Monthly Archives: November 2016

10 Local Women Were Killed in 1905 Accident

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From time to time over the past few months in this space we’ve looked at Steuben County’s worst train wreck (Gibson, 1912), highway wreck (Campbell, 1943), fire (Bath poorhouse, 1878), epidemic (Spanish influenza, 1918-19), and flood (June 1972).

*And certainly there were other very serious examples of each type of disaster. But there’s one tragedy worth noting that’s very difficult to classify. It’s not exactly a highway accident, and not exactly a railroad accident. Perhaps it’s the worst rail vehicle/road vehicle crash, and almost certainly the worst accident involving draft animals.

*The tragedy began to take shape on January 29, 1905, when Hornell’s First Universalist Church celebrated its first service in its new facility – still unfinished at the time. The Ladies Aid Society took advantage of leftovers from the celebration and moved up the date of planned sleigh ride. They would ride on February 1 to the home of Mrs. Martin Baldwin, outside Arkport, where their gathering would double as a 68th birthday celebration for Jane Graves.

*After a fine visit they left a little after six, as the dark was gathering, packed into two sleighs. South of Arkport a third sleigh fell into line, just by coincidence.

*At a railroad crossing occupants of the first sleigh saw a locomotive’s headlight, but the driver assumed that it was in the distant Shawmut rail yard. He crossed the tracks safely, but by then it had become clear that this was on oncoming train… in fact, the Angelica Express, steaming along at about 30 miles an hour.

*Those in the first sleigh shouted and waved for the second sleigh to stop. Maybe it was their unexpected noise and frantic activity, maybe it was the oncoming train, maybe something else known only to horses, but both animals drawing the second sleigh spooked. Driver Elijah Quick stopped them, then tried to get them moving again. But the inertia of a heavily-laden sleigh was too much. The train slammed right into the sleigh, finally managing to stop (inertia at work again) about a hundred yards down).

*The passengers had been able to see the train coming, but heavily bundled and packed tightly into the sleigh, none of them were able to jump out in time. The driver of the third sleigh raced to alert St. James Hospital, while someone from the first sleigh found a phone in a nearby farmhouse. Most of the dead and injured were lain in the baggage car and the train backed up to Hornell – with two women still trapped in the locomotive’s pilot.

*When all was said and done ten women died, including Mrs. Graves whose birthday it was. Three other women were injured, along with the driver. Both horses appeared unscathed.

*Ten such deaths would be devastating to any community, but in this case there was also the smaller church community. Back where I come from in Rhode Island, Christ Episcopal Church in Westerly lost ten members of its mothers’ group, plus a young boy who had gone along with his mother on their picnic, when the 1938 hurricane crashed in by surprise. The church still keeps their memory alive.

*And First Universalist would do the same, no doubt, if it could. Despite the loss they finished their edifice, installing a Tiffany window honoring the dead. But neither congregation nor edifice (which was diagonally across from the Baptist church) still exist today. The window was sold into private hands, but has lately been exhibited in a Chicago Museum.

Treasures in Silk and Fabric at Curtiss Museum

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Sad to say, Curtiss Museum is not offering its traditional holiday miniatures show this year. But on Friday the 18th, the museum did open another perennial favorite, the biennial embroidery show. Some of the pieces are over a hundred years old, and others were finished, I imagine, under the lowering pressure of the Friday deadline.

*A crazy quilt (c. 1900) on loan from Schuyler County Historical Society belies the commonplace idea of crazy quilts as patchwork folk-art primitives. Certainly odd patches are pieced together, but artistic embroidery adorns the work. This is, in fact a work of art on a different level than the usual crazy quilt.

*And it spotlights the definition of embroidery as work with an eyed needle, embellishing a fabric surface. The three 1905 pieces by Clara and Olivia Schumacher use silk thread, worked onto linen with a flat satin stitch. It took a lot of labor and a lot of patience to work the baskets in these works, capturing the weaving of slats, with alternating warp and woof slats oriented differently. I didn’t touch, (of course!) but I didn’t need to to. I could “feel” the texture of the silk, and I could “feel” the texture of the baskets.

*A brightly-colored bird approaches one basket from the upper corner, with marvelous clear space between. Sometimes successful embellishment includes recognizing when NOT to embellish.

*Now having waxed on about these historic pieces, I confess that I’m usually pretty ho-hum about historic samplers and the like. But my eye was seized by the REPRODUCTION Mary Starker 1760 sampler (embroidered by Pat Bennett), and by the REPRODUCTION Dorothy Walpole 1774 sampler (embroidered by Patty Kahl).

*What I loved about these is the fact that they’re so vivid. Now I get a sense of what it might have been like, in the 1700s, to see their just-finished originals, in all their vivid unfaded glory. The colors pop out; so do the birds, the deer, the vases, the tree. Even the “white space” seems to leap from the surface.

*The deer and the rabbit connect, in my mind, with a deer, a rabbit, a squirrel and a peacock on Barbara Heytmeijer’s counted-thread piece, Sanctuary. The layout reminds me of one of those boxwood hedge gardens in England, with each creature in its own quadrant and a space in the center.

*Speaking of England, Joyce House’s counted cross-stitch English village, overflowing with flowers, is also overflowing with colors. It took first prize at the New York State Fair. Mary Clarkson’s crewel piece, Country Cottage 1967, holds forth in paler colors. I couldn’t tell whether this was worked in 1967, or whether it was supposed to represent 1967, but it surely has a ’67 feel.

*And in keeping with the season there are also numerous Christmas pieces. Joyce House’s cross-stitch Snow Family Christmas whimsically shows a snow father and snow mother out pulling their little snow boy on a sled, with a little snow dog along for the adventure. Kristine Garner’s Home for Christmas (in beads and cross-stitch) pictures a closed but welcoming front door, surrounded by lights and next to a Christmas tree. It’s the door we all can’t wait to open… in memory if not today, in the mind if not in reality.

Bygone Attractions — Do You Remember?

Tourism is a major part of our region’s economy, going back to shortly after the Civil War. Over a century and half attractions change, and some well-loved ones simply slip away. I tried to pull together a list of attractions that either visitors or local folks might have loved, in time gone by… sticking only to those that are still within living memory.

*Probably the best-remembered feature at Lakeside Amusement Park, in Pulteney, was a slide that rose high and stretched long.  You slid down the slide until it dumped you into Keuka Lake.  People rode the slide again and again, and why shouldn’t they?  Sad to say it’s only a memory, and the Lakeside Restaurant is about all that’s left of the park nowadays.

*The heyday of Keuka Hotel (in Wayne) was during the 19th century, when guests arrived by steamship, stayed for weeks, and had all amusements laid on at the site.  But even well into the 20th century Keuka Hotel packed ’em in for such acts as Hoagie Charmichael, or Fred Waring and the Pennsylvanians.  On the landward side, you could play miniature golf.  But probably what most people remember is dancing and/or roller skating in the pavilion over the lake.  Once when I was director at Curtiss Museum an out-of-the-area visitor, whose family used to summer on Keuka, was talking about the pavilion; the front desk volunteer remarked that she used to go there too.  They exchanged names, and it turned out that they had danced together, in the pavilion over the lake at Keuka Hotel, forty years before.

*Sandford Lake near Savona used to be a popular swimming area, with a raft to swim out to and dive off of.  The lake is mostly for fishing or birding nowadays, with hunting and picnicking along the shores.

*Sensibilities are different now than they used to be… thank heaven.  Elim Bible Institute (now in Lima) used to be in Hornell.  And from what I read in a 1940s tour guide to New York state, no visit to Hornell was complete without dropping in at the institute to gawk at people speaking in tongues and otherwise showing physical manifestations of the spirit.  Apparently Elim didn’t object, perhaps figuring that the visitors would get a much-needed dose of preaching along with their voyeurism.

*The Museum of Glass has been around for over 60 years, and it sort of overwhelms memories of the days before.  But, even before the Glass Center opened, the 200-inch trial disc for Mount Palomar (now an anchor feature at the museum) was an attraction in Corning.  It lay in a domed building, just large enough to hold it, on the Centerway Square.  You could buy souvenir reproduction discs.

*From 1925 to 1985 local folks made the pilgrimage to Roseland Park in Canandaigua for summer fun.  If you really liked your visits, and you don’t mind ANOTHER pilgrimage, you can visit Roseland’s carousel at the Carousel Center in Syracuse, or ride the Skyliner wooden roller coaster once again in Altoona.  The current Roseland Water Park capitalizes on the name and its nearby location, but is not the same institution.

*In the days when the road from Addison through Jasper to Canisteo and Hornell was a far more significant route, an impressive feature of the ride was the Wigwams in Jasper.  The fine example of midcentury roadside architecture welcomed visitors to view a large collection of Native artifacts, not to mention having a meal and getting gas (not necessarily in that order).  The Wigwams still stands, and Jasper Historical Society is hoping to make it open by appointment.

*Ah, Bath Drive-In… so sorry to see you go.  Catching a flick there made you feel like summer would last forever.  When my wife worked at Bath Chamber of Commerce a man called from Massachusetts to see if Bath Drive-In was still open.  He had gone there as a kid, and now he made a trip to bring his own children down so that they could experience it too.  When I posted a photo on the Steuben County Historical Society Facebook page thousands of people viewed it, and dozens made nostalgic comments.  Drive-In, gathering dusk, the screen finally lighting up… summer.  Forever.

*(There was also a drive-in near Painted Post, and another [the Starlight] between Arkport and Hornell.  And the Elmira Drive-In still offers general-interest shows.)

*What did I miss? Put it down in the comments!

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Epidemics, or at least strong local outbreaks of illness… cholera, diphtheria, and dysentery among them… occurred pretty frequently in our county’s history. But numbers are hard to sort out, and even if you had them, those numbers would need to be compared against a constantly-changing total population before we could get a feel for how things stood relatively. But it’s probably safe to say that the worst outbreak of disease was the 1918 “Spanish Influenza” pandemic, which may have killed one human being out of every twenty on earth. It was one of the greatest natural disasters ever, killing as many (or more) in four months as the Great War did in four years. It was a catastrophe on a par with the “Black Death,” or Native America’s population crash under European diseases. But probably BECAUSE it was so close to the war, it’s been almost forgotten.
*There were two major spikes of the disease, one in early 1918 and another, even deadlier, in August through November. I looked particularly at the period which seemed worst locally, in last three weekly Advocate issues for October.
*Screening out deaths from military causes, and deaths that were obviously not flu-related, I totted up the deaths reported in these issues, and I found deaths ascribed to:
*Pneumonia 25 (usually due to flu)
*Influenza 14
*Unstated 42
*Or 81 deaths, not counting those excluded above.
*By contrast, in 2014 the last three October issues of the Courier listed 11 deaths.
*During this period of 1918 schools closed in Bath, Avoca, Corning, Hammondsport, Savona, and parts of Wheeler. Churches canceled services in Avoca, Corning, Prattsburgh, and South Bradford.
*In Mount Morris, horse-drawn scrapers dug graves for multiple burials. Dansville and Bath were reported as being hit hard.
*Public places were closed in the Corning area, where about 3500 became ill and something like 70 died. Emergency hospitals were set up in Corning and Painted Post… the latter unit supervised by Ingersoll-Rand.
*Such hospitals couldn’t do much, in fact. Even today, we can’t cure even a single viral disease.
*Hammondsport school children were ordered to stay on their own premises under pain of arrest. Quarantined families were kept alive by neighbors leaving food on doorsteps. Churches and lodges were asked to close.
*Although cases would continue for months, the worst outbreak tailed off so quickly it was bewildering… perhaps due as much to mutation in the virus as it was to the quarantine. By November 6, the Hammondsport flu quarantine was lifted (November 8 in Bath), just in time for jubilant crowds to celebrate the Armistice, on the eleventh day of that eleventh month.
*This flu acted with horrifying speed — people who woke up hale died in agony before sunset… although you could suffer far longer than that, and of course many patients did in fact survive. Bewlideringly, the flu seemed to strike hard at younger people — such as men of military age — while leaving older folks mostly untouched — a reversal of the usual situation with influenza.
*New York’s health commissioner nailed it at the time from studying the demographics… this flu was a more virulent variant of a flu that come come through decades earlier, so many older folks, having contracted the earlier mild form, had an immunity. He even figured which previous outbreak this had been, and his analysis has been confirmed by modern scientific studies.
*Why Spanish? With much of the world at war, each side feared that this unprecedentedly deadly disease was germ warfare from the other side… and even if it WASN’T, they didn’t want the enemy to know how badly they were affected. Neutral Spain was one of the few good-sized western countries without censorship, so a lot of information and news came from Spain, and the rest is (slightly misleading) history.