“To run the rivers on the freshets was the universal ambition of all the younger men for the first half of the present century in Steuben.” (Clark Bell, 1893)
In the late 1700s our area was hard to get to, and almost impossible to ship stuff out of… until Charles Williamson and others got the rivers cleared, and built 75-foot “arks” to carry the region’s produce. They started as far up as Bath (on the Conhocton), Bradford (on Mud Creek), or Arkport (on the Canisteo), then used the current to make their way to the Chemung, then the Susquehanna, and finally Chesapeake Bay and the markets of Baltimore.
George McClure (working for Williamson) built perhaps the first ark, and made the first experimental voyage, laden with lumber, staves, and wooden pipe. It took a half hour to get five miles from Bath, where they grounded… then about six days to get from there to Painted Post, where they waited another four or five days for the river to rise. “We made a fresh start, and in four days ran 200 miles.” Aiming for Baltimore, he got grounded near Harrisburg and negotiated a decent deal for his cargo there, having established that the thing could be done.
Joel Pratt (for whom Prattsburgh was named) cleared 110 acres four miles west of Pleasant Valley. The following year he hired men from Bath and Pleasant Valley to cut his wheat with sickles. They threshed that winter with flails, then took the wheat to Bath by ox team and sent it out on the high spring waters of 1802. Captain Pratt finally came back from Baltimore on foot, with nearly $8,000 in his pocket.
Doing business in Bath and Dansville with his brother Charles, McClure took in 4000 bushels of wheat and 200 barrels of pork. He built four arks at Arkport, and these may have been the first to navigate the Canisteo, running all the way down to Baltimore. One winter he built eight arks at Bath and four on the Canisteo, shipping flour to Baltimore and wheat to Columbia, Pennsylvania. “The river was in fine order and he made a prosperous voyage and a profitable sale. His next project was to build a schooner on Crooked Lake.”
He also bought fur, pelts, and deer hams, shipping them downriver. One year he boarded 40 head of “the best and largest cattle” onto arks, shipped them to Columbia, and drove them overland to Philadelphia, “where they sold to good advantage.”
The list of entrepreneurs who ran their arks downriver is a list of many of the region’s founding fathers: the McClure brothers, Charles Williamson of Bath, Frederick Barthles of Bradford, Benjamin Patterson of Painted Post, Joel Pratt and Jacob Van Valkenberg of Prattsburgh, Ira Davenport of Hornellsville, Christopher Hurlbut of Arkport, John Arnot of Elmira, and General Wadsworth of Geneseo all made fortunes in the arking traffic.
Bath in particular boomed, and warehouses bulged on Ark Street, but it crashed to an end when the Erie Canal opened in 1825. According to Ansel McCall, “The ark of the Conhocton passed into history; the rats took possession of the storehouses; the roofs caved in; the beams rotted away, and what was left of them tumbled into ruins.”
For decades to come lumber rafts in hundreds still made their way downstream to salt water. And the new canal system, while crippling Bath, was the making of Penn Yan and Hammondsport. Both of those are stories for another time. But join us at 4 PM Friday, January 3 in Bath Fire Hall, when I’ll kick off our 2020 Winter Lecture Series with a free presentation on the old-time days of lumber rafts and river arks.