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.