Monthly Archives: December 2018

Come Hear About the Erie Canal

Imagine you’re digging a moat 363 miles long. Using only shovels, picks, and wheelbarrows. Throw in some mules and oxen, and a few horses to help you out. And you might as well take some black powder, too, for when you hit rock ledges.

*Then imagine that your moat is actually a canal, so you’ve also got to create locks along the way.

*And while you’re at it, imagine that many of your workers are illiterate, and there’s not a single trained engineer on the job.

*What you’re imagining is the Erie Canal.

*Despite all that angst about taxes on tea, one of the reasons Americans rebelled in 1776 is because the British wouldn’t let them move west of the Appalachians to kill and rob the Indians. This was no problem once we got independence, but the mountain range was still a major obstacle.

*The Appalachians look low, even inconsequential, to us. But that’s because we aren’t trying to convince an ox to scale the slopes while hauling our furniture.

*Rather than using the overland route, people in Pittsburgh found it cheaper to ship their goods to Philadelphia by sending them down the Ohio, down the Missisippi to New Orleans, then out to sea and way south around Florida, then back up the coast to Delaware Bay and the City of Brotherly Love.

*Many people had seen the value of an Albany to Buffalo canal. New York Governor DeWitt Clinton hammered proposals through the legislature by which the state would fund the biggest construction project going on anywhere in the world. It’s staggering that they finished the job in only eight years (1817-1825).

*Its success sparked a nationwide canal-building craze, as communities hoped to cash in. But they overlooked a couple of key truths.

*First, Lake Erie and the Hudson River fairly screamed out to be linked. Just having a canal was meaningless. It had to join two points that NEEDED to be connected.

*Second, the Erie route might have been created for the purpose of one day putting a canal through. NYSDOT calls it “the Natural Corridor.” Besides the Canal, that stretch also accomodates (or accomodated) Indian trails; Routes 5 and 20; the New York State Thruway; Amtrack; the New York Central Railroad; and the New York State Barge Canal.

*While the Erie Canal was a smashing success, it stranded the Southern Tier, whose river system… plied by arks, rafts, and flatboats drifting downstream… had formerly been the great transportation route of western New York. We can still see that Bath was laid out to be a great metropolis, with green grassy squares and broad straght boulevards. But growth stopped, and land prices collapsed, when the Erie Canal opened.

*By 1833 we had the Crooked Lake Canal and the Chemung Canal, both of which helped a great deal, meantime bringing propseority to Watkins and Hammondsport. But the Southern Tier economy didn’t really recover until the Erie Railroad opened in 1851.

*At 4 PM on Friday, January 4, Steuben County Historical Society will kick off its Winter Lecure Series with a free public presentation on the Erie Canal, held in the Bath Fire Hall. Allegany County Historian Craig Braack will be the speaker, and you are more than welcome!

Even in Wine Country, 19th-Century Temperance Activists Were Busy

A recent reference request from a researcher got us interested in temperance activity, especially during the 19th century. Three great social reform movements of the period were women’s rights, abolition, and temperance — if you were in one, you were usually also in the other two.

*Temperance involved limiting or even eliminating alcohol use, either by suasion or by law. This was not simply killjoy crankiness — alcohol abuse was rampant in 19th-century America, along with all its attendant ills. One strategy for promoting temperance was to gain control of municipal boards, then simply decline to grant or renew liquor licenses. Canisteo was reported as a “temperance village” (no saloons) in 1896.

*The crowning achievement of the movement was the Prohibition amendment, but whatever its successes may have been, that experiment failed for a host of reasons, including corruption or indifference among many charged with its enforcement.

*Since this was an investigation at Steuben County Historical Society, I limited my research to Steuben. The list below is surely incomplete, but it shows that temperance activity was widespread in the county, though some groups were no doubt short-lived. It’s interesting that I only found one organized temperance group in the grape-growing towns around Keuka Lake!

*KNOWN TEMPERANCE ORGANIZATIONS

*Painted Post Temperance Society already exists 1841; Dorcas Society in Corning formed spring 1841: Men’s temperance society (name unknown) in Corning formed summer 1841; Tyrone Washingtonian Total Abstinence Society 1846. (Tyrone was in Steuben at that time.); Sons of Temperance Lodge at Liberty Corners [Cohocton] 1840s and 1850s; Corning Temperance Alliance formed 2/25/1852; Young Men’s Temperance Institute and Lyceum (Corning, fall 1852); the Hornby Lodge (Hornby, 1855-1856) — male and female; St. Mary’s Temperance Society at St. Mary’s Roman Catholic Church in Corning, formed January 1861; reorganized 1866, active to 1868; Lodge of the Sons of Temperance formed in Corning formed 5/9/1867; Father Mathew Temperance Society (St. Mary’s R.C. in Corning) already exists in 1870; Corning WCTU (Women’s Christian Temperance Union) organized 4/9/1874. Opened coffee house/restaurant 1892; Women’s Temperance League Hornellsville [Hornell] already exists 1877; Knights of Honor Hornellsville [Hornell] already exists 1877; Temple of Honor Hornellsville [Hornell] already exists 1877; St. Joseph Total Abstinence Benevolent Society of Corning (St. Mary’s R.C. Church) formed 5/4/1884; WCTU Cohocton organized 1884; St. Aloysius Catholic Total Abstinence Cadet Society organized October 1885 at St. Mary’s R.C. in Corning; IOGT [International Organisation of Good Templars] Gem Lodge Addison already exists 1891; IOGT Victor Lodge Lindley already exists 1891; IOGT Walnut Grove Lodge Presho already exists 1891; IOGT Endeavor Lodge Woodhull already exists 1891; RT of T [Royal Templars of Temperance] Bath already exists 1891; RT of T Canisteo already exists 1891; RT of T Painted Post already exists 1891; IOGT Bath already exists 1893; Ancient Order of United Workmen Bath already exists 1893; IOGT Wayland was formed at a date unknown, but was gone by 1897; WCTU Wayland organized 1897; WCTU County-level organization already existed in 1897; WCTU Lent Hill organized 1901; RT of T Hammondsport organized 1902; WCTU Hornell already exists 1906, still active 1925; Prohibition Party in Corning… dates?; Anti-Saloon League in Corning… dates? Pledge cards from Lincoln-Lee Legion (for children) were still being distributed in 1922; Bath WCTU… dates?

*KNOWN COMPANIES/BUSINESSES REQUIRING TOTAL ABSTINENCE FROM EMPLOYEES

*Corning & Buffalo Railroad 1853; Fall Brook Rail Road 1882; Corning and Painted Post Street Railway 1897

*KNOWN TEMPERANCE LECTURERS WHO SPOKE IN STEUBEN

*Reverend Mr. Abbott; Billy Maxwell; Q.W. Wellington; Frances Willard; Susan B. Anthony; William G. McConnell; Francis Murphy; Rev. Claudius Curtiss; J.P. Coffin; Mrs. Clara O. Hadley

*KNOWN TEMPERANCE NEWSPAPERS

*The Temperance Gem (Kanona); The Southern Tier Farmer (Corning); The Hornellsville Tribune (Hornellsville — now Hornell); The Steuben Courier (Bath)

Winter Fun in the Summer Towns

It isn’t summer any more. Most of the tourists have long since gone home. The boat liveries are closed, the canoes are up on racks. The beaches belong to coots and sea gulls. The ice cream shops are closed. And here we’re left, in the towns that live and die on the summer trade.

*So what about US? What do WE do, all winter long?

*Well, there’s no reason to stop visiting the summer towns. There’s actually still a lot going on. (Though you should check for winter hours.)

*In HAMMONDSPORT (south end of Keuka Lake), as long as the day’s not too windy you can still stroll the streets and appreciate the dramatic scenery of the little village in the deep cleft… a cleft that it shares with the Lake to the north, and Pleasant Valley to the west and south.

*There are a couple of antique stores still open year-round, and one just outside the village, on State Route 54.

*You should really visit the Glenn Curtiss Museum… 56,000 square feet of pioneering aviation and motorcycling history.

*You can find a comfortable chair at the Fred and Harriet Taylor Memorial Library, and open up a book. Or a magazine. Or your laptop.

*Drive up to the other end of the Lake at PENN YAN, and you’ll find two bookstores (one new books, one used books) just a block or so apart. Besides new books, Long’s also has cards, gifts, and office supplies.

*Penn Yan has a museum complex at Yates County History Center, and an art gallery at the Arts Center of Yates County… both on Main Street. Also on Main is Penn Yan Public Library, where the original part of the building was donated by Andrew Carnegie.

*Take a stroll and enjoy the architecture of the historic business district (blending into fine homes and churches), or drop down to water level and hike (yes, even in winter if conditions permit) on the Keuka Outlet Trail. At times you can watch the ice fishers on the East Branch. There’s a triplex movie theater on the edge of town.

*If conditions permit, you can walk out on the pier and the docks at WATKINS GLEN (south end of Seneca Lake). Watkins has an old-fashioned downtown walk-in movie theater (The Glen), so see if they’re playing something you’d like.

*Even when it’s chilly you can stroll the streets to see memorials for racing drivers, set into the sidewalk, and wall-art murals celebrating the Glen’s ongoing racing heritage.

*You can also stop in at the Motor Racing Research Center, to see which historic racing cars are now on show in the lobby. Go down the hall, and you enter Watkins Glen Public Library.

*Main Street has two antique shops, a fiber arts store, an art gallery, and Famous Brands.

*At GENEVA (Seneca’s north end) try out lunch at the elegant Belhurst Castle. You could also visit Geneva History Museum at the 1829 Prouty-Chew House..

*CANANDAIGUA (north end of the lake of the same name) has a comic book store, a needlework store, a used book store, art galleries, antique shops, Unique Toy Shop, and lots more… the mile-long Main Street is still a thriving site for business and shopping. You can learn a little about “olden days” at the Ontario County Historical Museum. Or you could spend some time at Wood Library… all on Main Street!

*Anyway, don’t mope. There’s still lots to do!

John James Audubon Comes to the Rockwell

We are very fortunate to have, now on exhibit in Corning’s Rockwell Museum, the work of one of the most significant artists ever to work in America.

*John James Audubon spent decades tramping, riding, or boating across the United States, determined to document his adopted country’s native birds in paint. He hunted with Daniel Boone, and lived among the Indians. He probably knew America better than any man had before… and we can wonder whether anyone has known it so well since.

*Although greeted with considerable skepticism, “Birds of America” was quickly recognized as a staggering achievement in art and in nature study (and in printing techniques, too).

*Audubon then launched upon “Viviparous Quadrupeds of North America” – in other words, mammals. It’s from this work that our exhibit comes, in the form of highest quality hand-colored lithographic plates.

*Look at the Canada Otter… look, and keep looking. Look deeper, and deeper again. Notice how much of the fur is painted in as individual hairs, perhaps with a single-bristle brush.

*Many of the names are unfamiliar to us… some have changed names, some have gone extinct, some have been reclassified. Audubon presents us with the black squirrel, which we now consider just an uncommon color morph of the gray squirrel.

*Likewise in his artistic menagerie we find the polar bear, black bear, grizzly bear, and cinnamon bear. We now see the cinnamon as a subspecies of our own black bear.

*Audubon sometime staged his scenes in unlikely or even impossible ways. Five Common Flying Squirrels burst from a single tree, at various stages of age and occupation (resting, coiling, “flying,” etc.). They look like a Tasha Tudor picture.

*The Long-Haired Squirrel skips up and down a maple tree, as we can see from the leaves. The soft-haired squirrel makes its home in an oak.

*Audubon died before the project was finished; one son finished up the figures, while another finished the backgrounds. I don’t know who made the artistic decision, but the “Birds” and the “Quadrupeds” seem to have a telling difference.

*In the bird paintings, as far as I know, all of the backgrounds are natural settings. But the quadrupeds book shows a background filled with fences, farms, and towns. In some cases, the human presence intrudes still farther. The Tawny Weasel seizes a chicken in the yard of a large, well-kept barn. The Red Fox and the Canada Otter each snarl at the viewer, one paw caught in a trap. The Black-Tailed Deer staggers away, streaming blood, after being shot by a hunter at port arms in the background. Anerica had changed dramatically… more than dramatically… in Audubon’s adult lifetime.

*The book was originally issued in two oversize editions, one of them huge, and three subjects are on oversize sheets, pushing a yard in width. The Canada Otter, the Little American Brown Weasel, and the Caribou, or American Rein Deer are here in that detailed glory.

*The exhibit runs through January 6, and you may never get a chance to see another such gathering. Also of interest right now: the invitational gingerbread house competition, and “Your Place, Your Space,” an exhibition from Mrs. Marla Goldwyn’s 8th-grade digital art class at Corning-Painted Post Middle School. Take them in, and enjoy the permanent galleries. But don’t miss Audubon.

Free Love and Silverware — the Onedia Community

Many of us remember the 1960s and 70s, with the explosive proliferation of communes and intentional communities, many set in or around California. Most were short-lived, and some were flat-out toxic. But they were counter-culture, and to many observers they were downright un-American.

*In reality, though, they were as American as apple pie. We often miss the fact that the English colonies in America started out as experimental utopian societies: the Pilgrims with their communism and commitment to the simple life; Massachusetts and the other Puritan colonies, with their austerity and a commitment to self-examination and self-criticism that would make Chairman Mao cheer; Rhode Island, with its liberty of conscience and its commitment to anarchy; the Pennsylvania Quakers, with their direct messages from God; the pacifist anabaptist sects, with their semi-closed communities; Georgia, where the rulers imported misfits and criminals so as to reprogram them after isolating them in the wilderness.

*Our pioneers were the lunatic fringe, and when they sailed away, folks back in Europe were delighted to wave goodbye.

*We got another burst of utopian communities in the middle of the 19th century, as the world was turning toward the modern age, away from lifestyles that had endured for a thousand years. Mormons engendered suspicion with their own closed communities. Celibate Shaker communes spread from Maine to Kentucky. Nathaniel Hawthorne lived in a utopian community, and so did Louisa May Alcott. So did John Roebling, who designed the Brooklyn Bridge. John Brown tried to start a bi-racial community near Lake Placid.

*While dozens of such communities speckled the American landscape, they lay especially thick in a band then ran from Boston to Buffalo. One of the most successful, and longest enduring, was the Oneida Community.

*The hundreds of members practiced hard work, economic communalism, religious perfectionism, gender equality, and complex marriage… all the members were considered married to all the other members. Needless to say, they were highly controversial.

*John Humphrey Noyes founded the Community (at Oneida, NY) in 1848 – a year that saw revolutions all over Europe and in South America, publication of the “Communist Manifesto,” the first women’s rights convention at Seneca Falls, a cholera epidemic that killed 5000 New Yorkers… a tumultuous moment. Noyes coined the term “free love.”

*For the next several decades local diaries and letters are sprinkled with scandalized reports that so-and-so, or such-and-such a family, had decamped (often secretly) and joined “the Oneidas.”

*Members subjected themselves to community criticism and evaluation, as well as self-criticism. Sex was not a free-for-all… it had to be consensual (and registered), and birth control was practiced. Pregnancy had to be planned and approved, though of course “accidents” happened. Child-rearing was communal. It’s probably too much to say that women were completely equal, but they were a whale of a lot closer to it than women in the outside world. Short hair and trouser suits were the norm.

*Older members of the Community introduced younger members to sex, which near the end of the Community’s history led to threats of statutory rape charges, though in fact they probably wouldn’t have applied under New York law at the time.

*Future presidential assassin Charles Guiteau lived in the community for about five years, but members (not unreasonably) considered him insane and held him at arm’s length. He left the community, and sued Noyes, some six years before killing Garfield.

*An elderly Noyes left the country under a legal cloud in 1878, urging the end of complex marriage. Members agreed the following year and in 1881 voted to close the Community, creating in its place a joint-stock corporation that endures to this day, making the famed Oneida silverware.

*The Oneida Community Mansion House is now a museum and a National Hostoric Landmark. This Friday (Dec. 7, at 4 PM) Dr. Tim McLean, a museum docent and a professor emeritus at Herkimer Community College, will tell us the Community’s story at a Steuben County Historical Society Lecture in Bath Fire Hall – free and open to all. Hope to see you there!