Monthly Archives: August 2019

Celebrate 150 Years With Bath’s Library

Bath’s library is celebrating its sesquicentennial… a hundred and fifty years of bringing pleasure, information, and services to the community. They’ll have an open house from 2 to 5 on Saturday, September 7… next-door Steuben County History Center (the old library) will also be open, and the library will unveil its new musical playground! (You’ve got to see/hear it to get the full effect.)

*Back in 1869 the library was in the Steuben County courthouse (then just nine years old). But in 1893 library trustee Ira Davenport, Jr. bought the 1831 Magee House, and lent it to the library.

*John Magee had built the place when he retired from Congress and married his second wife, and their children grew up there. (Considering that Bath was only 38 years old at the time, it must have been a staggering pile.) At one time it had two fountains (now in Pulteney Square) an Italianate design, and an extension… maybe a summer kitchen… out into what’s now the parking lot. That was the BACK in those days, and the side facing Cameron Street was the front.

*Erie depot was right across Conhocton Street, and I imagine that travelers between trains may have stepped over to sit down quietly and do a little reading.

*In 1904 Ira Junior passed away, leaving the place to the library, which now named itself Davenport Memorial Library. His widow donated the large fountain, at the point where the four streets meet, in her husband’s honor.

*Like much of the rest of the village, and much of the rest of the region, the library was flooded in 1935.

*By the late 1990s, Davenport Library was on the National Register of Historic Places, but it was also getting cramped and outdated. Publisher Henry Dormann and his wife Alice offered to fund a new structure, and in 1999 elementary school students joined other community members to pass the books from hand to hand across the parking lot and into the new Dormann Library.

*Mr. Dormann rounded up autographed books from Bill Clinton and from every living ex-president. He brought in Walter Cronkite, Gerald Ford, and Defense Secretary William Cohen for the opening ceremonies.

*Ira Junior’s contribution was not forgotten, as the site was designated the Davenport-Dormann Learning Campus. The “old library,” renamed the Magee House, became the Steuben County History Center, making a home for the County Historian, the County Historical Society, and the Elm Cottage Museum. A state historical marker now describes the building’s history.

*A later wing added to the library became home first to BOCES, and now to Head Start.

*Creation of Dormann Library triggered a boom in regional library improvements. Since then Hammondsport, Pulteney, Branchport, and Dansville have built new facilities. Prattsburgh, Avoca, Savona, and Cohocton have moved to new locations, while Penn Yan and Corning have had major renovations.

*Bath’s library is seven years older than the telephone, 19 years younger than the City of Hornell, and 21 years older than the City of Corning. Thirteen of the fifty states were created after the library was… the same is true for a whale of a lot of the world’s countries. And the library’s still going strong. You should come check it out.

“On Time”

It doesn’t seem to mean as much as it once did, but it used to be that having your face on the cover of Time magazine was truly a sign of celebrity, notoriety, or significance.

*Time started publishing in 1923, and on October 13 of the following year readers and newsstand browsers may have been startled to find the diamond-drill eyes of Glenn Curtiss (“handy at fixing things”) boring into their souls. Glenn’s photo spotlighted an article (“At Dayton”) about a recent international air meet which he had NOT attended, but where “his name was on every man’s lips…. At least every other plane of those assembled bore a Curtiss motor. Not one plane but bore some evidence to the contributions he has made to mankind’s knowledge of the air and his agility in it.”

*Curtiss’s portrait was photographic, befitting a former Eastman employee who had sidelined as a professional photographer in his teens. But the April 5, 1926 cover featured a sketch of Corning’s Alanson B. Houghton, grandfather of “Amo” Houghton. Alanson of course had been president of the Glass Works and had represented the district in Congress, but the article (“Nought on Stumbles”) was more interested in his bleak take on European affairs – he was our ambassador to Great Britain, following three years as ambassador to Germany (our first since the declaration of war in 1917).

*A color painting of Navy Air Chief Towers (“not ships or planes, but planes plus ships”) adorned the cover of Time on June 23, 1941. Admiral John H. “Jack” Towers was not from Steuben County, but came here in 1911 to learn to fly and to test the navy’s first aircraft (a seaplane) on Keuka Lake. He was a pallbearer at Glenn’s funeral, and a warm supporter of Curtiss for the rest of his life. The article (“Sailors Aloft”) concerned debates over the independence and composition of the military air services. Ernest Hamlin Baker painted the cover.

*Corning’s Robert E. Woods, First Captain of Cadets at West Point (“duty, honor, country”) got a Hamlin painting on June 11, 1945. Besides his graduation and commissioning as the war drew toward its end, an article “The Long Gray Line” noted Woods as the only man to have played for both teams in the army-navy football game… first as an Annapolis midshipman, and later as a cadet at West Point. Woods’ class would be the last to graduate during the war, which ended on September 2.

*The October 10, 1994 cover (“Black Renaissance: African-American Artists Are Truly Free at Last”) returned to photography, this time in color and this time featuring the far more cheerful countenance of Wayland’s Bill T. Jones, representing the article “The Beauty of Black Art.” Noting that he was diagnosed as HIV-positive in 1985, Time reflected that “today he works with the intensity of someone who knows his time is running out.” Twenty-five years after publication, we’re glad to report that Bill T. Jones is still going strong.

*It’s interesting to look at who did NOT make the cover of time. Neither Amo Houghton nor his father appeared, despite their long careers in industry, business, and public service. IBM president Thomas J. Watson Sr. never made it, though Tom Junior did.

*None of the “big three” birth control crusaders – Margaret Higgins Sanger, Edith Higgins Byrne, and Katherine Houghton Hepburn (all contemporaries from Corning) were on the cover. Nor were the Corning researchers who made dramatic breakthroughs in fiber optics. Neither was author and film critic Charles Champlin of Hammondsport. His contributions were INSIDE the magazine, over the course of 17 years as a correspondent for Time and Life.

What You Can Do at Steuben County Fair

“The lads in their hundreds to Ludlow come in for the fair,” A. E. Housman wrote. And so they do, so they do… lads and lassies, and kids and old folks, young marrieds and middle-aged, in they come for the fair.

*I counted it up, and over the years I’ve been (in most cases, multiple times) to two state fairs (New York and Rhode Island); to county fairs in Vermont (Orleans, Addison) and New York (Steuben, Ontario); to the Washington County Pomona Grange Fair (which is BIGGER than the Rhode Island state fair); to Woodstock Fair in Connecticut; to the “Big E” Eastern States Exposition, or Springfield (Massachusetts) Fair; to Steuben County Dairy Festival; to the New York World’s Fair in 1964; and to various 4-H fairs and such.

*So what can you do at OUR fair, Steuben County Fair, now, this week?

*Drop in and visit your County Historical Society at the one-room schoolhouse. There were almost 400 rural schools in Steuben… see how far the Society’s come in documenting them. And experience a little about one-room school days.

*Visit the rest of the “history corner,” including the Steuben County Fair Museum and the Memorial Log Cabin.

*Go to the Grange building, and check out the entries in this year’s Dairy Festival photo contest.

*Enjoy the antique farm engines… gas, diesel, steam, hot air. Some of them will be running at various times.

*Stop in at the conservation cabin for info on wildlife, parks, hunting, fishing, boating, invasive species – one-stop shopping for the outdoors.

*Visit the livestock, by all means! This is the heart of the fair. The Fair has competitions in beef cattle, dairy cattle, meat goats, poultry, and rabbits. The simultaneous 4-H competitions include most of the same, plus cavy, dairy goat, sheep, and swine.

*Get hungry by inspecting the fruit, produce, vegetable, and culimary entries. Likewise look over the 4-H entries, and see how the rising generation is doing.

*Learn about beekeeping.

*Pick up interesting information from dozens of agencies and community groups.

*Watch harness racers! Harness racing has been a feature of Steuben County Fair since the 1850s.

*Take in the carnival and the midway. I personally like the Scrambler and the Tilt-A-Whirl. I also like to get a root beer, and a hot dog with a squirt of yellow mustard.

*Try your skills at turkey calling.

*See if you can handicap the truck and tractor pulls.

*Speaking of trucks, feel overawed at the Monster Truck Show.

*If you go in for that sort of thing, enjoy the Demolition Derby.

*Groove to the country music strains of Lonestar.

*If you haven’t been… go. If you USED to go… go back. If you go every year… carry on. Do the stuff you ALWAYS do at the fair. Nostalgia’s great. But try one new thing too… one thing you wouldn’t normally do. This is Steuben County Fair’s bicentennial year. If you go, you’ll be helping the Fair make history.

Steuben County Fair Bicentennial: 1819 Was CRAMMED with Activity

In 1819 a group of visionaries met at the courthouse in Bath to form a county agricultural society. They got a $150 state subsidy under “an act to improve the agriculture of this state,” and the first Steuben County Fair was soon under way! But what ELSE was going on in that exciting year?
*Steuben County was bigger back then, stretching all the way over to Seneca Lake. Within the current boundaries there were 11 towns, though Wheeler and Hornellsville would be created in 1820. (Today’s it’s 32 towns and two cities.) Schuyler, Yates, Chemung and Livingston Counties did not yet exist.
*On the far side of Seneca, the village of Burdett was formed. Alabama became the 22nd state, and President James Monroe bought the Florida Territory from Spain. Governor DeWitt Clinton had thousands of men beavering away to build the Erie Canal, while hundreds more (including slaves) rebuilt the U.S. Capitol, which the British had burned five years earlier. In England King George III was still on the throne. He would die the following year, after almost 60 years as king, but his son, as Prince Regent, was already filling the old man’s role. (This was the “Regency” period so beloved of romance writers.)
*The 1820 census would show over 9,600,000 people in America. New York and Pennsylvania became the first states with populations over a million, and New York City the first municipality with a population in six figures. Albany was the eleventh-largest city in America. There were 23,000 people in Steuben County… and 46 of them were slaves.
*Washington Irving published the story of Rip Van Winkle, and James Fenimore Cooper was working on his first novel (which would flop).
*Queen Victoria, Prince Albert, Walt Whitman, Julia Ward Howe, and Herman Melville were all born in 1819. Charles Darwin, Abraham Lincoln, and Edgar Allen Poe were ten years old, Charles Dickens was seven, Elizabeth Cady (Stanton) was four, and Robert E. Lee was 13.
*Jemima Wilkinson, the “Publick Universal Friend” who lived near Penn Yan, “left time” in 1819. Hawaiian King Kamehameha also died, and so did naval hero Oliver Hazard Perry.
*Barrington Baptist Church was organized, and held its first regular service. Bath Masons received a warrant to form a new lodge. Baltimoreans created the Independent Order of Odd Fellows.
*America finally had an economy big enough to suffer its first economic depression – the Panic of 1819, which would last for two more years. We had no standard currency, so local newspapers printed weekly quotes as to the values of money from each state.
*British cavalry troops attacked peaceful demonstrators in St. Peter’s Field as they called for parliamentary reform. They killed almost 20, with at least 400 injured. Sarcastically recalling the army’s glory at Waterloo four years earlier, an enraged nation quickly labeled this massacre as “Peterloo.”
*On the brighter side, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison founded the University of Virginia, even as Norwich University was founded in Vermont.
*The Supreme Court protected the sanctity of contract in the Dartmouth College Case, and affirmed federal supremacy over the states in McCulloch versus Maryland. Daniel Webster successfully argued each case, and Chief Justice John Marshall delivered both judgments.
*Bolívar freed Columbia from Spain. Erastus Corning was in business in Albany. John Magee, became a deputy sheriff. Ira Davenport was setting up stores along the Steuben-Allegany line, and running river arks down to Baltimore. And folks congregated to Bath, to take in the new county fair.