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.