Monthly Archives: February 2016

Off-Season

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Off-season. Winter in western New York. What’s there to do?

*Quite a lot, actually, as long as you don’t mind being low-key – which is sort of what winter is anyway.

*Take a walk in a summer activity space, such as a fairground. See how it’s different… in fact, almost new. It will be quiet. You’ll likely have the place to yourself. Memories will surface, but distances will seem askew. You may notice features you’ve never seen before. Try taking pictures. I once got some very good shots of the snowbound fireman’s fair field in Hammondsport.

*Wander the waterfront. The marina space in Watkins Glen or Canandaigua is a new world off-season. Stroll up and down the docks (assuming they’re ice-free!) and remember what the place was like at the height of summer. Look out for overwintering waterfowl. From Hammondsport waterfront you almost always sees rafts of coots, gulls, and mallards.

*Try out a park. Some are no doubt closed, especially those out in rural areas. But pick your way through the in-town parks of Hammondsport, Bath, Elmira, Corning. What are the fountains like with the water turned off? What trees are slumbering in the parks, and when will they waken?

*Along those lines, we once visited Montezuma National Wildlife Refuge in the dead of winter. We had the place to ourselves, just as though it were our personal game preserve. We could stop whenever and wherever we liked without worrying about backing up traffic, and take all the time we wanted with binoculars gazing across the flats.

*Of course, you can have off-season fun right in your kitchen or living room, if you put out a bird feeder. The bears are still asleep, but by Easter or so we’ll have to take the feeders in, unless we live right in the heart of town. On a daily basis we get red-headed woodpeckers, downy woodpeckers, juncos, goldfinches, white-breasted nuthatches, black-capped chickadees. Out cat likes to watch as much as we do.

*Take an urban or village walk, assuming the sidewalks are clear. Steuben County Historical Society has walking-tour brochures for Bath. Some of our towns have heart-health walking routes.

*Twice in the past month I’ve been out walking on the Keuka Outlet Trail, at the Penn Yan end. In January we saw a bluebird… not our typical winter fare! We also inspected some recent beaver work, and glimpsed a muskrat in the offing.

*On my February trip I enjoyed just getting to know the Outlet area in the quiet and sleep of late winter. Much of the Outlet was frozen, at least until you crossed the footbridge downstream from Main Street, where mallards were huddled, just as they had been a few weeks earlier. Seeing the industrial buildings from beneath at this time of year makes you feel as though you possess arcane knowledge, vouchsafed to only a few.

*Besides heading downstream, I also crossed the hump-backed bridge over the Outlet and passed through the little park, then followed the trail a few hundred yards to its eastern terminus. Along the way I stopped at another bridge, under the trees, to watch the stream picking its way through the ice.

*And I came to he baseball field. Empty, deserted, and covered with snow, looking a little dilapidated, as all such places do at this time of year. But promising warmer days, and happy crowds, and summer sun. Back at the feeder, the goldfinches are starting to show their summer glow. “We are nearer to spring than we were in September.”

Steuben Courier Bicentennial: Life in 1843

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Our sister paper, the Steuben Courier in Bath, is celebrating its bicentennial. Because of mergers the Courier story goes back to 1816, and last week we looked at what life was like 200 years ago. But the paper actually called the Courier dates to 1843. What was the world like then, when The Steuben Courier first hit the streets?

*John Tyler was president — the first “accidental president” who succeeded to office on the death of his predecessor. Queen Victoria was ruling in Great Britain. (Believe it or not, Tyler still had two living grandchildren at the end of 2015.)
*There were 26 states. William C. Bouck was governor of New York. Robert Campbell, Jr. was Town Supervisor, and Benjamin Smead was Mayor of Bath. Town population was probably a little under 6000.
*Steuben County had 46,138 people in the 1840 census. 288 of them were non-white.
*Edgar Allen Poe published “The Gold-Bug” and “The Tell-Tale Heart” in 1843. Charles Dickens published A Christmas Carol, and Londoners sent the first Christmas cards.
*Ulysses S. Grant graduated from West Point. Future President McKinley was born, and Francis Scott Key died. So did Sequoyah, and so did Noah Webster.
*The Town of Avoca was formed on April 12, taking land from Bath, Cohocton, Howard, and Wheeler.
*Keuka, a crude double-hulled vessel with a central paddlewheel, was operating on Keuka Lake. It was the first steamboat in Steuben County. The Corning-Blossburg short-line railroad ran through the southeastern part of the county. The Erie Canal, Crooked Lake Canal, Chemung Canal, and Chemung Feeder Canal were all busy.
*There was no Catholic church in Bath, but the Episcopal, Methodist, Baptist, and Presbyterian churches were already here.
*Schuyler County did not yet exist.
*The map was peppered with names that would have been familiar to 1843 readers, but not to us: Crooked Lake (Keuka Lake); Little Lake (Waneta Lake); Mud Lake (Lamoka Lake); Poor Lake (Loon Lake); Liberty (Cohocton); Bloods Corners (North Cohocton); Bartlets Mills (Bradford); Kennedyville (Kanona).
*Washington Street was still called St. Patrick’s Street, but the name would change by 1850, possibly because in the interim a Catholic church DID open in Bath. Many people were hysterical about immigrants in those days, especially IRISH and CATHOLIC immigrants. There was a whole political party — very active locally — dedicated to keeping them out. Their official name was the American Party, but most folks called them Know-Nothings. For excellent reasons.

Steuben Courier Bicentennial — the World of 1816

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Our sister paper in Bath, the Steuben Courier, is celebrating its bicentennial this year! Through a series of mergers the life of the Courier goes back to a paper called The Steuben and Allegany Patriot, which later became the Farmer’s Advocate, and then the Steuben Advocate. The Patriot began publishing in Bath in December of 1816. What was the world like back then?

*James Monroe had just been elected President, succeeding James Madison. Monroe had crossed the Delaware with Washington, and been wounded at the Battle of Trenton. Since then he’d been a governor, a senator, a diplomat (he and Robert Livingston worked together negotiating the Louisiana Purchase), and Secretary of State. The Louisiana Purchase, and America, stopped at the Rocky Mountains, and Florida was still Spanish.
*Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln were seven years old. Queen Victoria was not yet born. Monroe would be our sixth president since the Revolution, but George III was still King of England. Napoleon had just finished his first year of exile on St. Helena.
*Bath became a legally incorporated village in 1816. Elisha Hanks was Bath Town Supervisor. John Taylor was governor. Pioneer prophetess Jemima Wilkinson still ruled her flock near Penn Yan. The courthouse was a frame structure on the same location as today’s.
*Indiana became the 19th state in the same month that the Patriot began publication.
*Mary Shelly created the story of Frankenstein in 1816, but only published it three years later. Lord Byron and Dr. Polidori created the first vampire novel at the same storytelling session, and also published in 1819.
*Schuyler, Chemung, Yates, and Tompkins Counties did not exist. Steuben County went all the way to Seneca Lake, and stretched well up the East Branch of Keuka Lake.
*There were no railroads in America, and no steamboats on Keuka Lake. The Erie Canal had not yet been approved, let alone begun.
*Within Steuben County’s current borders there were 11 towns; now there are 32 towns and two cities.
*Steuben County’s population was growing fast, from 7,246 in 1810 to 21,989 in 1820. The county’s slave population peaked at 87 in 1810, and was down to 46 a decade later. (Slavery ended in 1827.)
*Despite this growth, a week of court sessions would strip Bath bare of provisions. Riders would scour the countryside, buying whatever the farmers would spare at whatever prices they asked!

Come See Some Nature Photography

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At our popular Steuben County Historical Society Winter Lecture Series, it’s sort of become a tradition that just about every year we include a NATURAL history presentation.

*The connection’s stronger than you might think – changing wildlife, for instance, largely hinges on human transformation of the land and water – in so many ways, their lives revolve around ours.

*Within living memory the appearance of a deer was newspaper fodder, and children were taken out of school to go see it. Likewise the bear, the beaver, the turkey, and the coyote were all strangers to this land, not too long ago.

*With the possible exception of coyotes, all of those creatures lived here natively until European invaders clear-cut huge swaths of our land, killing off or driving out the forest species. Look at photos of Keuka or Seneca Lakes from around 1900, and you’ll see that their slopes are mostly denuded of trees.

*As farming techniques improved, less land and fewer people were needed for food production. The trees came back, and with them the wildlife, in many cases creeping up from Pennsylvania. Bears have become commonplace in the past twenty years, and the three New York populations… in the Catskills, in the Adirondacks, and a token few along the western Southern Tier… have pretty much merged.

*We hear a lot about invasive species… starlings, zebra mussels, purple loosestrife, emerald ash borers… but bears, beavers, deer, and turkeys are RE-invasive species, coming back to lands that once they knew.

*Coyotes, on the other hand, probably are in fact recent arrivals, although they fill the ecological niche once occupied by the now-extirpated wolf. Unlike the starling, say, which muscles aside native residents, the coyote is essentially filling a vacuum.

*Another native species is the otter. For otters to return we needed not only reforestation, but also cleanup… otters require pristine water. In their case we’ve been deliberately restocking, and the jury’s still out on our success. Unfortunately for our efforts the animals will often range a hundred miles to find a site they like, making it slow going to build up enough density for a breeding population.

*Eagle restocking, on the other hand, HAS been successful, pushing New York state from one breeding pair to dozens. Limiting certain pesticides has aided both them and the osprey.

*Global heating also plays a role. With grain being grown both earlier and later in the year, and farther north in Canada, the Canada goose population has exploded. The cardinal has moved north since World War II, aided by milder shorter winters AND introduction of the berry-bearing multiflora rose decorative shrub. New England fisheries have been devastated as the harvest species have withdrawn far to the north in search of cooler water.

*Allegany County Historian Craig Braack, who’s a perennial favorite history presenter at our Winter Lectures, is stepping outside his box this week to bring us a show of his nature photography. Craig spends as much time as he can manage behind a camera, joining such luminaries as Roger Tory Peterson, the Jamestown-born field guide pioneer, and General Sir Alan Brooke. Britain’s World War II Chief of the Imperial General Staff was a pioneer in wildlife photography, and stole time when he could even during the war, which no doubt helped him calm his soul.

*So Craig will be with us at Bath Fire Hall 4 PM on Friday, February 5, for our free presentation sharing his nature photos. We hope you can join us.