Monthly Archives: April 2018

The Farming Story Part 3: Canals, Railroads, and War

Everyone was very relieved when the 1816 “Year Without a Summer” turned out to be a fluke, and growth resumed until the even-more disastrous year of 1825, when that busybody DeWitt Clinton went and opened the Erie Canal. While a spectacularly excellent thing over all, it hit the Southern Tier like a neutron bomb, completely wrenching all the patterns of travel and commerce. You can still see that Bath was laid out to be the great metropolis of western New York, with traffic running down the Conhocton and Chemung to the Susquehanna and the Chesapeake Bay. Now Bath stalled while little no-account shanty towns like Buffalo, Syracuse, and Rochester started to boom.

*Land prices down here collapsed, and farmers suddenly found themselves paying mortgages that far exceded the new values of their properties. There were demonstrations, near-riots, and conventions until they finally held a summit conference with representatives from all the towns, and the Land Office agreed to revalue all the properties.

*Opening the Crooked Lake Canal in 1833 ameliorated this to some extent. While not in Steuben, it drained commerce on Keuka Lake into Seneca Lake and thence to the Erie Canal system. Hammondsport became a true port, transshipping goods from as far away as Pennsylvania up to Penn Yan and the canal. The later Chemung Feeder Canal, linking Corning with Watkins on Seneca, also helped.

*Steuben County was larger back then than it is today, and the 1835 gazetteer showed that 43% of its land – almost 40,000 acres – was “improved,” that is, cleared and useable for farming. This was quite an accomplishment for a feat done entirely with hand tools and draft animals, in about four decades. Of course it was also an ecological holocaust, and an open invitation to flooding.

*Steubeners in 1835 owned 43,000 cattle, 11,000 horses, a hundred thousand sheep, and 36,000 swine. They owned and operated 43 grist mills, 257 sawmills, two oil mills, 18 fulling mills, two paper mills, one iron works, three woolen factories, five distilleries, two breweries, 19 asheries, and 32 tanneries. So all those sawmills, asheries, and paper mills prove that lumbering was still vital.

*The Crooked Lake Canal helped, but real revival began with completion of the Erie Railroad main line in 1851, serving Corning, Painted Post, Addison, Cameron Mills, Canisteo, Hornell, Arkport, and Almond. The Rochester Branch soon also served Coopers Plains, Campbell, Savona, Bath, Kanona, Cohocton, and Wayland. By the time of the 1860 directory there was actually LESS improved land, but there was also less TOTAL land, thanks to the loss of several townships, so the percentage had climbed from 42 to 45. Steuben folks now owned more cattle, sheep, and horses than they had in 1835, but considerably fewer swine.

*The 1860 gazetteer also tells us something about their PRODUCE. Steuben folks annually produced over 1.5 million bushels of grain; 60 thousand tons of hay; more than a quarter-million bushels of potatoes; almost 300 thousand bushels of apples; 2 million pounds of butter; and 200 thousand pounds of cheese. Much of this, ESPECIALLY the dairy products, would have been useless without fast transportation. According to this gazetteer, “In extent of territory and in agricultural wealth [Steuben] now ranks among the first [counties] in the state.”

*I can’t state this for a fact, but I assume that Steuben followed the general national trend of mechanizing its farming during the Civil War. Thousands of young men who normally would be swinging scythes were now shouldering rifles. Production was kept up by mechanical combines, reapers, and the like.

*This meant that farming became much more CAPITAL-intensive and much less LABOR-intensive. It took more monetary investment, and larger farms, to farm successfully, and it was harder to find a job in the field, even for the men who came back from the war. Many of the veterans who populated the “Soldiers’ Home” (now Bath V.A.) after 1878 were only winter residents. During the growing season they got those jobs that were still left, or they went back to family farms as unpaid extra hands. But the work wasn’t there to employ them ’round the year.

A Visit to Brockport (At Last!)

Last week we finally visited Brockport, which we’d been meaning to do for several years. Brockport is home to a S.U.N.Y. campus, of course, but it also bills itself as “the Victorian village on the Erie Canal.”

*And a very pleasant place we found it to visit. Even with the campus, it makes a compact village, divided by the canal, with the north side (what little we saw of it) appearing to have been largely developed in the mid-20th century.

*We were glad to find that there are several municipal lots with free parking, so we pulled up right off Main Street, overlooking the canal and hard by the welcome center. For future reference, we saw that you can borrow bikes here, and use the canalside bicycle path. This was a sunny but breezy April day, so I decided anther time would be better.

*So we strolled the few steps back to Main Street and turned south to our destination, Lift Bridge Bookstore. This was really the purpose of our trip, since we’ve encountered the Lift Bridge folks several times at the Rochester Children’s Book Festival, where they are the sole vendor.

*And, Lift Bridge lived up to our expectations! We spent quite a while prowling and browsing, while I jotted down titles for future reference. The store includes a large children’s section, and Joyce bought a picture-book biography of Roger Tory Peterson. When she inquired about a particular book that was out of stock, the staff opened up the day’s shipment to check for her.

*Though I had several titles in mind, one kept calling to me all through the store. So as we were getting ready to leave I took a deep breath, and bought “The Blood of Emmett Till.” This has been on my to-read list for some time, despite my own P.T.S.D. I’m reading through it now, and it’s rough, but it’s incredibly important. I’m going slow, but I’m doing it at last.

*Joyce had spotted the Red Bird Cafe so we walked there (a block back toward the canal) for quiche (me) and a sandwich (her). Then I walked her to the quilt shop, about-faced, and went to the comic book store… Collector’s Corner. Here I met owner George, who’s wearily getting ready for Free Comic Book Day (first Saturday in May – drop in on him), and after thoroughly working my way through the whole store I got Al Williamson’s “Hidden Lands” and “Road to Perdition Volume 2: On the Road.”

*Back on the sidewalk I made the faux pas of walking while studying the mural on the facade of Lift Bridge books across the street, and almost ran down an older gentleman stepping out of a coffee house. We fell into conversation as we walked, and when he learned that he lived in Bath, he told me that the first mass he attended after his wedding was at St. Mary’s church… small world.

*Joyce was just checking out when I arrived at the quilt store… perfect timing. Brockport’s downtown is a National Historic District, and we walked south on Main Street taking in the shops, the 19th-century churches (including an Episcopal Jubilee Center), and the very interesting fire house, with its large September 11 statues.

*Then we reversed field and retraced our steps, down to the lift bridge itself and across the canal just to sample the north side a little bit. Brockport has two lift bridges within sight of each other, giving the small town an enjoyable blend of technology, transportation, architecture, history, retail, and higher education. One historial marker describes Brockport as “a museum without walls.”

*When we got back to our car we saw a cooper’s hawk sailing along above the canal. A drive toward Lake Ontario took us through the orchards of the fruit belt and a countryside more rural than we’re used to even in Steuben County, but much more of it is in cultivation, rather than woodland. It’s also far, far FLATTER than we’re used to in Steuben.

*We didn’t see much of the S.U.N.Y. campus, so I may be doing it a disservice, but it struck me as being rather featureless, much like the campus of my own beloved Rhode Island College. They have similar histories, starting out as normal schools or schools of education and blooming in the postwar decades into full colleges, and a let’s-get-the-job-done architectural feel. I felt right at home.

*Besides the Red Bird we had a range of choices for our evening meal: coffee houses, pizza places, Texas hots, a soul food place. We selected the Brockport Diner, which was packed on Friday night – Greek spaghetti for Joyce, a mini fish fry for me. And since I never did get to the lower level used-book section at Lift Bridge, we’ll be back for more – maybe this summer.

The Farming Story Part 2: The Europeans Arrive

Once Europeans started muscling into our area in noticeable numbers, about 1790, the first economic pursuit, no surprise, was lumbering. Settlement at first spread along rivers, so you cut down the trees and rolled them down to the stream. You kept cutting until you didn’t want to roll any farther.

*Their construction and their implements all made heavy use of wood, plus of course they used it for fuel. But while much of the lumber could then be for own use, it was also a cash crop. Well into the 20th century long rafts of lumber were floated down the Canisteo, Conhocton, and Tuscarora to the Chemung. At places like the Gang Mills, sawmills dressed the logs, or they might be floated further down the Chemung to the Susquehanna.

*On that newly-cleared ground, you could now plant crops and pasture livestock.

*But if you produced beyond your own consumption… which is what most people wanted to do… how could you then handle your produce? Men on Mount Washington spent several weeks each winter hauling their grain by sledge through snow to Naples, where it could be milled. Before too long, though, gristmills were scattered throughout the region – Jemima Wilkinson ordered mills built on Keuka Outlet. William Ovenshire of Barrington paid off twenty dollars on his farm by making eighteen trips to Wagener’s Mill in Penn Yan, each time leading a horse carrying three bushels of grain, “by a path only recognized by blazed trees.”

*Even then, though, you still needed to get your goods to market. Well, remember all that lumber? The reason this area was attractive to the Pulteney investors, and the reason Charles Williamson founded Bath, is that those river connections on which the lumber was drifted connected all the way to Chesapeake Bay and the Tidewater – probably the richest part of America.

*The rivers were the highways, and Williamson’s business plan was to sell vast country estates to the wealthy Tidewater barons, who would settle the region lightly with their retainers and their slaves.

*This didn’t happen, thank God, but Steuben County farmers cut trees and seasoned lumber, and stored up a year’s worth of produce. Then they used the lumber to build rafts or arks, loaded up their produce, and poled down all the way to salt water, then often along the shore to Baltimore. There they sold their produce, then sold the ark for the lumber, pocketed their money, and walked back home.

*One man decided he wanted to see George Washington’s home. So after poling down to Baltimore he walked from there to Mount Vernon, made his visit, and then walked back home to Prattsburgh.

*Steuben County was officially created in 1796, and things progressed for exactly 20 years when they hit 1816 – the Year Without a Summer.

*Snow fell every month of the year. Frost formed every month of the year. The Tuscarora Creek froze over in April, and again in September. All the grain died in the fields. All the vegetables died. Almost all the fruit died. And people died with them, not so much from cold (the summer was still warmer than a Finger Lakes winter) as from poverty and hunger.

*We now know that volcanic eruptions caused the catastrophe, but people then wondered if the sun was burning out… or if the end of the world was upon them. What would the next year bring?

The Farming Story, Part 1: Native Farmers

An otherwise excellent documentary on farming in the Finger Lakes said that Native people had been farming this land for a thousand generations. Charitably calculating a generation as 20 years, a thousand generations takes us back 20,000 years, at which time we were under a mile of ice. So crop yields were pretty thin.

But, once the ice receded and people moved in, farming did develop. The white people in the westward expansion are often called settlers… a very gentle noun… rather than invaders. They also make much of clearing the wilderness, or taming the wilderness. But this was NOT wilderness. One of the reasons the land was so attractive was that so much of it was cleared, there were towns, there were orchards, there were farm fields. Native people had been terraforming for hundreds of generations, as human beings always do.

Steuben County, though under Iroquois RULE, was home to groups of several ethnicities. It was sort of a military frontier, with small towns and large patrols. There’s a habit of dismissively calling any Indian settlement a village… the “village” Custer attacked at the Little Big Horn had as many people as Hornell… and the main Iroquois settlements at the north end of the lakes were honest-to-goodness cities, larger than most communities in the new United States.

But around here smaller towns were the rule. There was one at the Painted Post, and one at the Chimney Narrows (east end of Corning). There were two in today’s Canisteo… one at the mouth of Bennett’s Creek, one at the mouth of Colonel Bill’s Creek.

Much of Indian settlement was somewhat decentralized, which makes sense if you recognize that with no livestock animals in America, meat came from hunting, fishing, and clamming. A community needed a large geographic spread as its larder, to avoid overhunting or overfishing.

In Europe, farming was a he-man’s work, while hunting was a recreational activity, indulged in once or twice a year. To their ethno-centric eyes, Indian men were lazy sons-of-guns who made their wives do all the work on the farm while they went off hunting. They didn’t recognize that this required constant reconaissance, journeys sometimes of several days in all kinds of weather to reach a given hunting ground, processing the kills on the spot and then packing it all back.

In Europe after the Black Death chopped population almost in half, the legal doctrine of waste land arose. If land was NOT plowed, and if no one ran cattle on it, you could move in and take possession as long as you started doing one of those things. When Europeans arrived here, they said, “Look at all the waste land!” And started grabbing all they could. The Indians didn’t really USE it after all… they might just come through hunting one week a year. Roger Williams pointed out that the reason the Indians don’t run cattle is because THERE ARE NO CATTLE IN AMERICA – which is also why they don’t plow! In addition to the immorality of taking Indian land, Williams argued that the waste land doctrine had no meaning over here, but he, of course, was completely ignored. One of several reasons Rhode Island is so small!

“America’s Wish Book: The Story of Sears, Roebuck”

A week or so back we posted a photo of a Western Auto store on our Steuben County Historical Society Facebook page, and that led to a LOT of comments with reminiscences… many of them from people remembering ther first Western Flyer bicycle!

*That particular store was on Liberty Street in Bath. But there were other Western Autos in Bath over time, plus more in Hornell and Addison, not to mention Wellsville, Elkland, and many others.

*I myself put in ten years at Western Auto, mostly in Rhode Island but incuding a few months in Virginia. As the name suggests, it was HUGE in auto parts, definitely including tires. Our store in Rhode Island, in a village about the size of Cohocton, sold thousands of tires every year. But “your home town department store” also sold paints, furniture, electronics, appliances, sporting goods, toys, housewares, and more. I estimated that I personally sold enough firearms and ammunition to outfit a regiment of infantry.

*Western Auto’s “associate store” arrangements let local owners use the name and buy the products while retaining their own ownership and control, thus vastly augmenting their own hardware, auto parts, or sporting goods store.

*This was only one of a number of chain stores of fond memories. Ames, Jamesway, and Woolworth’s are in memory still green. Slide back a little farther and you’ll find W. T. Grant’s… J. J. Newbery’s… Ben Franklin. Slide back even more and you’ll encounter such local chains as Cohn’s Clothing and Peck’s Hardware.

*Then of course there are supermarket chains (A&P, Acme, Grand Union) and drug store chains (Peterson’s, Eckerd, Rexall).

*The great granddaddy of them all, I suppose, is Sears, Roebuck. Sears grew up with the post office, especially once the Grange had bullied the government into creating Rural Free Delivery. Sears promoted by mail, took orders by mail, got paid by mail, and made deliveries by mail.

*This of course led to creation of the gigantic Sears catalog, which covered everything from the tiniest widget to an entire house. There’s a Sears house still occupied in Pleasant Valley. A house was once delivered to the Branchport area by trolley.

*Mothers were known to tear out the pages dedicated to “foundation garments” before releasing the catalog to the family’s young people. Last year’s catalog, like last year’s almanac, often wound up in the outhouse, where those out-of-date pages proved still to be of use.

*As folks relied more on cars and less on mail, Sears developed more brick-and-mortar presence, either as catalog centers or as full-blown stores. The catalog center in Bath is closing out just now.

*Which makes a sad if fitting backdrop for our next Steuben County Historical Society Winter Lecture, “America’s Wish Book: The Story of Sears, Roebuck,” by Pam Farr of Big Flats Historical Society. The free presentation will be at 4 PM Friday, April 6, at Centenary Methodist Church in Bath. We hope to see you there, and we hope you’ll bring your memories!