Monthly Archives: September 2015

Rails-to-Trails… Seize the Way!

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As we’ve looked at in the past, our area owes a lot of its growth and development to the railroad. They aren’t what they once were, and arguably they don’t need to be. But as their tide has receded, they’ve left their mark on our shore, in terms of rail trails.

It’s one of those ideas that seems blazingly obvious once somebody puts it on the table. Take now-disused rail beds and turn them into trails for hiking, biking, and walking. They may offer a transportation advantage, and they certainly provide an opportunity for fresh air and exercise in the great outdoors.

On top of that, the trails tend to be straight, smooth, and level – just what the railroads want. That makes rail trails especially welcome to the older, the younger, the visually impaired, or anyone who has trouble with balance.

The 2011 Rails-to-Trails Conservancy guide book, “Rail-Trails Pennsylvania, New Jersey and New York,” lists four trails right near us. Working outward from Corning we find:

1)The Painted Post Trail (roughness index 2). This is a very nice paved urban trail, just over a mile long. Because it slides through the neighborhoods of Painted Post – crossing over North Hamilton and under Victory Highway – you almost always meet others, from elderly folks enjoying a stroll to young families leading (or pushing) toddlers and teens or adults tossing Frisbees to dogs. There’s a historic cemetery on the way, plus the old DL&W depot, now Town of Erwin Museum, and one terminus is in Craig Park. The last time I was there, a couple of months back, construction blocked my way west from the depot.

2)The Big Flats Trail (roughness index 2). If you’ve had enough of the mall for a while, stop by Sperr Park on Kahler Road and spend some time on this lovely partly-paved trail. You’re just off I-86, just outside Consumer Square, and parallel to an active rail line. But it’s such a quiet, lovely walk. East of Kahler the trees overhang and reach each other, so it seems like you’re walking through a green tunnel. West of Kahler you walk along the park with its two ponds, keeping eyes peeled for waterfowl, and then through brushy fields and meadows with plenty of sky overhead. Sometimes you even see a sailplane. Big Flats Trail is 1.7 miles long.

3)Lambs Creek Hike and Bike Trail (roughness index 1 – the smoothest). This trail runs three and a half miles north from Mansfield, Pennsylvania (starting near the IGA). I’ve been on parts of this trail, but it’s been quite a while. It parallels the Tioga River, and the northern terminus is a a boat launch in Lambs Creek Recreation Area.

4)The Keuka Outlet Trail (roughness index 3 – the roughest). Wow! Who can say enough about this seven-mile trail between Penn Yan and Dresden? With just a little more walking on the east end, you can hike from Keuka Lake to Seneca Lake. At Penn Yan you can start by the ball field, go through a little park, cross the Outlet, walk under Main Street, and cross the Outlet again… meantime taking in the way the lovely stream and the ancient industrial architecture complement each other.

The guidebook includes such not-too-far-away trails as Ontario Pathways Rail Trail (Canandaigua to Stanley) and Genesee Valley Greenway (Cuba to Rochester). Missing from the book are our Catharine Valley Trail (Horseheads to Watkins Glen) and the Lackawanna Rail Trail, from Eldridge Park to Water Street and the Chemung River. (This one is neat because part of the time you walk a berm or causeway, looking down on Elmira.) I’ve done some or parts of all of them, and they’re all great. Hike, bike, stroll, amble. They’re not hard to get to, and they’re not hard to manage. Carpe viam (seize the way)!

Lincoln’s Death Reached to the Finger Lakes

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The death of Abraham Lincoln was a tragedy to America, and to the world, but it also brought deep suffering to our Finger Lakes region. For one thing, TWO attacks were made that night, and the second was an attack on Secretary of State William H. Seward, a resident of Auburn.

Lewis Payne (or Powell) presented himself at Seward’s house as a messenger, then bulled his way in and upstairs. Attacking with a knife he did manage to slash the bedridden Seward badly, along with two of Seward’s sons, a soldier nurse, and a servant, besides roughing up the butler and Seward’s daughter, all of whom tried to protect the injured man, before escaping into the night. Seward, who had been badly injured in a carriage accident, was supported in a heavy metal frame, which probably saved his life by deflecting some of the blows. Although badly slashed, he managed to heave himself off the bed into the space between the bed and the wall, giving himself a little prottection.

Powell/Payne finally fled, and was later executed. Seward continued in stellar service to his country, including the purchase of Alaska. But one side of his face forever sagged, thanks to the slashing he got from Lewis Paine.

The other regional connection is Major Henry Rathbone. We often hear that the major was from Steuben County, but I’m pretty sure that that’s not true. He was one of the clan for whom the Town of Rathbone was named, but I’m not sure how close.

Hardly ANYONE, including their own son, seemed to want to go to the play with the Lincolns. They finally settled on Major Rathbone, who agreed to bring his fiancee Clara Harris.

When John Wilkes Booth crept into the presidential box Mary Lincoln was teasing Abe about holding her hand: “What will Miss Harris think?” Lincoln replied, “She won’t think anything of it” — the last words he ever spoke.

Booth, who was well familiar with the play, waited for a burst of laughter and used those laughs to cover the sound of his shot as he fired one bullet into the back of Abraham Lincoln’s head. While the audience missed the sound of the shot, experienced soldier Major Rathbone did not. He instantly sprang upon Booth, who dropped his single-shot Deringer and slashed Rathbone with his large knife, cutting to the bone from shoulder to elbow.

This got him free long enough to rush to the front of the box, where Rathbone grabbed him again. This, plus catching his spur on some bunting, apparently threw Booth off enough that he landed badly — it was something like a 12-foot drop to the stage — and broke his leg. Rathbone shouted to stop the man, and a soldier in the audience vaulted across the orchestra pit and set out in pursuit. Booth, however, made it to the alleyway and his waiting horse, then fled the city before word got out.

A doctor was lifted up from the audience while others pounded on the door that Booth had barred, which the profusely-bleeding Major Rathbone opened. Lincoln was carried out of the box and down the stairs to a house across the street. Here, as Miss Harris tried to comfort the justifiably hysterical Mrs. Lincoln, Major Rathbone finally passed out from loss of blood, and doctors recognized for the first time how gravely wounded he was.

Sadly, that was not the end of the tragedy. Clara Harris and Henry Rathbone, who were stepbrother and stepsister, married in 1867, after an eight-year engagement. He became consumed… unjustly and unrealistically… by his perception that he had failed to protect the president, and Lincoln had died because of his failure. But that had not been his assignment, and short of pre-emptively shooting anyone who walked through the door, it’s hard to see how he could have prevented it. His actions were heroic — instantly and bare-handedly springing upon a killer with a gun, and continuing the fight after being gravely wounded.

But none of those facts mattered. Two days before Christmas in 1883, while serving as U.S. consul in Hanover, Germany, he attacked his three children. When Clara Harris Rathbone rushed to their defense, he killed her with a knife and a hand gun… the same types of weapons John Wilkes Booth had used. He stabbed himself repeatedly but was taken into custody and died in 1911 in a German mental institution. He was buried with his wife, and their remains were disposed of in 1952. Their son, 13 years old at the time of the killing, was later elected to Congress from Illinois.

Perhaps there were other forces at work – Rathbone had fought through the Civil War, including what is STILL the bloodiest day in American history, at Antietam – so maybe PTSD was already eating away at his soul on that night. At any rate, Booth’s ghastly plot had a very long reach.

Into the Air: Blanche Stuart Scott Leads the Way

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This month marks the 105th anniversary of a nationally-significant event that took place on Keuka Lake. On September 2, 1910 Blanche Stuart Scott coaxed her Curtiss biplane from the field outside Hammondsport for her first controlled, extended flight. It was the start of a remarkable aviation career, and it was the first flight by a woman pilot in America.

Since Bessica Raiche flew on Long Island also in September of 1910, the date’s been a matter of debate for a hundred years or so, especially since Blanche was not above “improving her lie.” But a radio interview recorded many years later pretty much seals the deal. The interviewer was asking about reports of her making her solo IN AUGUST. This would have been an ideal chance to grab an incontestably early date, on OTHER people’s say-so. But no, Blanche insisted. She HAD gotten into the air a few times previously, on inadvertent “hops,” but didn’t consider those true flights. September 2, she stressed, was the day.

She had already driven cross-country by auto (probably the first woman to do THAT) when she came to the Curtiss Flying School. Glenn was reluctant, not because he opposed women pilots per se, but because he figured that a woman pilot killed in a crash would take the airplane business down with her.

He did agree, but he and Mrs. Curtiss insisted that she board at their house. The company sponsoring her auto tour had touted Scott’s age at 18, and the Curtisses were concerned that she needed someone needed looking after her. She was probably more like 25, and also probably bored to tears spending evenings with Glenn and Lena, but didn’t want to undo her own publicity.

She wasn’t much more than five feet tall, and she rode down to the flying field on a borrowed Curtiss motorcycle. She was so short that she would aim the machine at a wall, cut the engine, coast in, and jump off, letting the motorcycle prop up.

There are stories that Curtiss put governors on her airplane engine so that she couldn’t take off, and one day the governors were “mysteriously” omitted, so that she flew without his permission and forced him to accept her as a full student. The reality is that EVERYONE stared out on underpowered machines, and just about everyone, when the conditions were right, had those inadvertent hops.

By October Curtiss had taken her under contract as an exhibition pilot, though he and Lena remained very protective. She soon went on to other exhibition teams headed by Glenn Martin, Tom Baldwin, and Jimmie Ward. She was a star, sometimes (she said) making $5000 a week (but spent it just as fast). She also said she broke 41 bones.

She quit after a few years, disgusted to be billed as a freak woman flier, rather than a highly-skilled pilot. Supposedly she also overheard a spectator complain because no one had been killed.

She then spent years in movies, radio, and television broadcasting later in life from WLEA in Hornell (she was a Rochester native). Folks I’ve talked to who knew her (she died in 1970) remember her variously – as vivid, vibrant, exciting, crazy, or demanding and imperious. One man remembered her hanging around the Rochester airport in the 1930s, “on the outside looking in.” She was probably all those things. She was also the founder of a line of American woman pilots from Tuth Law and Katherine Stinson through Elinor Smith, Amelia Earhart, Jackie Cochran, and Eileen Collins.

We’re not sure how many times Blanche married, but she never had children (“I can’t even get a pet to obey me,” she said). She summed herself up by saying, “Life has been exciting and interesting. I have lived it my way, and found it good.”

Trash-Talking Lincoln in the 1860s

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On Friday I’m wrapping up Steuben County Historical Society’s Civil War sesquicentennial series with a presentation on the end of the war, and the death of Lincoln, so I hope you’ll join us. But in the process of doing that research, I found out quite a lot about local OPPOSITION to Lincoln during the war.

We think of our region as being rock-ribbed Republican and dedicated to the abolition of slavery, but that’s wishful thinking. While overall people in the Finger Lakes and Southern Tier supported Lincoln, there was also strong, and even hateful, opposition against him. And the region as a whole was very iffy on abolition.

Newspapers tended to be political party mouthpieces in those days, and the Steuben County seat of Bath had two… the “Courier” for Republicans, and the “Farmer’s Advocate” for Democrats.

The “Advocate” was in something of a bind, wanting to support the war without supporting the president – “Fight against Davis, argue against Lincoln.” They steered a masterly path of applauding Union victories while sneering that the administration had nothing to do with them – our brave soldiers won the fight despite Lincoln’s incompetence.

If Union troops lost, of course that was all Lincoln’s fault. Disastrous defeat at Fredericksburg was a “bloodthirsty atrocity of the radicals” – radicals being those Republicans who, UNlike Lincoln, were strongly committed to abolishing slavery, and doing it fast.

To give them their due, the editors published presidential proclamations in full, even if criticizing them fiercely in other columns. They also insisted that the highly unpopular draft law had been passed in the regular manner, and must be obeyed until and unless set aside by the courts. On July 1, 1863, with Confederate forces rampaging deep into Pennsylvania, “Advocate” editors announced that at the government’s request they were joining a general withholding of information on Union troop movements.

They did tend to overoptimistically view the south’s military condition, reporting in 1862 on the effectiveness of the Confederate draft, the huge size of the Confederate army, and the good provisioning of that army. Not one word of this was true. On July 1, 1863, they proclaimed “Vicksburg is impregnable” and it did in fact manage to hold out for three more days.

In one bizarre 1862 passage they supposedly report rebel prisoners as stating that if the states had been given permission to leave the Union the previous year, they would already have rejoined the Union. The supposed process seems to be (1) the southern states were not even thinking about seceding. (2) But the northern states, apparently out of the blue, told them they couldn’t. (3) So they did. (4) If no one had fussed, they then would have immediately joined back up. This, of course, is gibberish of the type you could ONLY find in an official party paper.

They also mocked Lincoln constantly… his having a bodyguard of troops, which no other president had had; his accent and ruralisms; his looks; his nickname of “Honest” Abe. For good measure they scorned his wife, sneering whenever one of her family members was killed fighting for the south.

And, they stressed that Lincoln’s actions, especially the Emancipation Proclamation, would make it impossible to restore “the Union as it was,” slavery and all. They didn’t face the fact that the south had HAD the Union as it was, and left it.

Unsurprisingly, much of their opposition was racist. They attack African Americans in the foulest and vilest terms – not for them the genteel circumlocutions that ooze from our TV today. In some of their mildest attacks:
“The relation of master and slave is a proper relationship.”
“When the Abolitionists began their crusade against he South, there lived 4,000,000 of as contented, well fed, well clad and well to do peasantry as ever lived on the face of the earth.”
“This war is to ripen into the horrible scenes of St. Domingo.”

To call slaves a contented, well-to-do peasantry is staggering chutzpah.

They seem to think that worst insult they can employ against Republican leaders and supporters is to call them black, which they do frequently, adding that the Republican plan is to bring white working men down to the level of the Negro.

Despite charges that Lincoln is a despot, a tyrant, a dictator, such papers abounded… I understand the one in Penn Yan was also vitriolic. Erastus Corning was a public and prominent Lincoln critic. A regular Congressional election took place in 1862, and Lincoln’s party lost ground, while still retaining control. Despite the best (or worst) efforts on the part of the “Advocate,” Steuben County increased its Republican vote in 1863.

Lincoln also beat off challengers from within his own party in 1864, and then won re-election against a popular general. But a month and ten days into his second term, a southern fanatic murdered him. That’s what we’ll be talking about 4 PM Friday, September 11 at Bath Fire Hall. Hope to see you there.