Monthly Archives: July 2018

Area Folks Made Their Mark on the Maps

Some folks from our region have really made a mark in the big wide world… enough so that their names are on the map. With some digging I created an impressive list – looking just at places NOT in the person’s immediate home area!

*The first was probably Williamsburg, which promoter Charles Williamson of Bath named after himself in the 1790s. Sadly the community faded away… it’s the empty hilltop behind the northbound rest stop at the Geneseo/Mount Morris exit on I-390, now denoted only by a state historic marker.

*Magee Street in Watkins Glen memorializes the Bath man who built Steuben County Historical Society’s Magee House in Bath, and later a second mansion (now gone) in Watkins. There’s also a Magee Street in Wellsboro, PA, which was served by John Magee’s Fall Brook Railroad. At least three of the Magees were active in Wellsboro… John, John Junior, and Duncan, for whom Duncan Township (also in Tioga County, PA) was named.

*Once upon a time, the map was sprinkled with Curtiss Fields, now gone, renamed, or absorbed. But there is a Glenn Hammond Curtiss Middle School in Carson, CA, and a Glenn Curtiss Street nearby (Glenn flew there in 1910); a Glenn H. Curtiss Road in San Diego, CA (where he invented the seaplane); a Glenn Curtiss Boulevard in East Meadow/Uniondale, NY (where he ran the Curtiss Engineering Corporation); a Glenn Curtiss Drive in Addison, TX; and a Curtiss Parkway in Miami Springs, FL (which he developed).

*Curtiss Park in Buffalo is on the site of the old Curtiss aerodrome. Curtis Parkway leads to Curtiss Park, and despite the single-s spelling, the original idea was to name the street for Glenn.

*Who is ALSO remembered in the Glenn H. Curtiss Mansion and Gardens at Miami Springs, a popular event venue, and the only surviving home in which Glenn lived.

*Of course, the Curtiss name is also preserved in 141 Curtiss-Wright facilities, all around the globe!

*Glenn also developed Hialeah, which for many years has enjoyed the Lua A. Curtiss Branch Library, now renamed Curtiss E-Library. Lua was Glenn’s mother, and they were both from Hammondsport (she started out in Jasper).

*Spalding, ID was named for the Reverend Henry Spalding of Prattsburgh, an associate of Marcus and Narcissa (Prentiss) Whitman. Spalding worked in that area, teaching irrigation and potato cultivation to the Nez Perce. Whitman College, in Walla Walla, WA, honors Dr. Whitman’s memory – as do Wallowa-Whitman National Forest, Whitman Glacier, and Whitman Mission National Historic Site. Also in Walla Walla is the Marcus Whitman Hotel & Conference Center.

*The names are not used much nowadays, but 90 years ago the road from Penn Yan to Rushville was named the Marcus Whitman Highway, while the road from Prattsburgh to Naples was named Narcissa Prentiss Highway.

*Ingersoll, Texas once honored famed freethinker Robert G. Ingersoll, but they changed the name to Redwater after a religious revival. Colonel Bob Mountain in Washington still remembers the Dresden boy, along with his Civil War service.

*Seneca chief Red Jacket spent time in the Branchport area, and maybe grew up there, although that’s still uncertain. (His mother was buried nearby.) He’s remembered in a dorm complex, a commercial building, and a peninsula in Buffalo; a dining hall at SUNY Geneseo; a school district in Ontario County; a fire company in Seneca Falls; a yacht club on Cayuga Lake; and a census-designated place in West Virginia.

*Maybe someone should try to visit all these places – they have my permission to skip the Curtiss-Wright sites!

Keep Cool at the Library — on Weekends!

So it’s being a hot, hot summer… unsurprisingly! EVERY year now is among the ten hottest years ever recorded, and it keeps getting worse.

*During heat waves the counties and other agencies often announce lists of “cooling stations,” where people can go for some relief before the dangerous heat makes them ill. Very often, these cooling stations are our public libraries.

*This makes sense – apart from the mall, the library is about the only place you can just “drop in” without charge – plus, there are books, magazines, computers and puzzles to occupy you, AND things to occupy the kids. If you want to check materials out, a card in any of the 49 Southern Tier System libraries works in just about any of the others.

*Not every library is air conditioned, so you shouldn’t just make that assumption. But nearly all of the libraries I’ve been in (which is quite a few) ARE.

*The smaller libraries and reading rooms are only open a limited number of hours per week, and some libraries (even large ones) close altogether for summer weekends. I understand their situation. In an institution dependent on volunteer workers, summer in the Finger Lakes makes scheduling almost impossible. ALL of the Chemung County libraries are closed for summer weekends.

*But there are still four other counties in our Southern Tier Library System, so what about them? My wife Joyce is a professional at Dormann Public Library in Bath, and she helped me assemble a list. But it’s always possible that some of information is not up-to-date, so CHECK FIRST before making a trip!

*A few libraries are open on summer SUNDAYS: Alfred (noon to 4), Montour Falls (8 to noon), and Watkins Glen (2 to 4).

*Alfred is open on Sundays but not on Saturdays. This sounds familiar to me, coming from southeastern New England. That stretch of the country, like Alfred, is historic Seventh-Day Baptist territory. I speculate that that history underlies the unusual scheduling.

*Watkins and Montour are open Saturdays in addition to Sundays. Andover is open the first Saturday of each month, while Arkport is open first and third Saturdays.

*To break up the list a little, let’s take the every-Saturday-but-never-Sunday roster by counties. They vary from two hours of operation up to six – usually three or four.

*ALLEGANY: Almond; Angelica; Belfast; Belmont; Canaseraga; Cuba; Fillmore; Friendship; Scio; and Whitesville. (MAYBE Rushford and Genesee – we’re seeing contradictory reports.)

*YATES: Branchport; Penn Yan; Dundee; Middlesex; Rushville. (All of them, Katie)

*SCHUYLER: MAYBE Odessa and Hector – reports are contradictory.

*STEUBEN: Avoca; Bath; Canisteo; Cohocton; Corning; Hammondsport; Howard; Jasper; Prattsburgh; Pulteney; Savona.

*Some of these libraries (or their settings) have special features BESIDES air conditioning. Bath (Dormann Public Library) has its own cafe, so you can keep cool with smoothies. Hammondsport (Taylor Memorial) has its own lovely park with shade trees and a gazebo, and it’s only a few steps down to the Keuka Lake waterfront. Branchport (Modeste Bedient) is at the other end of the lake, and has its own nature preserve right outside. Montour Falls is just a few steps from the falls (besides having lovely picture windows).

*Down the hall from the Watkins Glen Library is the International Motor Racing Research Archive, where there’s almost always a classic racing car on exhibit. Angelica is in a lovely small-village setting, with an outdoor farmers’ market down the street in the Circle.

*There are also open libraries just over the edge of Southern Tier Library System territory in Dansville, in Naples, and in Wellsboro, PA (Green Free Library). Right next door in Wellsboro is Gmeiner Art and Cultural Center, where exhibits are always free admission.

*So keep cool, and be cool. Even on weekends, if only for a few hours, the library waits.

Keuka Lake — Highway or Playground?

Funny thing about Keuka Lake.

*For the first 130 years or so of European occupation, it was a highway. But HOW that highway worked kept changing.

*It’s about 21 miles along the main axis, between Penn Yan and Hammondsport… plus you’ve got that arm reaching over to Branchport.

*Twenty-one miles doesn’t seem like much. But until well into the 20th century, there was NEVER a good land connection between Hammondsport and Penn Yan.

*People and goods moved over the lake, and the traffic generally ran from north to south. The vale of Pleasant Valley started a long portage down to Bath, where goods (or travelers) could embark on the Conhocton River, poling-floating-drifting-paddling-rowing down as far as the salt water of Chesapeake Bay. (Native people had done the same for centuries.) There was even a schooner on the lake (the “Sally”), maybe as far back as the Jefferson administration.

*So the Southern Tier, and the Keuka-Seneca region, prospered on that watery highway down to the Tidewater, and Bath was laid out to become the great metropolis of western New York.

*Then that busybody DeWitt Clinton went and opened the Erie Canal. River traffic continued, but it was pretty much an act of desperation. Land pices collapsed, and farmers found themselves with mortgages that were now horrendously overpriced, and produce prices so low that they could never get free and clear. Mob actions, petitions, and conventions finally led to revaluations.

*Things perked up once the Crooked Lake Canal opened in 1831. This ran from Penn Yan on Keuka Lake to Dresden on Seneca… and from Seneca, you could access the Erie Canal system. Suddenly regional farmers were back in the game, and steamboats started chugging across the surface of Keuka. Hammondsport became a true port, with goods hauled from as far away as Pennsylvania, transshipped to Penn Yan, and thence transshipped again by canal boat. Some visionaries even shipped experimental loads of grapes to New York City!

*Lake traffic was now running south-to-north, reversing the earlier pattern.

*The Southern Tier REALLY came to life again when the Erie Railroad opened its Lake Erie-New York City main line in 1851, right through Elmira, Corning, Addison, Canisteo, Hornell, and onward.

*That might have killed off lake traffic, BUT Penn Yan and Hammondsport still lacked decent overland connections. Glenn Curtiss helped create independent land tranportation with his motorcycles, but on at least one occasion got mired in mud on the shore road, arriving hours late, after dark, and absolutely filthy for a visit with his mother. In the early 1900s the post office moved mail in the Keuka region by steamboat, contracting overland routes only when the lake froze up.

*The three end points of Keuka Lake were never joined by rail, except for a trolley between Penn Yan and Branchport. But by the 1920s Governor Al Smith was having the highways paved, beginning with Keuka’s West Lake Road. The steamers and canal were gone by then, and the railroads mattered less and less. Keuka’s surface, once a busy commercial highway, became a pleasure place – just as it still is today.

Steuben County’s BIGGEST Fourth of July!

The Fourth of July in our region has seen some memorable moments. Slavery ended in New York on July 4, 1827. In 1863, news must have just started trickling in about Lee fleeing Gettysburg with his crushed army, and Grant marching into Vicksburg. What must that day have been like in 1946, with World War II victoriously ended, the boys back home, and America on top of the world! In 1972 people were still counting the dead and finding the living from the terrible flood twelve days earlier. But four years later, local folks joined Americans around the globe to celebrate their bicentennial, almost exciting as the CENTENNIAL Fourth in 1876. In Bath, in the late 19th century, EVERY Fourth meant a huge parade!
*As soon as this day dawned in 1908 people started converging on Pleasant Valley Wine Company. They came by bike and they came by buggy. They rode on horses and they rode in cars. They came on foot, or erupted from “special” trains of the B&H Railroad. The army had an observer there, and so did the German government. The movies were there, and so were the newspapers. The Aero Club was there, and “Scientific American” was there.
*Before you knew it, a thousand people were milling about the grounds, thrilled to have a chance denied to almost every human being living, or any who had ever lived. They were going to see a man fly.
*Hammondsport’s own Glenn Curtiss, who had just turned 30, was working with the awe-inspiring Alexander Graham Bell to create and perfect airplanes. Working with three younger partners (plus a lot of kibitzing from anyone who was interested), they had already designed, built, and flown “Red Wing” and “White Wing.” Now they had a new aircraft – “June Bug” – with Curtiss as pilot and chief designer. The new machine had a new feature – tricycle landing gear, still widely used today. It also sported ailerons, invented for “White Wing” and still in universal use.
*”June Bug” was so successful that Curtiss was going to fly for the “Scientific American” trophy. This would require an officially-observed unassisted takeoff, a one-kilometer flight without any stops or touchdowns, and a safe landing. He’d picked the Fourth of July to be sure of getting a crowd, and now the crowd was ready and eager. “June Bug” was ready, and the officials were ready. But Glenn Curtiss wasn’t there.
*For all his well-deserved reputation as a daredevil, Curtiss paradoxically was a bear for safety. There were thunderstorms in the area. Air conditions weren’t good, and when conditions weren’t good, Curtiss didn’t fly.
*No official time had been set for the trial, but around noon the crowd started getting ugly. They had all come out to watch a flying machine. Examined closely, how likely did that seem? Were they all the victims of some gigantic hoax?
*The winery invited everybody in for an impromptu tasting and a cold collation. They all decided they could wait a little longer.
*By late afternoon things had improved, and Curtiss motored out to the winery. After conferring with officials he took his seat, revved up the engine, rumbled down the trotting horse track, and took off as his wife screamed.
*Generations of amused male chauvinists have made much of this scream, utterly overlooking the fact that Lena was right – she had instantly spotted the problem, and recognized its dangers. “June Bug” was shooting up higher than they had ever flown before, at an angle steeper than they had ever tried before. Curtiss was standing up in the airframe, leaning on the wheel, trying to get the nose down low enough to regain control.
*He managed, and soon discovered that the tail had been assembled at the wrong angle, forcing the nose upward. After disassembly and reassembly they wheeled back to the start line, ready to try again. As Curtiss looked down the course he saw a photographer setting up just short of the one-kilometer mark.
*He’d been having a bad day, and he later wrote to Bell that something snapped in him at that moment. This unspeakable shutterbug was all prepared to snap a picture of Curtiss just FAILING to reach his goal. So, he told Dr. Bell, just to spite the man he flew down the course, over the photographer, over the mark… and kept going… into the sunset of the Fourth of July… as a thousand voices cheered.
*He made just about a mile before landing to shut down his engine to prevent overheating. Back at the winery workers grabbed bottles off the shelves and rushed outside. The movie crew soon found that it had fine film – the first ever made of an airplane flying in America. An even bigger crowd turned out for more flights on the fifth, and Glenn Curtiss was launched on a spectacular career in aviation. What could top that, for a Fourth of July?
*(Lightly edited from an earlier column)