Last week we looked at the fact that three lifetimes… just ordinary lifetimes of 75 years each – would take us back to 1790 and George Washington’s first full year as President. And we looked at what a person born on that day would have experienced, as he or she lived from the beginning of Washington’s first term to the end of Lincoln’s.
Now imagine with us a second child, born on this day in 1865, on the 75th birthday of the one we looked at first.
On this day in 1865 people were feeling the wondering realization that the end of the Civil War was in sight. Local men with Grant were, as they had been for months, hammering away at Petersburg, the key to Richmond and Lee’s dwindling army. Local men with Sherman, having already marched from Atlanta to the sea and captured Savannah at the end of it, were kicking off for a northward drive into the Carolina’s, chasing Johnston’s also-dwindling army.
In March Lincoln was re-inaugurated, promising malice toward none, and charity to all. Listening in the crowd was an infuriated John Wilkes Booth, who was in love with malice but a stranger to charity.
In April Grant broke through the defenses of Petersburg, sending Davis’s government and Lee’s both army on the run. Grant cornered Lee a week later, and captured his entire army. Lincoln remarked in an impromptu speech that maybe “some” of the black soldiers should be allowed to vote. Booth, again lurking nearby, gave in completely to rage. Just days later he finally took up arms for the Confederacy, shooting a middle-aged man from behind in the dark. With telegraph lines limited, many local towns didn’t get the news for days.
Over the next couple of months the remaining Confederate armies tossed in the towel, and the boys came marching home. Released soldiers in Bath got drunk and embarked on a race riot, attacking black people on the perverse “logic” that they had been “responsible” for the war.
Two years later, after lengthy debate, Bath integrated its schools.
The year after that, Brooklyn Flint Glass Works moved to Corning. Good rail connections let them move product out, but a one-track shortline, moving coal, wood, and sand up from Pennsylvania, sealed the deal.
Out along the lakes, grape and wine production grew feverishly.
Laws and Congressional amendments established African Americans as citizens and protected their rights, but most northern whites turned their backs and allowed white southerners to mount what boiled down to a race war.
As we hit our nation’s centennial in 1876, both the nation and the region were becoming more industrial. Our local cities of Corning, Hornell, Geneva, Canandaigua, and Ithaca were incorporated during this period. Ithaca, of course, also boomed with the new land-grant college system.
Local farm families formed Granges for mutual support and encouragement. Built-up areas started providing themselves with water, phone, and electric systems, though electricity was often part-time. Electric trolleys appeared, but would be gone within fifty years or so.
When George Armstrong Custer led his men into annihilation at the Little Big Horn, Bath men named their Union veterans post in his honor.
In 1879 New York opened its State Soldiers and Sailors Home in Bath, “to care for him who shall have borne the battle,” in Lincoln’s words. A great many local communities formed public libraries.
In 1872, most Corning businesses gave their employees the day off for Christmas. But for many workers, December 25th and the 4th of July were work days well into the new century. In 1890, firings at Corning Glass Works led to 200 men and boys walking out, and the start of a long unionization struggle.
Christian Science appeared during this period, along with the Jehovah’s Witness and Pentecostal movements. The first new English Bible appeared since 1611.
Niagara Falls became America’s first state park. Watkins Glen followed some years later.
Even small towns across the region opened high schools, or paid to send their kids to school.
In 1876 AND in 1888, our ridiculous electoral college system torpedoed us again. In both cases the voters chose a president… and the electors seated the guy who lost.
Two presidents — Garfield and McKinley — were assassinated.
In 1894 New York voters approved the Constitutional provision that state forest lands ‘be forever kept as wild.” In 1901 President Theodore Roosevelt established he first National Wildlife Refuge.
We had a war to free Cuba, during which we grabbed Hawaii, Wake, Guam, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines, besides setting up our own puppet government in Havana.
As the new century dawned, internal combustion became a force in the land. Nowhere locally was this more evident than in Hammondsport, where factories for motorcycles, blimps, and even airplanes – not to mention the engines themselves – sprang up. The spark plug for all this combustion was of course Glenn Curtiss, who made millions on the First World War.
That war left more empty seats around the table, meanwhile vaulting America into world prominence. The Spanish Influenza rushed in as the war neared its end, killing millions. Hundreds died locally.
The “Great Migration” was in full swing, as African Americans freed themselves from the south much as Jews would soon flee Germany.
Prohibition clobbered the economy of the Finger Lakes, which tried to make it up by paving the roads and promoting tourism. The Finger Lakes Tourism Alliance came to be.
As Catholic city-dweller Al Smith rose to prominence, hysterical rural folks formed Ku Klux Klan chapters. State headquarters were in Binghamton, and Yates County Fairground was a favored site for rallies. African Americans from Bath took the lead in fighting the Klan, which dwindled considerably (but did not vcanish) by the 1930s.
Franklin D. Roosevelt contracted polio in 1921. In 1928 he ran for governor, barnstorming every county by auto caravan, proclaiming his progressive record and asking delighted crowds, “Do I look sick to you?”
Across the country what looked like a boom proved to be a bubble, and the world plunged into a Depression that some economists compared to the Dark Ages. Hammondsport was one of many communities that helped sweep Roosevelt into the White House. He’d promised to end Prohibition, and did, and they immediately went back to voting Republican.
In one year of Depression Steuben County aided something like 5000 homeless people in transient camps and bureaus, and 3000 in the poorhouse. Public works from Washington and Albany helped. These included Glenn Curtiss Memorial School, Dansville High School, Painted Post post office, Stony Brook State Park, and Watkins Glen State Park. Civilian Conservation Corps worked on the parks and on soil conservation. After the catastrophic 1935 flood, which killed far more people than the 1972 flood, work got under way on Almond and Arkport dams.
As his second term neared its end in 1940, F.D.R. was desperate to retire and concentrate on his physical therapy, which bode fair to vastly improve his mobility. But Hitler had invaded Poland just months earlier, while Japan had been savaging China for a decade. With war at the door and depression still snapping at our heels, a soft-spoken sentiment grew slowly but steadily louder – we want Roosevelt again.