces about how she and our older son drove through here in November 1995, just before we moved to Bath from Bloomfield. They almost turned back at this point, but pushed on, and we hadn’t lived in the area very long before we learned that the top of this hill is often the site for mini-snow squalls and mini-rain storms, sort of like I-86 around Campbell. Both stretches have their own microclimates.
Now we’re back in the woods, and hilly woods at that, on a winding road. There’s a bit of a flat at Ingleside, a little hamlet that few people know about, and fewer still realize lies in Steuben County. On our way back, when the sun’s in a better position, I’ll photograph the still-active church for Historical Society files.
Right around the county line we meet another line, this time of wind turbines. Most of us locally seem to take these in stride, but when I guide out-of-state bus tours through this stretch I find that they’re always fascinated by the huge turning blades. Of course you need the right blend of topography, population pattern, wind direction, wind speed, and wind consistency to make wind farming work, so it makes sense that many people won’t have first-hand experience with it.
Then down another steep hill and… Naples, with its mile-long Main Street, where we once again cross the Bristol Hills Trail. Naples with its summer theater, lovely homes, busy restaurants, surrounding ridges, and striking Catholic church. Naples with its vineyard and winery right in the middle of town and its high school right on Main Street; I always expect to see Archie, Betty, and Veronica out front.
Past Naples (now on State 21) we just clip a corner of Yates County before arriving at Woodville, and the head of Canandaigua Lake. The road winds, the bare-rock cliff looms on the left, and the hamlet clings to the bank of the lake on the right. Like all of our lakes it’s a beautiful sight, but we soon turn away until reaching Bristol Springs. Here again Route 21 parallels the lake, but now we’re high on the overlooking ridge, and we get only glimpses of it. Sad to say, there are very few places to pull off and enjoy the view.
Cheshire is a busy little hamlet, where a former school is home to a country store from whose sign a Cheshire cat grins down on us. A few farms line the route now, but before long it’s suburban stretches, and then at last, Canandaigua. Definitely, a decent drive.

Back on Top

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Recently in this space we looked at “superlatives” – some of the best our region has to offer (in my humble opinion) in eclectic, unrelated fields. Continuing on that thought, here are some more superlatives, exemplaries, or just plain curious and unusuals from here in the Finger Lakes and Southern Tier.

*Best memoir: Back There Where the Past Was: A Small-Town Boyhood, by Charles Champlin. Charles was heading up the film desk at the L.A. Times (no small beat out there) when he started occasionally publishing vignettes and reminiscences of his upbringing in Hammondsport.
Well, who in Los Angeles knows from Hammondsport? But very soon readers were eagerly awaiting each new installment of his intermittent musings. When it was published in book form, Ray Bradbury wrote the foreword. And people all across America – people who’d never even heard of Hammondsport – discovered that they had a second home town.

*Best regional novel: Genesee Fever, by Carl Carmer. Once one of America’s most popular novelists, Carmer wrote about the very earliest days of white settlement, centering on the Bath-Keuka Lake area. Despite being originally from western New York, Carl Carmer perpetrated a few howlers for the sake of plot: the central character rides horseback from Bath to Jerusalem, and back, twice in one day; Charles Williamson and two comrades walk from Bath to Mount Morris in a single morning, and still have enough gumption left for a major brawl when they get there. But suspend the smirk, and it makes a terrific story.

*Best-loved observer: Arch Merrill. In the days before, during, and after World War II, Rochester reporter Arch Merrill wandered our entire region, soaking up all the stories he could find, turning them into newspaper columns and then into books. A River Ramble, The Finger Lakes, Slim Fingers Beckon, and a dozen or two more were beloved in their day – and they still are now. He collected stories, and I’ll warn you right now – a lot of them were not accurate. But they were all wonderful. Most of our libraries have a least a few of his volumes. Check the antique shops and used book stores if you’d like your own.

*Best-loved musician: A lady some years ago told me that she and her husband had been visiting Corfu, and were looking over the lovely Adriatic Sea, when a voice behind them said, “Now there’s someone from Rochester, New York.” They turned around, and it was Mitch Miller, record-company executive, conductor, composer, oboist, and leader of the Sing-Along Gang. After a cheerful conversation, she asked him how he’d known where she came from. “I recognized the accent,” said Mitch, who was born in Rochester on the Fourth of July in 1911, and died in New York City 99 years later. He got his musical education at Eastman School and University of Rochester, playing with both the Syracuse Symphony and the Rochester Philharmonic.

*Royal visitations: Future French King Louis Philippe toured our area in the days of his exile. Supposedly he did a painting, now in the Louvre collection, of the Montour Falls-Watkins Glen area.
According to Aileen Arnold McKinney, long-term Corning city councillor and secretary at the Curtiss plant during World War I, the future Duchess of Windsor was in town back in those days, accompanying her naval-officer husband. Nobody saw very much of her, because she kept very different hours from the local folks. Of course, the College of Heralds would no doubt inform us that the Duchess was NOT, in fact, royal, but we’ll take what we can get.