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.