While real estate is proverbially about location, community growth and economic development is often about transportation. Steuben County got its start and grew thanks to river transportation, then crashed when the Erie Canal rerouted the traffic.
We didn’t really recover well until the Erie Railroad main line came through in the early 1850s, quickly followed by its Rochester branch. We can see the impact of this new technology from the fact that there are two cities and 14 incorporated villages in Steuben County – and except for Hammondsport, every one of them was on the Erie Railroad.
Railroads made enough of an impact to leave their marks on our modern-day maps. In addition to the Erie, our other major line was the Delaware, Lackawanna, and Western, or DL&W… the two lines merged in 1960 to form the Erie-Lackawanna. This helps explain why Bath has an Erie Avenue, a Delaware Avenue, a Lackawanna Street, and a Railroad Avenue. Wayland has Lackawanna Street AND Lackawanna Avenue.
Canisteo has Depot Street, and Almond (Town of Hornellsville) has Depot Road, while Cameron has Depot Street and Railroad Street.
What we now call Denison Parkway in Corning used to be Erie Avenue, with multiple tracks running right down the thoroughfare. Corning has a different Erie Street now, plus a Delaware Avenue and a Lackawanna Street. (In 1942, there was also a Lackawanna Avenue.) Then there’s Roundhouse Lane, running to where the old Fall Brook-New York Central roundhouse stood. Trolley Lane, which skirts Denison Park on two sides, memorializes the days when the trolley connected Corning, Elmira, Watkins Glen, and Painted Post.
Hornell of course was a major center for the Erie Railroad, and site of the line’s main repair shops, so it’s unsurprising that the Hornell map still shows Erie Court and Erie Avenue. There’s also a Depot Street, a Delaware Avenue, and a Shawmut Drive, for the Pittsburg and Shawmut, which ran up the western edge of the County. Division Street perhaps notes the fact that Hornell was the meeting place of two divisions on the Erie Railroad. Transit Drive may recall the trolley line that joined Hornell with Canisteo.
Of course these types of names spread out much farther afield than Steuben County. Those approaching Rochester from the south encounter Lehigh Station Road, while the Fairport area has Railroad Mills Road. Auburn has Train Drive, Cortland’s got Delaware Avenue, Elmira has its Erie Street, its Junction Street, its Railroad Avenue, and its Pennsylvania Avenue (which might refer to the railroad or the state). Geneva offers Railroad Place and Honeoye Falls enjoys Lehigh Street, while Ithaca has Delaware Avenue. Part of Horseheads is named Holding Point.
Many communities have a Canal Street (Geneva, Elmira) that goes way, way back. Some (Hornellsville) have an Airport Road that’s relatively recent. But LOTS of towns have names remembering railroads and their glory days. Which tells us which form of transportation most deeply touched people’s individual lives.
Monthly Archives: March 2020
That OTHER Pandemic — the Spanish Flu
Some years ago, while studying how Hammondsport experienced the First World War, I read through all the 1917-1918 issues of the Hammondsport Herald. I was puzzled to see that while there was much discussion of the so-called Spanish influenza, the Hammondsport region appeared to have been spared any deaths.
While this was possible, it also seemed to be awfully unlikely. By some calculations, this global pandemic killed one human being out of every twenty on earth. It was one of the greatest natural disasters ever, killing as many (or more) in four months than the Great War did in four years. It was a catastrophe on a par with the “Black Death,” or Native America’s population crash under European diseases. The Curtiss plant with its hundreds of overcrowded employees, and officials visiting from around the world, meant that the flu surely hit Hammondsport hard.
I later learned that information about the flu was often kept quiet — either because the whole thing was feared to be German biological warfare, or at least to prevent the enemy from learning how debilitated our forces might be.
Of course the Germans were suffering just as badly, and behaving with equal suspicion. This helps explain why the flu unfairly became Spanish. Spain was the only large neutral country in Europe, and so the only one without censorship — lots of flu news came from Spain, while everyone else was playing it close to the vest.
Also making it hard to sort out information is the fact that death certificates often specified pneumonia as the cause, which was functionally accurate, but ignores the fact that the pneumonia had been caused by the flu. The whole secrecy thing may also have encouraged pneumonia diagnoses.
Having had no luck in 1997 with the Hammondsport Herald, in 2014 I struck it rich with the Steuben Advocate, one of two weekly papers in Bath at the time and since merged with the Courier. Like today’s paper, the Advocate covered a wide circulation area, including Hammondsport.
There were two major spikes of the disease, one in early 1918 and another, even deadlier, in August through November. I looked particularly at the period which seemed worst locally — the issues of October 16, October 23, and October 30.
Screening out deaths from military causes, and deaths that were obviously not flu-related, I totted up the deaths reported in these three issues of the weekly paper, and I found deaths ascribed to:
Pneumonia 25
Influenza 14
Unstated 42
Or 81 deaths, not counting those excluded above. (In some cases these were local folks who had died elsewhere.)
By comparison, in 2014 the last three October issues of the Courier listed 11 deaths.
During this period of 1918 schools closed in Bath, Avoca, Corning, Hammondsport, Savona, and parts of Wheeler. Churches canceled services in Avoca, Corning, Prattsburgh, Corning, and South Bradford.
In Mount Morris, horse-drawn scrapers were digging graves for multiple burials. Dansville and Bath were reported as being hit hard.
Public places were closed in the Corning area, where about 3500 became ill and at least 72 died. Emergency hospitals were set up at Corning Glass Works and in Painted Post… the latter unit supervised by Ingersoll-Rand.
Hammondsport school children were ordered to stay on their own premises under pain of arrest. Quarantined families were kept alive by neighbors leaving food on doorstep. Churches and lodges were asked to close — BUT a suggestion to close saloons and pool rooms “met no response.” One newspaper grumpily observed that the government’s call to conserve coal conflicted with the government’s advice to keep warm and avoid the flu.
Although cases would continue for months, the worst outbreak tailed off so quickly it was almost bewildering… perhaps due as much to mutation in the virus as it was to the quarantine. By November 6, the Hammondsport flu quarantine was lifted (November 8 in Bath), just in time for jubilant crowds to celebrate the Armistice, on the eleventh day of that eleventh month.
Presidential Rejects: (2) Rutherford B. Hayes
Last month in this space we looked at the presidency of John Quincy Adams – forced to take the office in 1825, after being rejected by the voters in 1824. Since no candidate had a majority among the presidential electors, Adams was chosen by the House of Representatives.
The next presidential reject was Rutherford B. Hayes, a Civil War general and governor of Ohio. The electoral college system had messed up the elections of 1796 and 1824, and turned the election of 1800 into a train wreck (even before we had trains). Now it turned the 1876 election into a train wreck with a simultaneous clown show, on top of a heist movie.
Hayes lost the 1876 election to Democrat Samuel J. Tilden, governor of New York. But Republican bigwigs discerned that if they could grab the electors of three southern states where the count had been extremely close, they would put Hayes over by one electoral vote.
Both parties charged election fraud, and both sides were probably guilty – American elections were staggeringly corrupt at the time. As day after day the inauguration drew nearer, Congress appointed a 15-man commission – five senators, five representatives, five Supreme Court justices – to allocate the disputed electors. The eight Republicans and seven Democrats voted eight to seven and called all disputed electors for Hayes, to the disgust of people from both parties all across the land.
A filibuster began to stop the inauguration, but Hayes finally swayed southern Democrats by agreeing to pull troops out of the south, which was essentially license for the Ku Klux Klan to run riot, crush the biracial governments set up after the Civil War, brutalize the African American population, and open a century of one-party white-power rule. Hayes went to the White House, and America abandoned millions of its children, who would suffer for generations like Jews in Russia.
“Rutherfraud B. Hayes” (as he was soon angrily nicknamed) quickly announced that he would not run for a second term as president, apparently preferring to make a graceful exit rather than trying to overstay a non-existent welcome. He tried to advance civil rights and civil service, but with only indifferent success.
As for Tilden, who had won an out-and-out majority (not just a plurality) of the voters, and who had apparently won the electoral college only to have 20 votes snatched away, he rejected calls to have himself inaugurated, to put crowds into the streets, or to resist the Hayes inauguration by force. “I can retire to private life,” he said, “with the consciousness that I shall receive from posterity the credit of having been elected to the highest position in the gift of the people.” True enough: Tilden had been elected president of the United States, which was more than Hayes, despite his many virtues, could say. Like the other “reject presidents,” Hayes was hobbled by trying to put through a program that the nation had already demonstrated it didn’t want. He was wise enough, and mature enough, to go gently into that good night. Being wounded five times perhaps conferred a certain perspective.
Childhood Death Was Once a Universal Tragedy
This is going to be a gloomy blog, but in the end it may help us rejoice in the really great aspects of our lives.
We live very differently than our ancestors did… even our ancestors of just a couple of generations back. For instance, a North Cohocton couple in the late 19th century had four children. And in one horror-filled month, all four of them died, stricken down by one or more of the many diseases against which medicine could do nothing. Then in September they had another baby… and within a few weeks, she died too.
How they ever found the heart I don’t know, but eventually they had five more children, all of whom lived to adulthood.
People expected to lose AT LEAST one child at a very young age… it was part of the routine of life. My grandmother (born 1903) and Joyce’s father (born 1915) each had brothers or sisters that died in infancy. Nineteenth-century parenting manuals told mothers not to get emotionally attached to their children before their first birthday. Otherwise, you were just setting yourself up for heartbreak. (But even though they “expected” such losses, they were just as devastating for them as them would be for us.)
My work as a historian takes me into cemeteries, but I’ve taken to avoding Mitchellsville Cemetery. The long line of children from one family preys upon my soul.
Dig a little into the lives of prominent folks a hundred years ago and more, and you’ll find these tragedies. Glenn and Lena Curtiss lost their first child, Carlton, and the age of 11 months. Carlton was a “blue baby” with congenital heart problems. It was 10 years before their only other child, Glenn Junior, was born.
Glenn’s colleague Alexander Graham Bell had two daughters that lived into their eighties, but two sons who died in infancy. Four of John D. Rockefeller’s children had good long lives, but Alice lived barely a year.
Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt had a child, the first Franklin Junior, who only lived a few months. There were two older children, and there would be two younger, including the second FDR Jr.
Dwight and Mamie Eisenhower’s first child, Doud, was only three years old when he died from scarlet fever. John Eisenhower, their only other child, was born 19 months later.
Winston Churchil and Clementine lost Mary, their third child, to sepsis of the throat before she was three years old.
Grace and Calvin Coolidge had two sons. The younger, Calvin, died in the White House at 16 when he developed a blister after playing tennis. The blister became infected, and he died of blood poisoning.
Margaret Sanger lost her third and youngest child Peggy to pneumonia when she was five years old, a loss that haunted Sanger all her life.
Abraham and Mary Lincoln had but one child who lived to adulthood, their eldest, Robert. Eddie died at age four from tuberculosis; Willy died in the White House at age 11, from scarlet fever; Tad, who survived his father, died at 18.
Of Martha Washington’s four children, Jacky lived to be 26. But Daniel died at two, Frances at four, and Patsy at 16 in an epileptic seizure. Through Jacky Martha had seven grandchildren, of whom three (including twins) died in infancy.
We should rejoice that we do not suffer in the same way, thank to innumerable medical advances, not least of which is antibiotics. We have vaccines for many diseases. TB and scarlet fever, once commonplace, have become real rarities. The girls born in 1920 were the first cohort of which the majority lived until their children were grown.
Even so, we could do far better yet. The U.N. counts 183 countries in the world, and 41 of them (including many former Societ-bloc counties) do better than we do on infant survival (first year after birth). The C.I.A. lists 223 countries, and we come out 52nd (tied with Serbia). Looking at child (under-five) survival, out of 35 advanced countries we come in 31st – managing to beat out Turkey, Chile, Mexico, and Slovakia.
For some reason many of us are frantic that we should NOT get univeral health care. But we can aim for a more limited traget. How about this for a national commitment?
“The United States has the best rate in the world for the survival of infants and their mothers.”
Why not universal health care JUST FOR THEM – for mothers and infants from the time pregnancy is detected through the child’s first birthday. We can do it, or we can continue to let babies die at a rate that is completely avoidable. What’s stopping us?