Monthly Archives: August 2017

Penn Yan — A Place to Ride the Storm

Leave a reply

Last week in this space we took a look at the Pulteney Square Historic District in Hammondsport. (A moment of bragging… the folks pulling the nomination together asked me to take photos of the Square to support their nomination. Mission accomplished!)

*So this week I thought it would make sense to take a trip to Penn Yan and look at Keuka’s OTHER large district on the National Register of Historic Places, at the OTHER end of the lake.

*PENN YAN HISTORIC DISTRICT: THE HISTORY Penn Yan’s district is huge, with 210 historic buildings covering 65 acres. Ever since Yates County was created, Penn Yan has been its seat. And while industry, transportation, and tourism have all been tremendously significant here, Penn Yan still wears its 19-century mantle as a courthouse town… medium in size, conscientious in demeanor, well aware of its past without being marooned in it.

*Grand homes, once-proud hotels, busy commercial blocks, elegant churches, and dignified public buildings all welcome the visitor to Penn Yan. White encroachment started with followers of frontier prophetess Jemima Wilkinson, back when this ground was still in Ontario County (and Ontario itself was still very sketchy).

*The magnet for settlement was Keuka Outlet, the stream that drains Keuka Lake into Seneca. Water power was the name of the game, and mill wheels were soon turning all along the flow.

*THE VISIT. Right in Penn Yan itself you can walk the Keuka Outlet Trail, seeing the old industrial buildings from the river side. This includes the huge Birkett’s Mills, making buckwheat for 220 years. In fact, it runs 16 hours a day when it’s NOT busy, and it’s one of the world’s biggest buckwheat suppliers.

*You can pick up the Outlet Trail on either side of the stream and cross to the other via footbridge. Looking UPstream (toward the lake) you can see the area where the steamboats docked through much of the 19th century, bringing in grapes and wine to be shipped out via rail or canal, and taking out summer visitors who spent the season at hotels or resorts along the lake.

*Where the Trail passes under the Main Street bridge, you can find flight of steps up to street level. Wander across the bridge, look both ways along the Outlet and both ways up and down the street, and you can get some sense of how the town developed.

*Being a hub of lake, canal, rail, and highway travel… plus a courthouse town… demanded LOTS of hotel space… like the gigantic Knapp Hotel, with facade sprawling across two streets. Walk farther up Main to find the 1913 Colonial Revival post office. Another block or two and you’ll find Penn Yan Methodist church, “the castle on the corner” with its breathtaking 1899 stonework and rocket-ship steeple.

*The hotel, the post office, and the church are all signs of growing prosperity roughly between the Civil War and Prohibition. Oliver House (1852) is home to the Yates History Center. Keep walking and you’ll pass the contemporary-style 1959 Presbyterian church and the public library. The oldest section (1905) is one of two Carnegie libraries in the five-county region.

*Past the library is the white-columned Yates County Courthouse, anchoring what’s technically ANOTHER historic district. Many folks won’t consider old courthouses to be worth much more than a glance, but step into the green space in front, and spend some time by memorial after memorial to Yates County folks who went to our country’s wars. During one of those wars, in the 1940s, Arch Merrill wrote that Penn Yan was a good place to ride out the storm. I’d say he had it right.

History Feels at Home in Hammondsport

Leave a reply

A little while back, I thought it might be fun to take a look at locations around Keuka Lake that are on the National Register of Historic Places.

*Think again. There are 42 of them in the six Keuka towns. So I had to pull my horns in a little!

*So I decided to concentrate, for right now, on one historical DISTRICT from the National Register… a place where the public can visit, wander around, and focus on whatever they like.

*PULTENEY SQUARE HISTORIC DISTRICT IN HAMMONDSPORT: THE HISTORY. Pulteney Square has been a center of action for more than a hundred years. Alexander Graham Bell visited here, and so, some say, did the future Duchess of Windsor. Glenn Curtiss’s bike shop once stood on this Square.

*The Square appears on the very earliest plans for this community, even before there was much of a village here. The founders stayed true to the vision, and resisted the profits that could have come from selling off. At first, though, no one paid much attention. Hammondsport was a true port, and Water Street was the business district. Economic changes, and a series of fires, migrated the business up to the Square.

*Excursion tourism began after the Civil War, though locals weren’t sure they approved of having all those strangers around spending money. During World War I Curtiss’s airplane factory overwhelmed the town, as engines roared in test stands all along the slopes. After the war, Hammondpsort finally started welcoming the auto-borne family visitors that we enjoy today.

*THE VISIT. The village green defines Hammondsport as much as the lakefront does. It’s shady and grassy, with park benches for the footsore traveler. Highlighting the green is the bandstand. Well over a hundred years old, it’s been the site of thousands of concerts, events, and presentations. Santa Claus greets the children here, and future film critic Charles Champlin, then in high school, played here with the town band. We don’t have any “official” figures, but we imagine that a poll would turn up hundreds and hundreds of grownups who treated themselves to imaginative playtime on the bandstand when they were little.

*By the way, take a look at the music staff and notes that run around the bandstand. They actually make a tune.

*If Alexander Graham Bell were here he’d recognize the place in an instant, except that the streets are paved. When lightning struck the Presbyterian church in 1950, destroying the front half, new construction restored the look of the old. The white church with its town clock and tall spire still smiles down on the Square and the people – local and visitor alike.

*Stroll the sidewalks and study the buildings that line the downtown streets. Most of them went in between 1820 and 1920… from the age of oxcarts to the age of airplanes. The iron fence at the J. S. Hubbs place has stood since 1901, and so has the Opera House (which hosted many entertainments but never, so far as I can tell, an opera).

*Strolling downhill will take you past the marvelous new library and the delightful old depot, right onto the lakefront with its loons, mergansers, and grebes… not to mention swimmers, fishers, and boaters. You can settle on a bench in the waterfront park and watch the winds and the shadows play with the lake. Or, you can take a bench in Pulteney Square… let your eyes droop… see in your mind’s eye the eminent Doctor Bell making stately progress across the Square alongside young Glenn Curtiss, tense with quick nervous energy. Ladies in long skirts… small boys in knickers… soldiers in blue, and later in khaki… history feels at home in Pulteney Square.

Strolling Through the Ages at Steuben County Fair

Leave a reply

Steuben County Fair, which is going on this week, has an anniversary coming up – sort of.

*Although there were occasional fairs going back to the 1790s, an 1819 event was the first true county fair, held with support from the state of New York, which wanted to encourage such events. Besides their economic impact, fairs served as educational centers for farmers. Competitions stimulated improvements in agriculture.

*Fairs continued until 1821 (when state aid ended), then disappeared until a new governing agency revived the fair in 1841 to 1845. In 1853 the new Steuben County Agricultural Society conducted a county fair, and they have done so every year since. In 1854 they moved to the current location (where they’ve been ever since), and in 1862 bought the place.

*In 1863 they started making the fairgrounds their own. As Grant was taking Vicksburg and Lee was fleeing from Gettysburg, the Ag Society created the first permanent structures on the site… the Fair House, and the Gatehouse on East Washington Street. Both of them are still there, and still in use today.

*In 1867 a Floral Hall was erected, and a Driving Park created. I assume that this is the oval track, which appears just as it is today on an 1869 map.

*Besides the track, that map shows buildings on the current footprints of the Gatehouse, the Fair House, and the Judge’s Stand.  It also shows buildings (east and southeast of Fair House) on what appear to be the current footprints of the Grange dining hall and the Grange exhibit building.  The Fair House, Gatehouse, Dining Hall, and Grange Exhibit Hall all show similar structure (as does one building on the north end), lending weight to the supposition that they were built at about the same time. 

*In 1884 the Pioneer Log Cabin was built – also still in use

*In 1920 the Auto Subway was built, and apparently rebuilt in 1935, but it’s no longer in use. The Pedestrian subway, still in use today, came in 1921 – it runs westward out of the infield.

*From 1927-1962 “new” stables were built, and in 1968 our Grandstand replaced one that had burned several years earlier.

*In 1993 the Babcock Hollow one-room school (built in 1849) was moved to site, making it the oldest building on the fairgrounds, but also a fairly recent addition. Along with the Fair Museum and the Log Cabin, the Schoolhouse anchors a historical corner east of the main Fair House. (New this year – non-functioning outhouses, so the kids can get a feel for what the “good old days” were like.)

*Looking back to 1853, when Millard Fillmore and then Franklin Pierce were President… when Queen Victoria, Franz Josef, and Napoleon III were on their thrones… Steuben County Fair has endured without interruption through the Civil War, two great world conflicts, polio outbreaks, the Spanish Influenza, and much, much more.

*Teen-aged Glenn Curtiss used to race bicycles on the track at the Fairgrounds (this was organized competition for cash prizes). Civil War General W. W. Averell was grand marshal of the Fair. Members of Congress attended Steuben County Fair, some of them as kids, then as Members, and finally as retirees. Captains of industry strolled through those gates, and inventors, and pioneer aviators, and renowned performers. And you and me. Maybe we’ll see you there.

Watson Homestead’s Sixtieth — A Look at 1957!

Leave a reply

Congratulations to Watson Homestead in the Town of Campbell! The retreat and conference center, which hosts guests from across the country for its “Road Scholar” programs and other offerings, is celebrating its 60th anniversary. Watson Homestead has been a busy place for the past sixty years. And the whole world was pretty busy when Watson Homestead got started in 1957!

Corning Community College was established, but wouldn’t open its doors until the following year. Corning-Painted Post School District closed the last of its one-room schools. Davenport Girls Home in Bath was in its last full year of operation.

Over in Apalachin, a hundred Mafia leaders panicked when they saw police driving by the house where they were meeting, and immediately ran for the fields and woods. Since most of them had never been IN fields or woods, they soon came in to be rounded up. Fifty-eight of them were arrested, even though they claimed they had only driven up to Tioga County because they heard that their host was sick, and they were worried about him. J. Edgar Hoover finally confessed to the nation that the Mafia did, in fact, exist.

John Lennon met Paul McCartney, even as American Bandstand went national and Elvis Presley made his last appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show. Watkins Glen International began its first full year of operation. There were no Major League Baseball teams south of the Potomac, or west of Kansas City.

President Eisenhower and Vice-President Nixon began their second terms. (Tom Watson had been instrumental in getting Eisenhower nominated back in 1952.) Averell Harriman was governor of New York. Republican Irving Ives was one of our U.S. Senators. Democratic former governor Herbert Lehman finished his term on January 9, succeeded by Republican Jacob Javits. Steuben County still had a Board of Supervisors, rather than a county legislature.

The first Sputnik was launched, and International Geophysical Year got under way. USS Glenn H. Curtiss spent 1957 operating in the antarctic for the IGY. The International Atomic Energy Commission started its work under Director-General Sterling Cole of Painted Post.

Congress passed the first civil rights act since Reconstruction. Black students braved violence to enter a previously all-white high school in Little Rock. Ernie Davis started his senior year at Elmira Free Academy. Ghana was the first black African country to become independent from European rule.

The first Frisbee sailed across a yard. The first Toyotas were imported. IBM produced the first Fortran compiler. The first electric watch went on the market, and so did the first Edsel. Passengers flew into Elmira-Corning Airport on Mohawk Airlines (propeller planes, of course).

Premieres for the year included West Side Story, Leave it to Beaver, The Music Man, The Bridge on the River Kwai, Perry Mason, and The Cat in the Hat. The NBC peacock first showed its colors. John F. Kennedy won the Pulitzer Prize for Profiles in Courage.

Deaths for the year included Bugs Moran, Humphrey Bogart, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Admiral Byrd, Oliver Hardy, Dorothy Sayers, and Senator Joseph McCarthy. The U.S. suffered its first combat death in Vietnam.

Mario van Peebles was born in 1957, along with Princess Caroline of Morocco, LeVar Burton, Vanna White, Spike Lee, Osama bin Laden, Daniel Day-Lewis, Bernie Mac, Caroline Kennedy, Donny Osmond, Andrew Cuomo, and Matt Lauer.

Prince Charles was nine years old. Bill Clinton, Donald Trump, and George W. Bush were all in elementary school. There was no Rockwell Museum, no Curtiss Museum, no Soaring Museum, no Finger Lakes Trail. No one had ever heard of K-Mart, Wal-Mart, Spectrum, Apple, or the Super Bowl. On the other hand, folks in 1957 DID have Western Auto, Woolworth’s, Ben Franklin, Acme, White Castle, A&P, J. J. Newberry, AND S&H Green Stamps!

Come See Canisteo!

Leave a reply

We very reasonably begin the Steuben County story with Charles Williamson establishing Bath in 1793. But of course people had been living here for thousands of years, and in particular European-descended people were already living here before Williamson arrived. Europeans had been living in Canisteo for five years before anybody around here ever heard of Williamson.

*The main Iroquois cities were up at the north end of the lakes, but there was a substantial Seneca town here well before Europeans stared muscling in. There’s a long-standing story that Marquis de Denonville marched down from Montreal and burned the town in 1690. Actually in that year he would have been marching from France, so it’s more likely to have been during a major expedition that he led in 1687, BUT despite the antiquity of the story, many scholars are pretty sure that he never got anywhere near this far.

*There’s another story that “Kanestio Castle” was a fortified town populated by local Indians, refugee Indians, white renegades, and escaped slaves, and was broken up in the 1700s. It’s quite possible that something along that line did in fact happen.

*By 1796 Canisteo was well-populated enough that it became one of the six original towns of Steuben County. I call these “supertowns” – Canisteo gave rise to another half-dozen current towns, plus Hornell and part of Allegany County.

*From an early date Canisteo was was an important point for road and river travel. Stages and mail came overland, while arks and rafts were poled downstream to Chesapeake Bay, carrying the produce of the region. Taking advantage of the same natural paths, the Erie Railroad came through in 1850. The nearby unincorporated hamlet of Hornellsville (today’s City of Hornell) started to boom with Erie work, and neighboring Canisteo grew along with it.

*In later years the New York & Pennsylvania railroad reached Canisteo, as did an electric trolley line linking to Hornell, and also circulating through each community. The Village incorporated, and became the market and business town for the surrounding countryside.

*The rail lines guided pioneer aviators, who made Canisteo a stop on long-distance flights. Cal Rogers cane through when he made America’s first coast-to-coast flight (1911, seven weeks elapsed but only 84 hours in the air). Canisteo at one point in the 1800s even had its own professional minor league baseball team.

*In 1933 Canisteans laid out the living sign on a hillside – 260 pines spelling out “Canisteo.” It was reported in Ripley’s Believe It or Not!, and listed on the National Register of Historic Places. It was recreated last year… eight decades takes its toll.

*The 1935 flood inundated the whole downtown area knee-deep, and also killed off the New York & Pennsylvania, which was already on its last legs. Two years later, with New Deal help, the community built a fine modern school that’s still in use. A fleet oiler, USS Canisteo, served in the US Navy from 1945 to 1989.

*We’ll be exploring the village in a historic walk (free and open to the public) at 4 PM Friday, May 6, sponsored by Steuben County Historical Society. We’ll meet at Kanestio Historical Society (23 Main Street). We hope you can join us!