Monthly Archives: March 2018

The Finger Lakes Trail is the Cemetery Trail

The cover of the latest Finger Lakes Trail magazine bears a photo of Six Nations Cemetery in Orange. And rightly so. Perched on a little prominence above Kelly Hill Road, the cemetery offers a glorious view of Lamoka Lake, surrounded by the rolling fields and hills of Schuyler County. The very old cemetery itself is carefully kept, and you can wander quietly among the antique stones, musing on the folks and families who lie here, perhaps forgotten in practical terms, except for the enduring stones.

*You’d have to work to find that spot. It’s one of many treasures hidden throughout our region. The F.L.T., as it turns out, can give us a tour of interesting cemeteries and burial grounds.

*The small Six Nations is on F.L.T. Map 13. Near Birdseye Hollow County Park (also F.L.T. Map 13, but 20 trail miles away from Six Nations), is another small rural cemetery, in Bradford. It’s only a few steps off of Telegraph Road to the south, but not really visible from the road, though the Trail runs right by. Unfortunately word gets around, and it’s still close enough to the road to be prey to vandals.

*Map 12 guides us near the huge Pleasant Valley Cemetery in Urbana, just outside Hammondsport. It’s rightly noted as the burial place of aviation giant Glenn Curtiss, along with other motorcycling and aeronautical pioneers. Curtiss’s family plot is marked by a huge boulder. When he was buried, three future World War II admirals were pallbearers, and ten airplanes flew overhead to drop flowers on the crowd.

*Glenn’s old friend and associate Bill Chadeayne has a mausoleum. A key man in the early days of Mercury Aircraft, Bill made a punishing coast-to-coast motorcycle odyssey over a hundred years ago, struggling from New York to Los Angeles in under 48 days… a record in those frightening days when there was no road at all between Denver and Omaha.

*Six Nations Cemetery, as we mentioned, is on a bit of high ground, and it used to be typical to site cemeteries in space that was high, or sharply sloped, or otherwise undproductive. But Pleasant Valley sits right smack in the midst of a long flat stretch of excellent farmland… an indication of how imporant it was to the early inhabitants.

*Sliding over to the Allegany County Line, West Pennsylvania Hill Cemetery is on F.L.T. Map 9, just a little off the Main Trail but on the hunting season bypass (Webb Road), and also on a spur trail that leads down to Kanakadea County Park. This is a lovely well-kept cemetery, and also offers a little parking potential for the hiker.

*There are two major F.L.T. Branch Trails in Steuben County. The Bristol Hills Trail rises from the Main Trail (Map M 12) in Wheeler and runs on north of Naples, in Ontario County. Just where the trail starts to climb south of Bean Station Road on Map B 3 is the beautiful walled Covell Cemetery, lovingly restored and cared for by the late great Bill Garrison. I haven’t been up there in several years, so I can’t speak to its current condition. We can only hope.

*The Crystal Hills Trail rises from the Main Trail at Map M 13 in Bradford, and thence south to the state line. When you’re heading south on Map CH 2 in Addison, you come out of woods into burying grounds… Addison Rural Cemetery, St. Catherine Catholic Cemetery, and Maple Street Cemetery… before turning toward the heart of the village.

*And on Map CH 3 in Tuscarora, with Pennsylvania almost in sight, you pass Liberty Pole School and Liberty Pole Cemetery, both echoes of bygone days when communities were small and widely spaced. As communities still do today, they banded together to give their children a good start in life, and to give their neighbors a respectful end.

Eminent Rochestrians: Louise Slaughter

Back in days of yore there was a book on “Eminent Victorians” – British folks from the high days of the British Empire. The book was famed for dishing the dirt.

*For some time now I’ve been ruminating on a POSITIVE series about “Eminent Rochestrians,” and who better to launch this intermittent series than Louise Slaughter.

*Her story started in 1929. Herbert Hoover became president in March of that year, and the stock market crashed in September, making her a child of the Great Depression. It was 81 years since the Women’s Rights Convention at Seneca Falls, and nine years since the 20th amendment opened up voting to all American women. Talking movies were just becoming popular. Lindberg had flown the Atlantic two years earlier. Racial segregation looked like it would last forever.

*Her father was a blacksmith. One of her sisters died, of pneumonia, in childhood. She graduated from high school which, while not uncommon by then, was definitely still not the rule. Then she went to the University of Kentucky for a bachelor’s degree in microbiology, and a master’s in public health.

*At this point she was indeed venturing into the realm of the uncommon. Women were usually discouraged from hard science fields, and those who persevered were still pretty much considered quirks of nature. Besides getting the degrees, she convinced Procter & Gamble to hire her.

*Even so, once she married she followed her husband’s work to Kodak and Rochester, where the couple reared three children. Over time she became more and more involved in community activism and then in elective politics, serving in Monroe County Legislature and the New York State Assembly before winning her seat in Congress in 1982. She successfully defended that seat 15 times – enough times to become the oldest sitting Member of Congress. She was the only microbiologist in Congress, and the only woman ever to chair the House Rules Committe (often called the POWERFUL House Rules Committee). She was 88 when she died earlier this month. (Her husband predeceased her four years ago.)

*Besides being a trailblazing woman in science and in politics (as if that wasn’t enough!), she co-authored the Violence Against Women Act, and wrote the Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge Act. She helped lead fights for breast cancer research, genetic information non-discrimination, and better body armor for military personnel.

*She also secured substantial funding for R.I.T., for U. of R., and for building Rochester’s new Amtrak station – which will now be named in her honor, as is a hall at R.I.T. Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, and the great John Lewis have carved time at short notice from their hectic schedules to come and speak at her funeral. Quite a life, Louise. Well done. Safe journey.

Take a One-Mile Walk — on Sidewalk

A couple of weeks ago, both for business and for pleasure, I made several stops in Corning that required walking from one end of Market Street to the other, and back again. Since Market is half a mile long, I did a mile walk.

*If you’re doing that walk for exercise or pleasure, you can enjoy yourself checking out all the varied architectural facades. You can take in the clock tower at the Centerway Square, and stop in next door at the visitors center in the Baron Steuben Building to use the rest rooms.

*You can get a Texas hot across the street, or smoothies down at the Soulful Cup coffeehouse. You can study the art at West End Gallery, or at the ARTS of the Southern Finger Lakes. You should check out the “blade signs.” Corning is famed for these creative signs coming out at right angles to their buldings.

*There are quite a few other places around our region where you can walk a mile without having to leave the sidewalks – which can be a fun way to keep fit when the woods and fields are icy, soaked or snowcovered.

*Stand by the bandstand in BATH’s Pulteney Square, look up Liberty Street, then walk out of the park onto the Liberty sidewalk at your left (the west side). Keep walking up Liberty (crossing Washington) until you get to the Civil War statue. Walk back to the bandstand, and you’ve done a mile.

*Besides the bandstand and the statue, you’ll see the “three sisters” near the statue – three elaborate matching 19th-century homes, created in part to promote a lumber business. You pass the monumental 19th-century St. Thomas Church, across from the delightful contemporary Centenary Methodist Church.

*As on Market Street, enjoy the business facades, but recognize that many of Bath’s buildings are older, such as the 1860 county courthouse and the 1835 Bank of Steuben, almost directly across the Square. The green space in the Square has several monuments, and the dramatic First Presbyterian Church is on the south.

*In CANANDAIGUA if you use the courthouse as one anchor, the pier a mile away is the other.

*Susan B. Anthony was tried in that courthouse for the crime of voting, and fined a hundred dollars. She said she would never pay one penny of that unjust fine, and she never did.

*On your Canandaigua walk you’ll cross active railroad tracks (watch your steps), besides passing art galleries, a paperback book store, an embroidery shop, and even a comic book store. All of this depends on which side of the street you’re on, and Canadaigua’s Main Street has four lanes, plus a grassy median… so once again, watch your step!

*Also watch the “green” sidewalk features that Canandaigua has created to capture rainwater and naturally process it… a marvelous addition to the city. And, of course, if you walk north to south you just improve your view of the lake with every step.

*Start on Main Street in CANISTEO, walk up Greenwood (the old trolley route) to the elementary school and back, and you’ve got a mile. This also gives you a chance to see the famed “living sign” tree plantation spelling out the name of the village up on a hillside near the school.

*Also by the school is the very pleasant cemetery, including two 1920s gravestones appallingly inscribed with “K.K.K.” On a less horrifying note, there are also historic homes and churches on Greenwood Street, plus the businesses and churches down on Main Street and the village green area.

*So – want a little exercise, but at your own rate, with frequent breaks allowed and a good surface underfoot? There are plenty of one-mile walks available in our communities. We’ll look at some more, another time.

The Spanish Flu Devastated Our Region (and the World) A Hundred Years Ago

Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote that the first two things built by any new community, no matter how optimistic, are a jail and a burying ground.

*That’s pretty much what happened in Bath. Charles Williamson started clearing ground to make a town in 1793, and that same year made the first burial – his 7 year-old daughter Christian – in what became the Pioneer Burying Ground.

*Christian died of “Genesee Fever” – probably malaria. And ever since, from time to time, waves of sickness have flowed over our region, hollowing out families and communities.

*One late-19th century family in North Cohocton had four children, and lost them all in one horrible January. In September they had another child, and she died within weeks. Who knows how they had the heart, but the couple later had five more children, all of whom lived to adulthood.)

*Cholera swept through from time to time, leaving high death tolls in its wake.

*But the worst epidemic was no doubt the Spanish influenza, which concentrated in 1918, the last year of the Great War. It seemed to spring from nowhere, and was suddenly scything down people in thousands. Men and women who woke up feeling fine had died in agony before sundown.

*It wasn’t Spanish, but with nearly every country at war, neutral Spain was the only large western European nation without censorship. News flowed freely from Spain, while other countries tried to keep the lid on, and Spain got harnessed (unfairly) to one of the worst pandemics in human history.

*This was a war of technological innovation, including various forms of gas warfare. When the new influenza’s death-dealing potency was recognized, many governments and militaries on both sides feared that this was biological warfare from their enemies. They restricted information.

*Even once medical personnel were pretty well satisfied that this was not germ warfare, neither side wanted the other to know how weak it had suddenly become. Regiments became unable to take up arms, and ships’ companies unable to sail. Information was still restricted.

*A century later, it’s still remembered only obscurely. The Spanish influenza rates with the Black Death of the Middle Ages, and the horrendous die-off of Native Americans exposed to new diseases from the Old World.

*Spanish Flu killed as many people in four months as the Great War killed in four years. But the war loomed so huge, and so traumatically, that it overshadowed the worst health crisis of the modern age.

*Perhaps too no one wanted to look back. Ninety percent of the War deaths were fighting men. But the flu snatched children from their mothers’ arms, or turned beloved parents into sparse dim memories. The fact that people prefered remembering World War One, rather than the Flu, tells us how horrendous the Flu really was.

*Right here where we are, Corning Glass Works operated a makeshift hospital for its workers. So did Ingersoll Rand, in Painted Post. In Mount Morris they used horse-drawn equipment to dig multiple graves.

*In Hammondsport children were ordered to stay on their own properties, under pain of arrest. Quarantined families were kept alive by neighbors leaving food on their doorsteps. Schools and churches closed in Avoca, Bradford, Wheeler, Hammondsport, Dansville, Bath.

*In a 27-week period Buffalo registered over 3000 deaths from influenza or pneumonia, and Rochester almost 1500. Put another way, Rochester’s 1918 death rate from those two causes was four times what it had been in either ’15 or ’16, and Buffalo’s was even higher. Statewide New York was more than triple.

*The worst of it burned out pretty quickly, perhaps because of the disease mutating – which was good news, since there was no preventive, and no treatment beyond palliating the symptoms until the caregivers fell ill themselves. Two good books on the subject are “American’s Forgotten Pandemic: The Influenza of 1918” by Alfred W. Crosby and “Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World” by Laura Spinney.