Ever hear of Knoxville? It’s what we call the Corning Northside. It used to be a separate incorporated village, and it was bigger than the village of Corning (what we now call Southside), which was mainly farmfields with a few scattered houses. An 1890 merger created the City of Corning, after which BOTH sides started to boom.
*In 1873 (pre-merger), Northside development was centered on the strip between Dodge Street and Sly Street. After the merger, Knoxville had 30% growth in two years. In 1891 year, 114 new dwellings were erected, plus a brick business block on Bridge Street and three stores at Bridge & Pulteney. McBurney plots east of Sly were developed beginning 1903, while the Fuller plots west of Dodge developed after 1913.
*Going back to 1796, land agent Charles Williamson built an inn on what we call West Pulteney Street, and installed Benjamin Patterson as the innkeeper. That was the road to the west in those days, and the Chemung River flowed just a few rods away. From this, the city grew.
*Patterson Inn, at Heritage Village of the Finger Lakes, is where we’ll start a free historic walking tour at 4 PM on Friday, August 2. (If it’s bad weather, we’ll have a tour of Heritage Village.) From there we’ll see a number of things, including:
*The former Merrill Silk mill. Merrill operated in Steuben County at least from 1891 to 1925. There were also silk mills in Hornell (the center of the industry, and of Merrill), Canisteo, Wayland, Cohocton, and Bath… the latter capitalized by community subscription.
*Hugh Gregg School, which goes back to about 1950 – PRECEDING the new buildings constructed in the late ‘fifties, in the run-up to, or aftermath of, consolidation during the Baby Boom.
*St. Vincent’s Church and School. A graduation celebration was taking place here in June of 1972, and about a hundred people got stranded by Hurricane Agnes and spent the night on the roof of the school. The school later closed, and the building was used by Christian Learning Center, now Corning Christian Academy. The church itself was already scheduled for closing when a stringer broke in the roof, so it was officially closed 11 months ago, leaving one Catholic worship center in Corning, and one in Painted Post.
*The Hazel Street area, where many houses are built to similar plan, or to mirror plans.
*Grace Methodist Church, which formed in 1897 and dedicated a frame building in 1898. The church enthusiastically welcomed a large Ku Klux Klan delegation in 1924 – 30 men, masked and robed, were welcomed with applause and the church quickly filled up as word spread through the neighborhood – they had to borrow folding chairs from the funeral home. The church at the time was already working on a major building program which had begun in 1922 but got stalled after the crash of 1929. They had to meet in the basement until work could be finished in 1938.
*The current location of Northside Liquor Company, formerly Corning Fire Department Station 2, home to Crystal City Hook and Ladder Company # 2.
*Several fine homes on Ontario Street.
*Once we approach Bridge and Pulteney we encounter late 19th- and 20th-century commercial block architecture. This includes the “Joe Sofia” building. In 1923, Joseph Sofia was a shoemaker on Market Street, renting a home on Front. By 1950 Joseph Sofia and Ralph Scott had Sophia Grocery on this spot… note change in spelling.
*Our route will also give us a peek at the much more-modern Corning Glass Works/Corning Incorporated facilities. And on Bridge we’ll see the M. L. Allen block, built around 1910. Mr. Maynard, who had a furniture and trucking business, was on the Board of Public Works in 1916. The furniture store closed in 1984 after 92 years and three generations in the same family.
*The Hotel Stanton on Bridge first appears in the 1923 directory. In 1950 it offered “Rooms with bath $2.00 to $5.00 double, running water, legal beverages and meals. Phone 35.” Next door was Randy’s Stanton Diner (phone 2380), a manufactured diner now sadly gone.
*We will also notice wall art at Brick House Brewery; Marconi Post 47, Italian American War Veterans of the United States; Kapral Motors, with its elaborate ornamental facade; the Corning Leader building; North Baptist Church, built 1906… besides giving a nod to Hokey Pokey!
*And of course we won’t forget the horrible tragedy of 1972, when lives were lost and every foot of our route was under water. We hope you’ll join us.
Monthly Archives: July 2019
Two Centuries of Our County Fair!
In the early days of our country, when we were still pretty much an undeveloped nation, state legislators wanted to improve agriculture in New York, so in 1819 they appropriated matching funds to help support county agricultural societies. Elkanah Watson, who’d proposed the law, began stumping the state to spread the word… the Johnny Appleseed of county fairs… and in Bath he found an eager crowd already waiting. They invited him to the courthouse, where the judge courteously adjourned and “I found the court room and the gallery crowded, and the lawyers’ seats preoccupied by ladies. Mr. Higgins [Bath Presbyterian minister] made an eloquent appeal to the throne of grace, appropriate to the occasion. It evidently softened the hearts of the audience and predisposed them to receive with favor my address. They immediately proceeded to organize and, what was more important, in one hour the whole sum requisite to secure the state bounty was pledged.”
*The goal was to improve agriculture. Fairs were a place for experts and salesmen to reach the isolated farm family. Competitions stirred people to improve practices, and to learn about better techniques from those who won the premiums. There were also, of course, entertainment and social benefits, especially in those days of difficult travel.
*Fairs and subsidies continued until about 1824, after which things apparently lay silent until 1841, when a new subsidy was passed, and a new agricultural society came to be, with founders having such prominent Steuben names as Cook, Bradford, Balcom, Magee, Waldo, Erwin, Robie, Potter, Hammond, and Campbell. They held their fairs in Bath “upon the river flats, just east of Ark Street, and domestic manufactures and household goods were exhibited in the court house.” (The courthouse was in the same location as today, but it was an earlier structure.)
*But that fair petered out by 1844 or so, with loss of subsidy and amid bitter complaints that the judging was rigged in favor of wealthy farmers. But in 1853 farm folks formed a third Steuben County Agricultural Society, and this time they got it right. Starting in 1853 the fair has run without interruption, under the auspices of that same Ag Society. In 1854 they held the fair on the current site, and it’s been there ever since – they bought the place (for $1200) in 1862.
*In 1863 they built the Fair House and the Gatehouse still so familiar to us today, and the driving track appeared about 1867. The 1869 map shows half-a-dozen buildings on site, and by 1873 the grandstand had been added. By 1901 Hammondsport routinely closed school during fair week, and merchants stood idle in their stores.
*In 1909 there were 29 structures, including numerous sheds, barns, and stables north of the grandstand and a “w.c.,” or water closet (flush toilets).
*In 1867 Civil War General William Woods Averell of Cameron delivered an address, and in the 1890s teen-aged Glenn Curtiss raced bicycles on the track. Entertainers over the years included Grandpa Jones, Frank Fontaine, Bobby Vinton, and the Hoosier Hotshots.
*Sad to say, the fairground was used at least once, in the 1920s, for a Ku Klux Klan rally. In the wartime year of 1943, Bath folks staged a parade from the grounds, celebrating Bath’s sesquicentennial.
*It’s been a gigantic challenge for our current Ag Society to put on a fair every year – though the Civil War, two World Wars, the Spanish influenza pandemic, the Great Depression, the catastrophic flood years of 1935 and 1972, and the dramatic dwindling of the agricultural community. They deserve a round of prolonged applause from everyone in Steuben County.
*This year the fair runs from Tuesday, August 13 through Sunday, August 18. Be there! Join us! Enjoy our fair’s bicentennial!
A (New York!) Apple a Day
According to legend, John Chapman spent a year in Olean before moving west to become Johnny Appleseed, and I had a vague idea of doing a piece on the various apple varieties that had been developed in New York state.
*Then I discovered that there were at least 123 of them by 1905, and plenty more since.
*So let’s look at JUST a few! The earliest varieties often arose naturally and accidentally, and by 1750 or so the Newtown Pippin had appeared on Long Island, in Queens. The Encyclopedia of New York State describes it as “the first widely known American apple variety.” Presidents Washington and Jefferson raised the Newtown on their plantations, and it has a small commercial market to this day.
*Jefferson also grew the Esopus Spitzenberg, discovered in Ulster County. The Wagener was discovered right here on Keuka Lake, near Penn Yan, around 1795 – you can see the Wagener Mansion on the Bluff as you drive up northward on State Route 54. Dutch farmers in the Hudson Valley developed (or discovered) the Swaar.
*If you look very carefully on a country lane near East Bloomfield you may find a small low monument to the Northern Spy, which was discovered near there in the early 1800s. Esopus and Swaar, like the Newtown, are essentially heirloom varieties today, but Wagener and Northern Spy are grown on larger scales. Perhaps none of these early varieties is what eaters today prefer for raw apples, but they’re all used for cooking and for cider.
*Once the State Agricultural Research Station was set up in Geneva, new varieties were developed purposefully, on scientific and commercial bases. We can thank the Research Station for the Cortland apple (1898-1915), developed as a good eating apple and named for the nearby county. The Lodi (1924) was named for the town and village in Seneca County. The Empire (1966, named for the Empire State) was developed as an eating apple… “ideal” for the lunchbox, says Wikipedia, “not least because it does not bruise easily.”
*New Yorkers also took the lead in other aspects of apple cultivation. The 1901 Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo provided an opportunity to test 345 varieties (all that were being grown in the state at that time) to see how each responded to the brand-new field of cold storage. Scientists at Cornell worked on “controlled atmosphere” storage in 1930s and ’40s.
*Of the top 18 varieties being cultivated in New York in 1904, five of them – the Northern Spy, the Golden Russet, the Espous Spitzenberg, the Twenty Ounce, and the Swaar – were all developed in New York, with the Tompkins King and the Tolman Sweet as possibles.
*By 2000, the top 18 included seven native New Yorkers: the Empire, the Cortland, the Macoun, the Twenty Ounce, the Northern Spy, and the Jonagold. Also in 2000, New York was America’s second state in apple production, behind only Washington. Our 695 apple farms grew almost 24 million bushels, for cider, juice, cooking, saucing, and eating.
*According to www.applesfromny.com (a cool site), within 25 miles of Bath you can get heirloom apples at Crooked Line Farm in Bath, Joseph’s Wayside Market in Naples, Barrington Heirloom Orchard near Penn Yan, and Reisenger’s Apple Country in Watkins Glen. But you don’t need to get all “artisinal” to enjoy an apple – just grab whichever type YOU like, and don’t worry about being fashionable. Happy crunching!
The 1935 Flood Devastated Our Region
It’s almost faded from living memory now, but the July 8 flood of 1935 was just as big a disaster regionally as the June flood of 1972 would be. Just as in 1972, the ’35 flood sprang up without warning in the dark hours before dawn. It killed 44 people in New York and Pennsylvania.
*The 1935 event was actually a collection of pretty-much simultaneous floods… on the east-flowing Chemung, the west-flowing Susquehanna, and the north-flowing Genesee, plus all their tributaries; on the Finger Lakes; and on the north-running inlets and outlets of the lakes.
*In Hammondsport the Glen Brook, the Gulf Stream, and Keuka Inlet all flooded. Since the village mainly lies along Glen Brook, and slides downhill from there, it was quickly inundated. Charles Champlin recalled being woken up in the middle of the night at his home on Lake Street, then carried to safety through deep water by his teen-aged cousin Tony Doherty.
*The flood gouged out Orchard Street six feet deep, and scattered brandy casks all across the village. (Tales still abound of how far the casks went, who picked them up, and what they did with the contents.) Farther down Keuka Lake, Keuka Village was flooded too. Damage led the Erie Railroad to give up on the Bath & Hammondsport line, which was then bought by local investors. (The New York-Pennsylvania Railroad likewise gave up its Canisteo connection.)
*Both the Erie and the D.L. & W. lines were unusable in Bath, where boats and canoes plied the waters as far out as the post office.
*The flood wrecked the Erie yards in Hornell, where a Mrs. Case was electrocuted to death as she tried to rescue a lamp in a flooded living room. Her neighbors had taken in a passing family whose car was flooded, and these strangers helped them cart their furnishings to the second floor.
*The Corning Glass Works was flooded, endangering the 200-inch mirror for Mount Palomar Observatory, but the disk later proved unscathed.
*Addison was flooded, and water was knee-deep in Canisteo. In Coopers Plains, farmer J.J. Baker posted a notice looking for two lost heifers and three pigs… we don’t know if he ever got his stock back. Much of Avoca’s farmland was devastated. Things were so bad that at the end of 1935 an Avoca sharecropper received one calf as his total share for a year of mighty labor.
*The flood wrecked the trails, stairs, and infrastructure at Watkins Glen State Park, and carried the gatehouse almost down to Seneca Lake. Owego, Binghamton, Wellsville, Geneseo, and much of Rochester were underwater, along with their neighbors. The water gouged canyons near Arkport.
*A day or two later Governor Herbert Lehman was splashing through the region, among other things sharing a cup of water with a Salvation Army man in Hammondsport. (They had set up a water statuon at the Presbyterian church.) Hornell residents got water at the armory, from the National Guard. Red Cross workers had bread baked for Hornell, and surveyed damage in Hammondsport.
*Longer-range federal projects aimed to make future disasters far less frequent. The Arkport, Almond, and Letchworth dams were created. Civilian Conservation Corps lads planted trees and dug drainage ditches. In some places the rivers were moved, in many places new dikes went up. Avoca became a pilot program for flood control. In 1972 Hornell was spared a repeat disaster by one inch on the Almond dam. That one inch on that one day must have more then justified the original cost of the dam. And that’s just looking at the dollar damage that it prevented… not speaking at all of the lives it saved.