Monthly Archives: February 2019

Farming Today

For well over a century, agriculture was the number one business in Steuben County and its neighbors. Far fewer people are engaged today, but what IS the current (and future) state of local agriculture?

*Farms in our area went back to scrub and forest as agriculture dwindled in the 20th century, and the deer came back as the trees grew up. Much of our forest is actually very young – it’s grown up since the Great Depression, or even since the Second World War; starting in the 1950s and 60s, farms went out of cultivation in huge numbers. This is also when the Amish and Old Order Mennonites started coming in. They WANTED small farms that could be operated by a family, and bought land that otherwise had no takers.

*Another significant change took place in the grape and wine sector. Men such as Charles Fournier and Konstantin Frank had pioneered bringing in European strains and producing more premium wines. Along with that specialization, in 1976 Governor Hugh Carey signed a boutique winery act. If you produced at least 51% of your own wine, and kept output under a certain amount each year, you could sell directly to the public, operate a tasting room, pay reduced taxes and fees. As we know, the number of operations has boomed.

*So as we are well into the third century of European-style farming in Steuben County, what do we see? Those marvelous muck lands in the northwest continue to be very productive. The uplands are rather limited in large-scale farming, but Amish and Old Order communities preserve the family farm, often using draft animals. Maple production, often selling raw sap, is important in the southwest. Lumbering has continued on small scale, but dairy has dwindled almost to nothing, though the Dairy Festival continues.

*Only three or four high schools have F.F.A. programs. M. J. Ward closed and dismantled the last grain elevator in Steuben County a few years back, and has now gone completely out of business. The County Fair continues, and while it still has a large agricultural component, it must always appeal to the NON-farm folks to keep the fair running. Interestingly, Steuben County has become one of New York’s most significant hunting areas – number one county in deer take, top five in turkey – BECAUSE so many farms have gone out. Hunting, much of it by out-of-county visitors, pumps a tremendous amount into our economy.

*Besides the small family farms of the conservative anabaptists, and besides the ongoing productive use of the mucklands, there are two possible portents for the future. One is the proliferation of small farmer’s markets, which ties in with the local-food movement and the direct-to-consumer movement, particularly C.S.A’s, such as that operated by the Peace Weavers in Wheeler.

*Secondly, such changes as the transition of Blue Gill Farms, operated by the Weaver family on Mitchellsville Road in Bath. Long a substantial dairy operation, Blue Gill moved out of that ten years back or so. Now they raise hogs for Hatfield, with the pig barns in the hills of Wheeler while they grow much of the feed on the flats in Bath.

*And around Keuka Lake, of course, the story is grapes. Throughout several millennia of human history, steep, inaccessible, or unproductive land has been reserved for grapes and graveyards. Grapes, it was said in the 1870s, were the first thing Pulteney folks ever found to justify the taxes on their land. The Steuben County shield bears a picture of a wheat sheaf. In 1900 it might have been a milk can, and in the 1930s a bushel of potatoes. If the shield were being created today, it might well bear a bunch of grapes!

*At 4 PM Friday, March 1, I’ll be doing a free presentation, “From Wheat to Grapes: The Steuben Farming Story” at Bath Fire Hall, as part of Steuben County Historical Society’s Winter Lecture Series. We hope to see you there!

1969 — Half a Century Gone

Wow! In 1969, where did we dream we’d be when half a century was gone?

*Yes, it’s been fifty years since “the sixties” reached their frantic climax… and how different the end of decade looked from January 2, 1960, when John F. Kennedy drew smirks by announcing that he was going to run for president!

*So what was going on in that memorable year?

*To get perhaps the ugliest memory out of the way, 1969 was the year of the Manson Family murders.

*It was also the year Ted Kennedy crashed his car at Chappaquidick, killing Mary Jo Kopechne.

*Richard Nixon became president that year, and soon ordered secret bombing of Cambodia. And it was the year of the Santa Barbara oil spill, one of the first of those dreadful accidents (still the thrid-worst in U.S. history), and perhaps the first to rally thousands to rescue the suffering wildlife.

*James Earl Ray and Sirhan Sirhan confessed to the assassination murders they committed the previous year, of Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy, respectively.

*Hurricane Camille killed over 300 people, destroyed 30,000 homes in the U.S., and left 200,000 people homeless in the Caribbean. It’s still the third-most intense storm to strike the U.S.

*Golda Meir took office as prime minister of Israel, and Yasser Arafat as leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization. Former president Eisenhower died, while his old wartime comrade Charles de Gaulle (a very prickly, difficult comrade, to be sure) resigned as president of France. Ho Chi Minh died, no doubt still disgusted by how Woodrow Wilson had gone back on his promises at the Versailles peace conference in 1919 – a betrayal that had set the stage for the Vietnam War.

*The Stonewall Riots took place in New York City, and gay people began to openly demand decent treatment, rather than discrimination, ridicule, and abuse.

*The Woodstock music festival took place! Noplace near Woodstock, though. The planned venue that had panicked and reneged at the last minute, under pressure from Nelson Rockefeller. Farmer Max Yasgur near Bethel didn’t give a hoot about Rocky, and local motel operator Elliot Tiber already had a permit for a fair and craft show, so…. The rest is history.

*Man on the moon! (To quote Walter Cronkite.) Neil Armstrong took “one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind,” and earthlings had finally traveled from their planet to another world… and back again. Later in ’69 Pete Conrad and Alan Bean landed as well. Those four are one-third of the people who have ever stepped in the moon.

*The Beatles performed their last concert, and issued the album “Abbey Road.” Led Zeppelin issued its FIRST album. Other debuts in 1969 included “The Godfather,” (the book), “Scooby Doo,” “The Brady Bunch,” “Monty Python’s Flying Circus,” “Sesame Street,” Wal-Mart, and Wendy’s.

*Besides getting our first look at Big Bird that year, and being introduced to Vito Corleone, we sweated out the first draft lottery, and gingerly operated the first ATM. ARPANET, forerunner to the Internet, went into operation.

*Births for the year included Jennifer Aniston, Cory Booker, Steffi Graf, Ice Cube, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Gwen Stefani, and Nancy Kerrigan.

*Deaths included former Director of Central Intelligence Allen Welsh Dulles; actor Boris Karloff, famed for portraying Frankenstein’s monster; cowboy comic Gabby Hayes; Franz von Papen, who maneuvered Hitler into power and then had 36 years to regret it; and beat poet Jack Kerouac.

*All in all, it was a memorable year. And half of a century has passed since then.

Snow, Cold, and Ice, in Days Gone By

Well… we’ve had some snow this winter, haven’t we? AND some cold, just like we had some extreme cold last year (which, despite all those extreme low temperatures, was STILL the fourth-hottest year ever recorded… so that deep cold does more to PROVE global warming than to DISprove it).

*Anyhow, the point I’m wandering toward is that in the past we’ve had some winters that were memorable, or even historical.

*Last year an ice jam forced the Conhocton River into the streets of Campbell.

*In January 1996 we got snow, then ice, then rain, which meant that the streams and rivers backed up. Badly. Kanona got clobbered especially hard.

*In March of 1993 it snowed on a Saturday, and school reopened on Thursday. People used their windows, rather than doors, to get in and out.

*A three-day blizzard in 1977 dropped as much as a hundred inches of snow in some places. Unsurprisingly the Buffalo area suffered worst, including 23 deaths.

*The winter of 1957-58 saw deep DEEP snow all through the region. Kids in Prattsburgh played on snowdrifts that were so high, the kids could reach above the telephone lines.

*In 1950, snow broke down the Wildcat Hollow Bridge in the Town of Hornby.

*The winter of 1939-40 was the first winter of the Second World War, and it was an extremely snowy season. Snow still lay on the ground in April, parked cars were buried up to the tops of their tires, and the girls at Davenport Orphanage in Bath went to school by sleigh for a week.

*The Great War winter of 1917-18 saw significant snow, and extremely low temperatures, even as people suffered coal and food shortages because of the war.

*Ice jams flooded Painted Post four feet deep in December, 1901, and temperatures were below zero.

*A two-day blizzard in 1890 stopped the trains as well as blocking the roads. Two feet of snow fell.

*In January of 1877, over five feet of snow fell between one thaw and the next. It crushed a church in Corning, wrecking it beyond repair.

*Methodists used to have a church in Curtis, between Campbell and Coopers Plains. Supposedly more Coopers people attended, so one January night in 1860 they went out and stole the church (yes), sliding it downstream along the thick-frozen Conhocton River.

*None of this quite matched 1816, “the year without a summer.” Snow fell and frost formed in every month of the year. Streams around here were still frozen in April, and froze again in October. Crops didn’t grow, or died in the field and on the vine. People feared that the sun was going out, and wondered if the end of the world was upon them. We now know that the sun’s rays were partly blocked by clouds of dust from a huge volcano eruption. The following summer went back to normal, and the world rejoiced.

From Branchport to Commander-in-Chief: Admiral Frank Schofield

Until a couple of years back I hadn’t heard about Admiral Frank H. Schofield, who was born on a tenant farm near Branchport, back in 1869, and even then I had only the sketchiest information.

*But then on February 1 we had a Steuben County Historical Society Winter Lecture by Rich MacAlpine, who has studied 12,000 family letters relating to this unfortunately-forgotten man. (The admiral died in 1942.) Rich has also written a book on the man.

*Frank’s father, who had fought in the Civil War, was a tenant farmer around Yates County. This meant that they moved from time to time.. and it also meant that they didn’t have much money.

*All of which together meant that it was hard for a driven, high-achieving boy like Frank to get an education. Luckily his parents supported his efforts, sacrificing the contributions he could have made on the farm, and he attended Penn Yan Academy for what we would call high school.

*Until the money ran out. Without tuition, Frank would miss or delay his senior year. But the principal suggested that he sit the exam for West Point, where he could get a free education. He did excellently, but the Point balked at admitting a 16 year-old. Hard-driving Frank took the exam for Annapolis, won admission as a midshipman, and finished second in his class.

*When the Spanish-American War broke out he wrangled a transfer from the Pacific to the Caribbean, served as executive officer on a gunboat, and took part in combat. Later he served the navy at the Colt factory in Hartford as an insoector of naval weaponry, and patented a quick-release mechanism for shipboard guns.

*As our entry into World War I approached he was part of a naval team working out convoy systems. Their work was successful, and when we joined the fight Frank went to London, where he served on the staff of our European naval commander. This in turn led to his being appointed as a technical advisor at the Versailles peace conference in 1919.

*Both before and after the war he had command experience, helming a supply ship, a destroyer, and the battleship Texas, then commanding squadrons and divisions of ships, besides a few weeks as acting governor of Guam.

*In 1931 he jumped two steps in rank to full admiral, becoming Commander-in-Chief, U.S Fleet, the highest position in the navy. As part of maneuvers the following year, he tested out an aerial attack on Pearl Harbor. (Commanding the aviation forces was future admiral John Towers, who learned to fly at Hammondsport in 1911.)

*The “attacking” force raced toward Hawaii from the north and launched aircraft from carriers at dawn. Referees ruled that they had wrecked the army air fields AND the battleships in harbor. The attackers then escaped, completely evading the defenders.

*If all this sounds familiar, it’s the same playbook the Japanese used nine years later. Schofield retired a few months after the war games, and his successors insisted that the spectacular “attack” had been a fluke… that airplanes and aircraft carriers were actually only a minor threat. The whole world would soon learn differently, but Admiral Schofield died just two and a half months after Pearl Harbor. Too bad we didn’t listen to him, Jack Towers, and other far-seeing officers.

*At least we can recognize that Yates County is honored to be the home of a man like Admiral Frank.