The Civil War had been over for two years, but conflict hadn’t ended. Parts of the south were still under military government, and the Ku Klux Klan had begun burning its murderous way through history, enraged and horrified by the new biracial governments that were forming. Their evil work still pollutes our nation to this day.
Slavery had been abolished the previous year, but not until the following year would it be clearly established that the freed slaves were citizens, and that all citizens had equal protection of the laws.
Bath entered the national debate in microcosm, voting after two public meetings to integrate the schools. The old “colored school” on Pine Street was given to the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church. Bath Grange is there today.
The Knoxville-Corning bridge washed out in February, and was replaced later in the year. A Sons of Temperance Lodge was organized in Corning, along with a St. Mary‘s Temperance Society. Baseball was already popular, but the game was a little bit different back then. Corning Monitors traveled to Addison and beat the home team Meteors 61-29. In July Corning beat Elmira 65-34. On November 7, a fire burned eight two-story buildings on the north side of Market Street.
Steuben County Fair opened in Bath on September 25, with cattle, sheep, swine, and poultry on show. New at the fair that year were the driving park, or race track, and a floral hall. October saw two days of harness racing at the grounds. There were best-of-five one-mile heats with purses totaling $125, and best-of-three one-mile heats with purses totaling 100. Contestants paid an entry fee equaling ten per cent of the purse. Admission was a quarter, and so was parking, but your ladies got in for free.
Captain R. C. Phillips of Prattsburgh took his company of the “U.S. Colored Troops” to the southwest as Andrew Johnson and William Seward pressured the French out of Mexico. They also bought the Russians out of Alaska — imagine what the Cold War would have been like otherwise. Also up north, Canadian Confederation became a reality (without Newfoundland, which wouldn’t join until after World War II).
Francis McDowell of Wayne joined seven other men and women to form the National Grange. Binghamton became a city. In Angola, New York, a train derailment killed 49 people — the Angola Horror. Steuben County had its current 32 towns, but its two cities were still to come.
Looking farther afield, the first ship passed through the Suez Canal. Lister described antiseptic surgery. The Vienna Men’s Choral Association made the first public performance of Strauss’s Blue Danube Waltz, quickly followed by orchestral premieres at London, New York, and the Paris World’s Fair. Best Western champagne from Hammondsport stunned the Europeans by winning a gold medal in Vienna.
Cy Young was born in 1867… So were Wilbur Wright, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Marie Curie. Jules Verne published his fifth novel in 1867, but Mark Twain was still mostly unknown. Twenty year-old Alexander Graham Bell collapsed after overworking himself on his experiments. Theodore Roosevelt was nine years old, and Woodrow Wilson was eleven, and had just learned to read – the future scholar and president was apparently dyslexic. When he retired from the White House in 1921, Wilson would be the last President who had grown up with slaves in his household.
Across our region, veterans tried to adjust to their new lives. R. C. Philips, whom we mentioned had gone to New Mexico, had lost the use of one arm at Gettysburg. Monroe Brundage of Hammondsport had lost an arm completely at Antietam. Diaries and memoirs reveal men struggling with what we now know to be Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Hundreds of local women had been widowed, and Ira Davenport’s splendid “female asylum” in Bath was three years old – the late Mr. Davenport having correctly discerned that the terrible war would mean thousands of orphans.