Monthly Archives: June 2019

Celebrate 170 Years With the Olde Country Store and More

A retail business started in 1849 on what we now call University Street in North Cohocton… and there’s been a store there ever since! On Saturday, July 6, the Olde Country Store and More (a fun place) is celebrating 170 years, with German food, live music, fudge tasting, fire trucks, displays by Cohocton Historical Society and others – plus the store’s own vast stock of candies, cookies, honey, and plenty more.

*So, 1849 was a historic year for North Cohocton! But what ELSE was going on back in 1849?

*The Town of Wayland was one year old. Steuben County stretched over to Seneca Lake, but would soon lose those easternmost Towns to create a new Schuyler County. In the current Steuben boundaries there were 29 Towns. Still to come were the Towns of Fremont, Rathbone, and Tuscarora, plus the Cities of Corning and Hornell. The newly-incorporated VILLAGE of Corning held its first election in January.

*The Town of Cohocton (or Conhocton) had been created back in 1812. But in 1849 Cohocton Village was called Liberty; Atlanta was Blood’s; and North Cohocton was Blood’s Corner (or sometimes Cohocton, and sometimes even North Cohocton). The Town of Corning was the Town of Painted Post.

*James K. Polk became the first president to be photographed while still in office. He retired from the White House on March 4, and died later that same year. General Zachary Taylor followed Polk as president. The two of them had been instrumental in ripping away almost half of Mexico in just the previous year. Millard Fillmore, who had lived for a spell in nearby Sparta, became Taylor’s vice-president. He would succeed to the White House on Taylor’s death in 1850.

*In our new territory of California, a gold rush was on. Many Steuben men who had enlisted for the Mexican War took their discharge in California, and became ‘forty-niners. The first regular steamboat service started up between our new west coast and the old east coast. The first trip took four months and 21 days (one way).

*In Washington, the Department of the Interior was established. In Texas, Fort Worth was founded. France issued its first set of postage stamps. The Erie Railroad reached Owego (it started in Hoboken). The Pennsylvania Railroad stretched from Harrisburg to Lewisburg. Stephen Foster published a book of songs.

*There were 30 states in the union, the latest one being Wisconsin. Albany was the 10th-largest city in America – Buffalo 16th, Rochester 21st, and Syracuse 28th. America had over 23 million people, and three million of them were slaves.

*The Great Potato Famine was underway in Ireland, taking millions in death. (A state visit from Queen Victoria didn’t seem to help… perhaps because British landowners were still shipping food OUT of Ireland, where people could pay more for it.) John F. Kennedy’s grandparents came to America to escape, and were married in Boston.

*Captain Robert E. Lee was guarding Baltimore harbor, and turned down a chance to lead a revolution in Cuba. Abraham Lincoln finished up his sole two-year term in Congress. In Rochester, Frederick Douglass was publishing the abolitionist newspaper North Star. Also in Rochester, Susan B. Anthony had missed the previous year’s women’s rights convention, but she now started running the family farm. Lieutenant Ulysses S. Grant started out the year in Sackett’s Harbor, but the army transferred him to a quartermaster’s post in Detroit.

*Over in Europe, the last of the revolutions of 1848 were petering out, without much success. Peter Colgan fled Ireland after the uprising there was crushed, came to Buffalo, and started studying for the priesthood. He would pastor St. Mary’s church in Corning for 35 years.

*Harriet Tubman escaped from slavery. In Russia, future literary giant Fyodor Dostoyevsky was literally taken out of line in front of a firing squad, and sent to Siberia instead. British writer Anne Brontë died, as did American writer Edgar Allen Poe and Polish composer Frédéric Chopin. So did former first lady Dolley Madison. So did William Miller, whose (incorrect) interpretations of Biblical prophecy helped lead to the founding of the Adventist churches.

*Future plant scientist Luther Burbank was born. So were Lord Randolph Churchill (Winston’s father); German gunmaker Georg Luger; German admiral Alfred von Tirpitz; German automotive pioneer Bertha Benz; Statue of Liberty poet Emma Lazarus; industrialist (and union crusher) Henry Clay Frick; and writer Frances Hodgson Burnett.

*Steuben County had 63,771 people in the 1850 census – and 1,993 of them lived in the Town of Cohocton. The Town had lost a third of its population in the previous decade – but that was because of giving up land to create Avoca and Wayland!

Hurricane Agnes: Reality Was Bad Enough

Makeshift morgues were set up in Corning and Painted Post. Outside, people whispered. “There are fifty bodies in there… sixty… a hundred….”

*Nothing even close. But the reality was bad enough.

*The first local death in the 1972 flood took place when a man was swept away in Bath. The second death came downstream in Gang Mills, where a firefighter was searching for the body.

*Hurricane Agnes had already caused a hundred deaths from Cuba to Pennsylvania, and two more would die in Canada. The official New York state death toll was 24.

*The firefighter was the first of 18 in the Gang Mills-Painted Post-Riverside-Corning-South Corning stretch. A father and daughter died in Allegany County, right on the line with Steuben. Add in the single Bath death, and 21 of the 24 New York fatalities came in (or on the edge of) Steuben County.

*And the count of 24 does NOT include three men killed a day or two later in Hornell, when their helicopter crashed as they conducted a damage survey for the Army Corps of Engineers.

*It’s a wonder the toll wasn’t higher, given the fact that in the Corning area, the rivers burst their banks unexpectedly, in the early morning hours, meaning that many residents were taken by surprise.

*Then there were those who were already in distress. A doctor in Corning Hospital performed emergency surgery by flashlight while standing knee-deep in cold, filthy water. The hospital telephoned people with station wagons and begged them to come in. Each one laid a patient out in the car’s flatbed and drove them to another hospital – often, the one in Montour Falls. Amazingly, they didn’t lose a single patient, but in some cases families couldn’t find them for days.

*St. Joseph’s Hospital in Elmira, although flooded, was able to rush patients to nearby Arnot, where they lined the halls on gurneys. One young woman, who had had surgery in Arnot the day after her high school graduation, was bustled out of the hospital by a nurse who told her she had to get out, so they could use the space. With no one expecting her, and no phones working, she struggled several miles home on foot, then collapsed.

*Although this was certainly Steuben County’s worst flood in terms of deaths, the overall death toll was far worse in the flood of 1935, when 44 were killed, mostly in the Finger Lakes. (More about that in a couple of weeks.)

*President Roosevelt’s New Deal administration got very busy after 1935, putting in dikes and other flood control measures, such as the Arkport Dam. Believe it or not, without those improvements 1972 would have been far, far worse. But, as we said back at the beginning of this blog, the reality was bad enough.

Cruisin’ Night — and Other Car Shows

Somehow, nothing seems to capture “pop” Americana more than cruising around in cars. We admire the vehicles themselves, but we also adore the whole support structure, and the vast array of paraphernalia.

*Road maps. Gas stations. Drive-in movies. Drive-in restaurants. Dairy Queen. Fuzzy dice. Snow chains. Steering wheel covers. Pep Boys. Western Auto. Burma Shave signs. The orange roof on the Howard Johnson’s, and the 28 flavors of ice cream.

*I’ll bet if I asked people what automotive toys they had, sixty years ago, most everyone could answer without hesitation.

*We went to Penn Yan’s Cruisin’ Night last week. They closed off several blocks of Main Street, and lined both sides with vintage vehicles. We strolled along with the mob of happy visitors of every age, from the stroller-and-toddler crowd right up to folks who look like they might have ridden around with Henry Ford.

*One little guy, about two years old, delighted a hundred spectators when an electric guitarist got down on his knees in the street. The little guy rocked right along with every beat.

*Parked near the post office was a vintage fire truck, while the triangular space right in front of Birkett’s Mills was reserved for tractors. Otherwise, though, it’s block after block of vintage cars, vans, and pickups.

*Chevy Bel Airs and Ford Fairlanes, familiar to us from our childhoods. An Edsel, from even earlier. Mercuries. Thunderbirds. A Corvette or two.

*All the way from France, a Citroen. A Jaguar and Mini Coopers (including the model used in the movie “The Italian Job”) from Britain. Plenty of Ford V-8s and Model As from interwar days.

*The stores and shops are open during Cruisin’ Night, and we stopped in at Long’s for a little visit. For two bucks I also indulged in a hot dog with home-made sauerkraut from the Elks.

*When you’re writing a weekly feature, dealng with annual events presents a dilemma. Do you write after the fact (as I’m doing now), and hope that folks remember 51 weeks from now? Or write it up now, and hope I myself remember to dust it off next year?

*Well, I hope you WILL remember Cruisin’ Night next year, in the sad event that you’ve missed it this year. (We go almost every year.) But the summer’s still young, and so am I (more or less). Summer in our neck of the Finger Lakes overflows with car shows and cruising nights.

*July 14 is Cars in the Park Car Show at Hickories Park in Owego.

*August 7 Race Fever brings NASCAR show cars (and a big block party) to Corning Northside.

*On September 6, the Grand Prix Festival will bring some 600 sports cars to Watkins Glen.

*Curtiss Museum’s Wings and Wheels fills Hammondsport with classic and exotic cars, IN ADDITION TO seaplanes, September 14 and 15.

*The Windmill’s Fall Car Show (near Dundee) is on September 28.

*No doubt you can find more! Look around! Take the kids or grandkids!

A Visit to Cornell Botanic Gardens

I’m writing this on a soon-to-be rainy day, remembering a sunny day, about a month back, when we last visited Cornell Botanic Gardens.

*I say “last” (or most recently) because we’ve been visiting for over twenty years. And will do so again.

*A visit stretches you from the 19th century into the 21st… from the cozy Cornell of upstate New York to one of the great universities of the world. The welcome center is a modern masterpiece of glass with swooping lines and landscape-friendly placement. But next door is the old center, quiet and dignified like a gentle dowager at a baby shower.

*Vine-covered bowers shade the flagstoned walk. In the adjoining space are raised brick-walled beds with herbs and flowers, edged with a sloped rock garden. Some creative gardeners have organized plants by topic – herbs mentioned in literature, herbs used in religious ceremonies, herbs used by Native American peoples. Juncos and robins hop around at our feet in the grass, while blue jays yack and yell from the bowers and the trees. In the distance, a pair of Canada geese serenely survey the lawn.

*Next to Beebee Lake we take the circular walk that wends around the rhododendron-covered Comstock Knoll. When we stop to look at the young shoots on the branch of an overhanging evergreen, we’re rewarded with a puff that unleashes a cloud of pollen… a sight that we’ve never seen before.

*Though we enjoyed our visit immensely, we only touched on a fraction of the 4300 acres that come under the Botanic Gardens umbrella. And, of course, we didn’t touch at all on the vast academic and scientific dimension of the gardens.

*If you’re visiting Ithaca, you might also like the Sapsucker Woods nature preserve operated by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. If you like public gardens, don’t miss Sonnenberg Mansion and Gardens in Canandaigua. Then there’s the Buffalo and Erie County Botanical Gardens, and the delightful gardens at Highland Park and Ellwanger Garden in Rochester. Genesee Country Village has 13 heirloom gardens scattered across the grounds.

*How many more summers are you going to get to look at flowers? Close the computer, and go take a walk.

A Walk in Wayland

Wayland’s a nice village. Steuben County being as big as it is, if you live in Corning or Addison, you may never have gotten there. But I have, frequently, and I like it.

*Wayland’s a village in the larger town of the same name. It’s in potato country, and it’s almost the last thing in Steuben before you cross into Livingston County and North Dansville. Like 13 of the 14 incorporated cities and villages in Steuben County, it was on the Erie Railroad. That transportation link helped make the communty, along with the fact that Route 15 rides straight through, on its way from Rochester down to Virginia.

*A little later, though, the DL&W Railroad would lay its route to the south of the village, and even later yet Interstate Route 390 would be run within a stone’s throw of that rail line. The Erie line, and Route 15, each became less significant. The village, now set back a mile or two from the main routes, was no linger as vibrant as it had been – the fate of almost all the old market towns that served surrounding farm lands.

*Right by the 390 exit, and the old DL&W depot, is Gunlocke, which for generations has been a mainstay of Wayland’s fortunes, making high-quality chairs and other furniture.

*In the village itself I’m leading a historic walk on June 7, meeting in the historical society museum (100 South Main Street) at 4 PM. One of the spots we’ll be taking in is Bennett’s, founded almost a century ago, the oldest Buick dealership in the world, and still a very busy business. The Bennett brothers started the operation after they got back from World War I.

*Also a sign of those fast-paced postwar days is the 1922 American Legion on North Main. Originally an organization for Great War veterans, the Wayland post celebrated modern times by including a movie theater when they built the place.

*Several churches along the walk give us a picture of the community’s religious and ethnic history. Two church edifices on Route 15 – United Methodist and Lighthouse Wesleyan – actually started out as homes for German-speaking congregations. The Seventh-Day Adventists have a more modern home on Third Street. Their denomination grew out of religious upheaval in upstate and western New York, back in the 1840s. Sacred Heart is the home for area Catholics, again largely German in the early days.

*Not far from the church is the old village hospital, to which victimes were rushed after a 1943 train wreck near Gunlocke killed 29 people.

*Besides the Legion, North Main is also home to interesting commercial blocks, while 19th-century homes are sprinkled throughout the village. A much more modern place is the Gunlocke home (now a funeral home), and the 1973 Gunlocke library. The library’s modern design is elegantly executed in wood, stone, and glass, but the wood and stone also lend it dignity and link it to the past. Of course, the wood links it to the Gunlocke company, too.

*Wayland is home to Wayland-Cohocton High School, and Way-Co’s most famous alumnus is perhaps Bill T. Jones ’70. He was three years old when he came to Wayland in a family of migrant farm workers. After going on to SUNY Binghamton Mr. Jones went into dance, for which he received a MacArthur “Genius” Grant. Since then he’s also received Kennedy Center Honors, numerous honorary degrees, and membership in the Steuben County Hall of Fame. I recently found a photo of sophomore “Billy” Jones as Marcellus in “The Music Man,” going into his star turn to teach River Citizens how to dance the Shipoopi.

*Anyhow, we’d be happy to have you join us on our free historic walk. As I said, we’re meeting at Wayland Historical Society Museum, and if the weather’s bad, the walking tour will become a museum tour. So you win either way.