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!