Monthly Archives: February 2020

Presidential Rejects: (1) John Quincy Adams

The first time we had a contested presidential election, the electoral college fouled us up. The next election, the electoral college REALLY fouled us up. The first time we had a popular-vote election, the electoral college fouled us up. The latest time we had a presidential election, the electoral college fouled us up. And it’s fouled us up repeatedly in between.

The founding fathers were nervous about democracy, which was still a brand-new experiment. So they ruled that the people would elect the representatives in Congress, but an elite group – the state legislators – would elect the senators. And a SUPER-elite… the presidential electors… would elect the president and vice-president.

This fouled up the 1796 and 1800 elections so badly that they amended the Constitution, improving things a little. By 1824 there was a new wrinkle. Electors still chose the president, but in most states the VOTERS chose the ELECTORS. This made selection of the president MORE LIKELY to be the voters’ choice, but not ASSUREDLY the voters’ choice.

With four men running in 1824, nobody got a majority of the electoral votes. This meant that the House of Representatives picked the president from the top three, but – get this – the states got one vote apiece, no matter how many people they had! And if the state delegation split, they cast no vote at all!

Anyhow, Andrew Jackson was the clear winner by plurality, with 41% of the popular vote compared to 31% for John Quincy Adams, with Crawford and Clay splitting the remainder almost evenly. The House, though, chose Adams.

A popular book right now is about “accidental presidents” – those who’ve succeeded on the predecessors’ deaths or resignations. Quincy Adams was the first of six “loser presidents” or “presidential rejects” – those who had to assume the nation’s highest office after the nation rejected them.

Young Adams in many ways looked superbly qualified. He had been a senator, a representative, an ambassador, and secretary of state. He’d been active in the Revolution even as a boy, and he’d helped end the War of 1812. None of this would help very much.

Like his father, John Quincy Adams had two handicaps. First, that he was usually the smartest person in the room. And second, that he knew it. Each of them were good at behind-closed-doors politics – not meaning anything crooked, just that they were cerebral men who worked well by quiet, face-to-face negotiations. Neither one was happy with the broader politics of crowds and speeches and nationwide campaigns.

And, of course, Quincy Adams had to do his job even though the voters had decided NOT to have him do the job. It’s as if an employer had chosen to hire the other candidate, but the government swooped in and forced him to take you instead. He wouldn’t be very happy, and you’d be batting with two and a-half strikes against you.

President Adams had some successes, but failed in much of his program: a naval academy, a national observatory, a national university, uniform weights and measures. In 1828 Jackson was back, and by then 22 of the 24 states chose their electors by popular vote. Jackson outpolled Adams 56% to 44%, though winning the electoral college by more than two-to-one (another example of how ridiculous the system is).

John Quincy Adams was a patriot, and a brilliant man, and even after the White House he served our country with distinction until struck down by cerebral hemorrhage on the floor of Congress while loudly objecting (quite rightly) to the Mexican War. Carried to the Speaker’s Room, he died there in the Capitol two days later, in 1848. In the right circumstances, he could have been a great president. Forced to take office after being rejected, his leadership could only be poor. He was doomed to one indifferent term, and the country suffered accordingly. His greatest days came before and after his presidency.

Hiking Into History

It’s not the best hiking weather just now, but better days are coming, so I’ve been looking at some of my maps and doing some planning.

Hiking is a good way to connect with nature, but there are certain stretches that also connect us with history as we hike. And we can pack in a huge amount of history on a single half-mile in section M12 of the Finger Lakes Trail, in the Town of Urbana near Hammondsport.

We can pick up the trail at County Route 88 in Pleasant Valley, just about across from the Urbana town building. Heading westward we pass through a lovely vineyard… how fitting for Pleasant Valley… then dip down a short slope into the woods, and over a footbridge across the Keuka Inlet, near where it receives Mitchellsville Creek. A short distance more, and we connect with history by crossing the old (disused) Bath & Hammondsport Railroad. We’ve been walking more or less in step with the train tracks, the stream, and the Fish Hatchery Road.

All of which illustrates how geography formed the settlement and economic patterns of the area. The rivers and lakes were highways back in the 1790s, and Keuka Lake at Hammondsport was joined to the Conhocton River at Bath by Pleasant Valley… a long portage between the two bodies of water.

Slopes rise on either side, constricting travel. Five highways laid out over centuries overlie each other here, roughly following the stream: a footpath going back probably before Iroquois days; the Fish Hatchery Road; the B&H; a turn-of-the-century bicycle sidepath along the edge of Fish Hatchery; and yet another footpath, the Finger Lakes Trail, proving that the more things change the more they stay the same.

AT LEAST as far back as the 1820s there were schemes to dig a canal along the route… that never happened, but the railroad bridged the gap in the 1870s.

The railroad carried out tons of grapes and numberless gallons of wine, making both enterprises truly successful in the Hammondsport area. They also carried out first motorcycles and then airplanes for Glenn Curtiss. Without the B&H he could not have created his industrial operations. He might have ended his days in obscurity at the bike shop, or he would have had to move… at least to Bath… and make someplace else the “Cradle of Aviation.”

With separate railroads coming in to Penn Yan and Hammondsport, Keuka Lake also became a tourism destination, with visitors connecting from the train to the steamboat, then being whisked away to lakeside resorts. Finger Lakes tourism came to be in the years after the Civil War.

Back at the road you’ll find the lovely Grange hall a few rods down to the left, with wineries and Hammondsport beyond, but dominating all else is Pleasant Valley Cemetery. Charles Williamson gave land in the 1790s for a school-and-cemetery lot. The school continued until the 1950s and was succeeded by a Mennonite church, and that property is now private. But thousands rest in the still-active cemetery, where Glenn Curtiss was brought home in 1930 at the age of 52; ten airplanes flew overhead and dropped flowers on the crowd.

To the right, the road swings around toward the fish hatchery and Bath. Alexander Graham Bell cane this way to visit Glenn Curtiss in 1908, and young Curtiss traveled it himself, on his bike a decade earlier. Charles Champlin in the 1930s biked this way to Bath for cornet lessons… generals and admirals used the route to insect the airplane factory during World War I. Thirty-four year-old lawyer Benjamin Bennett drove by horse this way on business in 1861, becoming the first Hammondsporter to learn that the Civil War had begun. When he got to Bath, he enlisted on the spot.

Continuing eastward on the F.L.T. we cross the very busy State Route 54, which turned Fish Hatchery into a byway when it was opened after World War II. Horses, oxen, mules, and early motor vehicles would not have managed that hill. Modern vehicles do, and that’s also history.

The Treasures of the Snow

Winter… when icicles hang by the wall (Shakespeare)… when earth stands hard as iron, water like a stone (Rosetti)… when it’s lovely weather for a sleigh ride together with you! (Parish)

We know about ice, we know about frost, we know about the cold wind blowing, and here in western New York, we also know about SNOW. We know about lake effect from Lake Erie, and lake effect from Lake Ontario. We know about mountains of snow in Buffalo, Syracuse, Rochester, Ogdensberg. The late Ted Markham told me once that his dad had had the last horse-drawn mail route in New York, because it needed a sleigh in winter.

What do we REALLY know about snow?

Snow is water in delightful frozen forms. It forms in crystals, coalescing around a micro-speck of dirt, dust, soot, radioactive fallout, or what have you. So maybe your mother had something when she told you not to eat the stuff. (Always listen to your mother.)

The crystals form hexagonally, with either six points or six sides. Famously, no two are alike. Wilson “Snowflake” Bentley was so fascinated by them that he begged his Vermont farming parents to buy him a cumbersome glass-plate camera, and spent literally the rest of his life photographing, studying, and admiring these tiny subjects, each of which endured for only a few seconds, and yet was preserved forever.

Snow looks like snow, but most of us are aware that the flakes vary in size. My grandmother in Rhode Island observed that when the flakes suddenly increase in size, it’s usualy a sign that the fall is about to end, and I’ve found her observation true. But besides sizes, they also vary in shape.

Most famously we have our six-pointed star, the snowflake of cartoons and greeting cards and every child’s imagination. They form with radial symmetry, more or less… nothing’s perfect in nature, and as a snowflake falls its environmental conditions change second by second, so irregularity is the order of the day.

But we can also get six-sided plates, or six-sided lobed plates… sometimes with the “star” embedded within. Or, we could get open-ended six-sided columns.

There’s also needle snow, the shape of which is pretty much what it sounds like.

Look closely if things get very slippy underfoot. You may be “enjoying” graupel, sort of a tiny snowball or snow slab. This happens when atmospheric water collects and freezes on the snowflakes as they fall. Layers of graupel are prone to avalanche.

In a very implausible set of conditions, Florida residents in the Palm Beach-Stuart area experienced grapel last month. (It didn’t stick.)

A blizzard is a severe sustained snowfall with high winds. A snow squall is much the same, but of short duration. Either one may produce a whiteout, in which visibility almost instantly goes to almost zero. “No cloud above, no earth below – a universe of sky and snow!” (Whitter)

Winter can also bring freezing rain, when the surface is colder than the sky, or sleet, when rain freezes on the way down.

Our area only caught the edge of the Blizzard of 1888, which dumped four feet of snow on Albany and almost five feet in Saratoga Springs. Over 400 people died. The blizzard of 1978 had much the same footprint, and multiple locations in Rhide Island reported 40 inches of snow, but “only” a hundred people died.

In February of 1940 the Davenport Orphanage girls in Bath had to go to school by sledge for a week, and snow still lay on the ground in April. After a 1958 blizzard, children in Prattsburgh could climb drifts and reach above the telephone wires. Right where we are snow fell and frost formed every month in 1816, “the year without a summer.”

But as long as it’s not excessive, snow can be one of the most lovely experiences North America has to offer. Even if you only watch it through the window, with a warm robe and a good book in hand.

The OTHER Corning

Have you ever been to Corning? No, not THAT Corning. The OTHER Corning. The ORIGINAL Corning.
Once upon a time, Europeans called this the Painted Post Country. When Steuben County was created in 1796, Painted Post got official standing as one of six “supertowns” created at the same time. From these six Towns came the 32 Towns and two Cities of today’s Steuben, plus parts of five newer counties.
In 1836 a much-reduced Painted Post changed its name to Corning, after giving birth to Campbell, Hornby, Erwin, Lindley, and Caton. (Just to cloud matters a little more, a new Village in Erwin took the name Painted Post when it was incorporated in 1860.)
When the CITY of Corning was created in 1890, it was legally separated from the Town (taking almost 80% of the population) and immediately began to overshine its namesake parent.
Which is a shame, because the Town of Corning has a lot to offer on its own.
The Town of Corning completely surrounds the City. This can be a little had to see sometimes because of the Corning “megalopolis” – the urban sprawl that starts with unincorporated Gang Mills, then through the official Villages of Painted Post and Riverside, through the City itself, and culminates in the Village of South Corning.
In New York, incoporated Villages remain a part of their Town, so Riverside and South Corning, both incorporated in the 1920s, are in Corning Town. Much of what we think of as the City of Corning is actually in the Town, or even in the Town of Erwin.
Many of the Town offices are in South Corning, which was formed from the communities of Brown’s Crossing and Mossy Glen. The Village is also home to most of Hope Cemetery, and to St. Mary’s Cemetery and St. Mary’s Orthodox Cemetery. Where the Catholic and Orthodox Cemeteries come together is a monument to some 20 glassworkers killed in an 1891 train wreck in Ravenna, Ohio, on their way back to the Corning area.
Besides the two Villages, Gibson, Denmark, and East Corning are part of the Town. The stretch along the Chemung River was once known as Little Flats, with Big Flats farther downstream.
Corning Community College is in the Town of Corning, as are Spencer Crest Nature Center and the Houghton Land Preserve, not to mention the new Corning Hospital.
Post Creek, Narrows Creek, and Cutler Creek all flow down through the Town from the north to empty into the Chemung River, while Bailey Creek runs through the Town from the south. I’m open to correction, but I believe that the “Christ is the Answer” sign is in the Town of Corning.
A boulder in the Town of Corning designates the Pre-Emption Line, from which much of western New York was surveyed back in the early days of the republic.
Corning Town has always been a vital link in the chain of transportation. The Chemung River, Chemung Feeder Canal, Erie Railroad, DL&W Railroad, and an interurban trolley line followed the natural lay of the land, as did what we now call Routes 352 and 415, which follow the tracks of Indian trails. More modern times have also brought in I-86.
Of course, those rivers and creeks also wrought devastation in the floods of 1935, 1946, and 1972.
The Imperial Club of distant memory was in the Town of Corning, and so is Corning Country Club, which hosted the L.P.G.A. Corning Classic for many years. Tobacco was once an important product, but the Town has no state forests or state game lands. Over 6000 people call it home. Don’t overlook it.