So I worked in Lima for almost two years, and then for the next six months did work that took me TO Lima frequently. And a couple of weeks ago Mrs. House and I stopped off there on our way back to Bath from Rochester.
First of all, since this is western New York – rather than, say, Peru – it’s pronounced LIE-ma, rather than LEE-ma… though the Catholic church, pleasingly and perhaps inevitably, is St. Rose of Lima.
Twenty years back, when we were here steadily, there were three used bookshops in town. Now the theme seems to be antique stores, some of which were already in business back then. When we stop here we seem to gravitate especially to the large multi-dealer market in the 1855 Baptist church edifice. Prowling around this time we found comic books, Little Golden Books, and CDs of Celtic Woman… not to mention, well, just about everything you’d usually find in a large (two floors) antique establishment. One discovery that was noteworthy for us was 1940s telephone maps of several Steuben County communities. We spent ten dollars on the map of rural Cohocton, largely because it locates the rural schools, and we can use it at Steuben County Historical Society.
A few steps back toward the crossroad we also looked in on another store, where we ran into one of my former employees. This shop was smaller, but focused more on art, ceramics, and higher-end items.
Befitting a town with several antique stores, much of Lima is a National Historic District. The architectural fabric includes an attractive and well-maintained set of historic buildings, such as the 19th-century firehouse. The Tennie Burton Museum, in a large historic home, makes an enjoyable visit. I’ve always especially liked the old Lima telephone switchboard, to which is tacked a note telling the operator, whenever someone reports a fire, to ring the siren and then call the fire chief.
There’s also a blue-and-yellow state historic marker, companioned with a shining globe that look like it came from outer space. This is the vault from the Bank of Lima, which just a hundred years ago in 1915 suffered Livingston County’s first bank robbery.
Lima has long been famed for three eating establishments, all of which were already doing a roaring trade well before we arrived in the early ‘nineties, and all of which seem set fair to go on after we’re gone. The Lima Family Restaurant is just what it sounds like, an enjoyable place with enjoyable meals. The American Hotel actually goes back to the early 1800s. The menu offers sixty kinds of soup, half a dozen or so of which are available on any given day.
George’s Family Restaurant was known in my day as the George E. France Drive-In. Despite the name, carhop service was gone already by then. But World War I veteran Mr. France presided over fountain and counter service, plus a prized set of booths. Those booths formed a sort of clubhouse for the retired gentlemen of the town, and woe betide anyone else, including my father once, who sat in them. I don’t know what the seating arrangements are nowadays.
Besides St. Rose, Lima is also home to a Presbyterian church founded by Reverend Daniel Averitt, the frontier preacher who left churches scattered all across western New York. Lima Baptist Church, whose congregation also goes back well before the Civil War, has a late twentieth-century facility. This church also operates the large and long-established Lima Christian School.
Education has been a key part of Lima almost as long as the village has been here. There’s a very nice small library (part of the Pioneer system). The public school district is Honeoye Falls-Lima, joining the “twin cities” across the county line.
And perched atop the hill like the Parthenon in Athens is a site that’s been dedicated to higher education for almost two centuries – home first to Genesee Wesleyan Seminary (one of the first co-ed colleges, founded 1832), then to Genesee College, then Genesee Junior College, and now to Elim Bible Institute (which in the 1930s had its home in Hornell).
Some fairly prominent people, both famous and notorious, have made their way through one or another of the hilltop institutions. Belva Lockwood was the first woman to run for president. J. Sheldon Fisher became a beloved regional historian. Randall Terry founded the highly-controversial Operation Rescue.
Kenneth B. Keating, who was born in Lima, became a United States Senator. Not much remembered now, the liberal Republican was a man of real consequence in his day, and a tiger for civil rights. In the midst of the Cuban Missile Crisis a highly frustrated John F. Kennedy grumbled that Keating, who had blown the whistle on the missiles, would be the next president of the United States. He wound up losing his senate seat to ROBERT Kennedy in 1964, but later served as an ambassador and a federal judge.
Genesee College became the basis for creation of Syracuse University. Apart from Elim, the other institutions are long gone, but new in town (though not on the hill) is the Genesee Community College Campus Center at Lima. Both schools grant associate’s degrees.
Lima is a significant crossroads town, where Routes 5 and 20 (a single highway) crosses Route 15A. My father-in-law and a cousin drove down 5 and 20 on their way from Vermont to Oklahoma, unsuccessfully hoping to find oil field jobs during the Great Depression. At every diner and gas station where they stopped on 5 and 20, a group of men huddled around the radio listening to news of Hitler’s invasion of Poland. It was the first week of the Second World War.
He didn’t even dream that he’d one day have a daughter, a son-in-law, and two grandsons living by that road that he’d traveled, alternating with hope and worry, over half a century before.