Monthly Archives: August 2018

The Keuka Story — in 600 Words

Native peoples in small numbers lived around Keuka Lake for centuries before the Seneca took control, around 1500. But their main towns were at the north end of the lakes, and Keuka’s population remained small.

*White people started muscling in around 1790, after forced sales and unjust treaties. Jemima Wilkinson, the imperious frontier prophetess, ordered mills established along Keuka Outlet and settled her flock nearby. Jemima claimed to have died and come back to life, but she finally got it right in 1819, after which her following dwindled away.

*By the early 1800s a schooner plied the lake, and shipping ran southward to Bath and the Conhocton River. When the Erie Canal changed traffic patterns in 1825 the entire economy of our region collapsed until the Crooked Lake Canal (Penn Yan to Dresden, on Seneca Lake) opened in 1833, joining us with the Erie system. Now freight flowed northward, Hammondsport became a true port, and the economy revived.

*About then steamboats appeared, beginning with “Keuka,” a double-hulled centerwheeler that ran right up onto the beach.

*In the 1850s grape cultivation got under way… the first thing Pulteney people had ever found to justify the taxes on their land, according to one contemporary. Penn Yan and Hammondsport had academies offering high school education. Pleasant Valley Wine Company opened just before the Civil War. Hundreds of men from Yates and Steuben Counties died, while many more suffered life-long effects from their wounds.

*Railroads found their way to Penn Yan and Hammondsport, which helped the grape growers and wine makers, but also stimulated tourism. Families traveled by train and steamboat to lakeside resorts, there to spend a month or even a whole season enjoying the water and the scenery, with tasting tours laid on.

*An electric railway (or trolley) connected Penn Yan with Branchport, and Keuka College got under way by fits and starts, beginning as a ground for revival meetings.

*With a new century Glenn Curtiss opened the age of internal combustion, first on motorcycles and then in blimps and airplanes. Hammondsport became a dirty, smelly, smokey industrial town, until the Great War ended, and the Curtiss plant closed just as Prohibition began. The economy collapsed again, and drunken men taking pistol practice became routine on Hammondsport streets.

*The last of the steamboats gave up the ghost, and in 1919 local folks formed the Finger Lakes Association – now Finger Lakes Tourism Alliance – to promote family travel to the region. This meant improving the roads, and Governor Al Smith made an inspection, ordering that the West Lake Road be paved.

*Then came the Great Depression and the catastrophic 1935 flood, but Roosevelt’s New Deal repealed Prohibition, built the Glenn Curtiss Memorial School, and took up the disused trolley tracks in Penn Yan. When World War II came Mercury Aircraft jumped from two employees to 850. But 14 boys from Curtiss School died, and the other communities fared equally sadly.

*State Route 54 was installed in the 1950s, finally providing a good land route between Hammondsport and Penn Yan. Ira Davenport Hospital replaced the old Bath Memorial. Curtiss Museum and the Finger Lakes Trail both got into operation in the early 60s. Experiments by Charles Fournier and Konstantin Frank transformed the grape and wine business. The Hurricane Agnes flood took a toll in 1972. Family farms largely went out until the influx of Amish and Old Order Mennonites. The big wineries were largely succeeded by smaller “boutique” operations.

*As the farms went out the forest came back, and with it came the deer, the bear, the turkey, the beaver. The steamboats are gone, but locals and visitors alike crisscross Keuka in sailboats, motorboats, rowboats, and canoes. Another season on the lake.

Going to Ganondagan

We used to visit Ganondagan State Park back in the mid-1990s, when we lived nearby in “the Bloomfields.” Walking the trails there we had one of our most cherished outdoor encounters, with a new-born fawn and its mother.

*In the small visitor’s center was a small exhibition relating to the history of the site. Ganondagan was a major Seneca town back in the 1600s, far bigger than almost any town in the English colonies. The little exhibition documented those days when the hilltop outside Victor was the metropolis for many miles around.

*We knew that a lot had been added to Ganondagan, but since we moved “way away” to Bath we hadn’t gotten back until our elder son came in for a few days on a visit from Houston. He and I finally decided to take the plunge.

*We were glad we did. The most significant change is the gleaming Seneca Art & Culture Center… a year-round museum, visitors center, and educational facility. “When you’re a native person, your story is often told by other people,” says Historic Site Manager G. Peter Jemison. “Here, we tell our own story.”

*And the story begins with creation, in a mixed live-action/C.G.A. film that runs about 15 minutes, retelling the myth so dear to centuries of Huadenosaunne (that being their own, proper name, rather than the French-derived “Iroquois.”

*The large new gallery space makes use of a hundred years of archaeology at Ganondagan and similar sites, so that we get some glimpse of long-ago life through the artifacts made or used by the people themselves. Many of these items were collected under the leadership of Arthur C. Parker, the Seneca-descended archaeologist who was director of Rochester Museum and Science Center, and before that had a lengthy tenure at the New York State Museum.

*On the height overlooking the Art & Culture Center is a recreated longhouse, fully decked out within as a longhouse might have been in the days when it was a crowded home to five or six families. Docents are on hand to help us get a feel for life in the longhouse days.

*Despite the development of the past 20 years or so, Ganondagan is still criss-crossed with trails (including interpretive signage), many of the trails cut through grass that at this time of year is now waist-high. Coltsfoot, Queen Anne’s lace, and brown-eyed Susan sparkle in the meadow, and the surface is alive with butterflies, including the monarch and the eastern tiger swallowtail. Small apples drop unremarked from the trees, and acorns are starting to fall.

*The Seneca evacuated and burned Ganondagan in 1687, during a French invasion, then resettled in the Canandiagua area… farther away from the Lake Ontario invasion route. Much of the original site still remained in Seneca hands in the 1900s, becoming a National Historic Landmark in 1964 and a state park in 1987… in part as a way to combat “pothunters” who were digging and stealing artifacts.

*The place is worth a visit, even more now than it was 20 years ago! I do observe that acoustics for the film are poor. It can be captioned, but you need to ask ahead of time. Apart from that, a great visit!

The March of the Monarchs

In the hot hot week of the Fourth of July, we made the latest of our many visits to the Mystic Marinelife Aquarium. Part of the fun there (even on hot hot days) is making your way along a concrete “sidewalk,” on one side of which are pools for seals and sea lions.

*On the other side is southeastern Connecticut: granite, high grasses, maples, catbirds, croaking frogs, and plenty more. And on one long stretch, I was filled with joy to see, is a monarch migration stop.

*Monarch butterflies, their large orange wings veined with striking black, are easy to spot and easy to identify… even a child can do it, and I hope most children do… it’s often the first, and sometimes the only, butterfly they learn.

*The simple excitement of identification may well change the child’s life. Identify one type of butterfly, and the world suddenly has twice as many butterfiles – this type, and all the others. Learning to spot the monarch may open a lush, overflowing world of nature.

*Monarchs are beautiful, always a joy to see. Unlike any of us, they do absolutely no harm to anyone in the world. They even lay their eggs on the broad leaves of the milkweed, so the caterpillar feasts its whole life on a plant that’s been rated as a pest.

*In their mature butterfly form monarchs sip nectar, and as the flit from blossom tto blossom they join with the bees in pollinating the planst and the flowers that bring us so much joy.

*One end of their range is well to the north and east of us, while the other is in Mexico and Central America. That’s why they need these migration stops, especially as we chew through the natural world and their normal habitat.

*Everybody has to eat, to be sure. But it’s a sorry business that kills off butterflies.

*Here in our neck of the woods Seneca Park Zoo works a Butterfly Beltway program, designed to create safe havens in and around Rochester. Our Department of Transportation… one of New York State’s biggest landowners… has created corridors along which butterfly gardens are spotted on DOT land.

*Few of us would try to fly from Maine to Mexico on paper-thin wings, and few monarchs actually make it. It’s often a multi-generational journey, perhaps two northward and two southward to make a round trip in a single year.

*So they need to rest, recuperate, and shelter as they struggle on. They need to sip nectar. They need milkweed on which to lay their eggs. Since we’ve largely forbidden nature to provide such spaces we need to provide them ourselves. Doing so is a supremely humane act.

*It’s true that we’re acting, in part, in self-interest; we need the pollinators. But it’s also true that we rush to succor these most fragile, most delicate of creatures. And that almost every heart thrills, in great age as it did in early childhood, to the flash and flit of orange in the lawn.

Ah, August

Ah, August.

*Out of all the year’s months, August may be the most lonesome. There are no major holidays, with Fourth of July but a distant memory and Labor Day no more than a half-seen shadow. (The V-J Days of my childhood seem to have gone with the wind.)

*Nothing seems to make August stand out… it’s almost just a continuation of July, and it may well slide into September’s early days. (In Rhode Island, August was sometimes enlivened with hurricanes, but… 1972 withstanding… it’s not the same in the Finger Lakes.)

*But the breeze last Friday carried September with it. Go into the woods in August’s first week, and here and there you’ll spot the hint of color, the dried-out leaves, and the dropping acorns that mark the first of the fall.

*The fledglings have left their nests, and in some cases their parents. Tired monarch butterflies struggle to the southward. The roadsides sparkle with coltsfoot, chicory, Queen Anne’s lace. Aster peeks out underfoot. But for all that color, the flowers and the fields are starting to go to seed. Farmers make hay, dotting the hills with rolls and bales.

*Thunderheads rise and accumulate, sponsoring booms and flashes and downpours that liven our afternoons and wake us up at night. On clear nights we crane our necks to see the Summer Triangle directly overhead. Scorpio sits near the horizon, and if the clouds cooperate we may enjoy the streaks and flashes of the Pleiades.

*An occasional morning is downright chilly, and startled folks schedule another day of swimming, of boating, of picnicking… another trip to the ice cream stand, maybe a ride to Elmira, Toronto, or Rochester for a baseball game. Even summer doesn’t last forever. When I was a kid I loved school. I even DEPENDED on school, as a shelter from the insanity of my home. But I also loved the glorious kid freedom of summer, and felt a melancholy as September drew near. I felt it every August from 1958 to 1994, after which I finally unlinked my life from the beloved round of the school year.

*In Steuben County August brings “fair week,” and other counties enjoy the same. Businesses get the last flood of seasonal traffic. Mothers make back-to-school lists. Drug stores and supermarkets start putting up autumn displays, and REALLY forward-looking kids now and then dream of Christmas.

*In a typical life you’ll probably get around 80 Augusts. None of them, once gone, will ever come again. Enjoy this one.

Join Us for a Walk Through Prattsburgh

When I was growing up in rural Rhode Island, many of our neighbors were Pratts and Wheelers. That’s one of numerous reasons I feel at home here.

*Silas Wheeler, who founded the Town that bears his name, was also from Rhode Island. Joel Pratt, first white resident in Prattsburg, had New England roots.

*(Both Towns were part of Bath when Towns were created in 1796, and have been separated out since then.)

*Mr. Pratt and his family are buried in the Pioneer Cemetery on State Route 53, at the southern edge of the unincorporated settlement of Prattsburgh (with an h, unlike the Town), on land he gifted to the community.

*The settlement itself (part of the larger Town of the same name) grew up around the Pratt farm, a little before the War of 1812. It lies at the foot of a steep slope to the north, toward Naples, Ingleside, and Canandaigua. I speculate that this slope led travlers to overnight in Prattsburgh, or at least to change to a fresh team of horses, mules, or oxen. Assuming I’m correct, this would have meant steady business.

*Mr. Pratt saw to it that a church was soon established… Congregationalist, later changed to Presbyterian. Baptist, Methodist and Catholic churches followed, and an academy was established in 1823.

*This was an extraordinary institution, for it offered what amounted to a high school education at a time when many communities were still struggling to set up one-room schools. Narcissa Prentiss (later Whitman) and Henry Spalding are perhaps the school’s most famed alumni, being early explorers and missionaries in the American northwest, where Narcissa and her husband were killed. Franklin Academy would eventually become the public central school.

*The original Academy building burned in 1923 (exactly a hundred years after its founding), along with the next-door Presbyterian church. Both were rebuilt and reopened with considerable fanfare, and both are still in use almost a hundred years later (with additions and alterations).

*Also still in use (with considerable alteration) is the 1860s St. Patrick’s church. It’s no surprise, given the name, that the original congregation was largely Irish-American. They built the church themselves, and it’s now the oldest Catholic church edifice in Steuben County.

*It’s located maybe a quarter-mile down the street from the Baptist church. A hundred years ago there must have been considerable tension between the two, as the Baptists welcomed a Ku Klux Klan delegation during a service in the 1920s.

*Prattsburgh has the original (and still operating) Air Flo location (manufacturing truck equipment) and is also home to Empire Access, the telecommunications provider. It has a library and a small supermarket (with ice cream stand), a Dollar General, a gas station-convenience store, and a large grassy tree-lined town square.

*On Friday, August 10 I hope to be leading a free historic walk of Prattsburgh, sponsored by Steuben County Historical Society. This was put off one week because of weather, but we expect to gather at the bandstand at 4 PM. Maybe you’d like to join us.