In the days when farms and transport both required large animals, hay was VERY important. The old rhyme Candlemas Day, Candlemas Day, half your wood and half your hay, meant that if you had used MORE than half of your supply by February 2, you were going to be in big trouble before the season was out.
The 1860 state gazetteer showed an annual Steuben County production of 58,749 ¼ tons (0.93 tons per person – almost all by hand!). Bath came in first with 5931 ½ tons (0.98 1/3 tons per person!), more than doubling second-place Prattsburgh at 2953 ½. Troupsburgh, Howard and Woodhull weren’t too far behind Prattsburgh, while only Lindley, Erwin, and West Union (last at 721 tons) fell below four figures.
Hay was so vital, and so ever-present, that it soaked into America’s history, legends, and language. Little Boy Blue was under the haystack, fast asleep. The American Protestant missionary movement traditionally dates from the 1806 Haystack Prayer Meeting, when five Williams College students took shelter from a thunderstorm.
Shrewdly taking advantage of an opportunity meant that you were making hay on the situation. Racing to meet a deadline meant struggling like farmers, desperate to make hay while the sun shines – hay stored wet will spontaneously combust. Hayrows left by reaping would be piled into haystacks (or hayricks), then cut out with a long-handled hay knife and hauled to the barn where the hay could be pitched into haylofts or haymows. Changing technology would replace the haystacks with haybales, and then hayrolls or hayrounds.
After all that work of bringing in the sheaves, you’d probably want to hit the hay.
If your production ran surplus to your own needs, you’d take it to the haymarket. Haymarkets in big cities were large and bustling places. Police attacks on workers in Chicago led to the 1886 Haymarket Riots. Fifteen years later, Pulteney farmers were getting $10.50 a ton for October hay.
Exasperated sergeants (is there any other kind?) had Civil War recruits tie a sprig of hay to one ankle, and a sprig of straw to the other. Many weren’t too confident about left and right, but chanting “hayfoot, strawfoot, hayfoot, strawfoot,” taught them to march. A hayfoot was a new (probably hopeless) recruit… just like a hayseed was a naive country rube in the big city.
When coaches were confident that their teams were primed for the Big Game, they could brag that the hay is in the barn. If you won the game, that might be the time to hitch up the haywagon, call out your friends, and have a hayride.
While we don’t wish to be indelicate in a family publication, this could possibly lead to a roll in the hay. If tempers flared afterward, an aggrieved party might throw a haymaker.
If bad news came upon you without warning, you might feel like a load of hay landed on you. Beekeepers, on the other hand, insist that a swarm in May is worth a load of hay. If you were desperately hunting for something, it was like looking for a needle in a haystack. If you persisted in using a horse once the new gasoline buggies ruled the road, people laughed at your hayburner.
Hay seems like humble stuff, but it was a vital commodity, close to the heart of America’s labor, economy, language, and folklore…
And that ain’t hay.
Monthly Archives: April 2020
Sidewalk History Spotting — Free Packet With Six Walks!
Steuben County Historical Society conducts two historic walking tours every summer (weather and illness permitting!). We’ve put together a “Sidewalk History Spotting” packet with notes from four of them – in Wayland, Canisteo, Addison, and Corning’s Northside – plus information on established historic walking tours in Bath and Hammondsport. If you e-mail us via steuben349@yahoo.com, we’ll send you the free 20-page packet as a pdf attachment.
We hope that this will give you a way to get some fresh air and exercise (while socially distanced!), besides spotlighting some of our communities and pointing out a little history. Once you’ve had a guided look at history “from the sidewalk,” you’ll probably spot more on your own as you walk or drive through “old Stew-Ben.” Here’s a little sampling of what each walk has to offer.
At the heart of ADDISON is the Canisteo River. In fact, sometimes the river is IN the heart of Addison, but modern flood control makes that a rare occurrence nowadays. Eagles and osprey hunt for fish and build their nests along the river, so keep your eyes peeled.
Two small parks on the south side collect several memorials, and one of them honors Mr. Valerio. When the new central school went up in 1929, he paid to pave the street and put in the sidewalk, because it broke his heart to think of children walking to school through mud.
Cross the Main Street bridge and the railroad tracks (once the Erie main line) and you can climb the little hill to Wombaugh Park, surrounded by beautiful homes and historic churches. It’s a little showplace for the carpenter gothic style.
CANISTEO also flooded frequently in days gone by. In the late 1800s a trolley ran through the village and connected it with Hornell.
Canisteo’s green along Main Street has been a gathering place just about ever since the village was born. Greenwood Street has the Wesleyan church, which was a-building from 1934 to 1942; the 1856 Methodist church, whose pastor was the only local white Protestant minister we’ve found who opposed the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s; and the 1880 Baptist church, whose two very different towers give evidence of a long-ago lightning strike.
Further up Greenwood you get the cemeteries, including two stones inscribed K.K.K. by proud Klan members a century back, the schools, and the famed Canisteo Living Sign.
CORNING NORTHSIDE: While Addison and Canisteo both lie on the Canisteo River, Corning is divided by the Chemung. The Northside area around Bridge Street includes Benjamin Patterson Inn, built around 1796 and now the heart of Heritage Village of the Southern Finger Lakes.
The first block or two north of the bridge includes a commercial area largely built from 1900 to 1920 or so. Grace Methodist, North Baptist, and the old St. Vincent’s each have historic edifices, while Ontario Street has large old homes, a former church, and a 19th century fire station. All of this was under water in the Hurricane Agnes disaster of 1972.
WAYLAND is not on a river, but it was on two major railroads. It has Bennett’s Motors, an auto sales and service business opened by two brothers when they got back from World War I, and still in business until the end of 2019. It also has a Legion hall built by veterans – when they put it up in 1920, they included a good-sized movie theater – just what every town needed back then!
Wayland also has historic churches, of course, the old Main Street business district, and Gunlocke Library. When it opened in 1974 it was the first modern library built in Steuben since Hornell’s, in 1911.
For BATH our packet has just a short section introducing the existing random-access audio tour. Bath of course includes historic churches, the fairgrounds, the county buildings, the Liberty Street business district, and a number of fine old homes, including our own 1831 Magee House.
Our HAMMONDSPORT section likewise is short, introducing a historic tour created for a Girl Scout Gold project. Any tour of Hammondsport of course includes Keuka Lake, plus Glenn Curtiss history, the village square, more old homes, and the Elmwood Cemetery.
So that’s enough to keep you busy for six trips on six days! We’ll be happy to send you a packet!
Presidential Rejects (3) Benjamin Harrison
Twelve years after fouling up the 1876 presidential election, our electoral college once again cheated the voters. There were still people around who had lived through the electoral foul-ups of 1796, 1800, and 1824.
Benjamin Harrison certainly had the wherewithal to be a good president. He commanded first a company, then a regiment, and finally a brigade in the Civil War. He was a successful lawyer, and served six years as U. S. senator from Indiana. His grandfather William Henry Harrison had won the election of 1840, ousting President Martin van Buren only to die after a month in office. William Henry’s father, Benjamin Harrison V, had been a governor, a member of the Continental Congress, and a signer of the Declaration of Independence.
All Benjamin needed was the will of the people. The 1824 mess was darkened by accusations (probably untrue) of a “corrupt bargain.” The 1876 fiasco DEFINITELY required corruption and crime to steal the election from Tilden, and send Hayes to the White House.
Things were more sedate and straightforward in 1888, requiting no intervention by commissions (1876), courts (2000), or Congress (1800, 1824). Cleveland won re-election, but the votes in certain states fell out so that Harrison had a majority of electors. He had matched his grandfather’s record of unseating a sitting president, but the voters had actually chosen to KEEP Cleveland. They got Harrison instead.
Harrison announced that Providence had made him president, starting a gag-inducing list of losers proclaiming that God wanted them to be president, and so intervened to overrule the voters. One of the first to gag was the Republican party boss of Pennsylvania, who growled about “how close a number of men were compelled to approach…the penitentiary to make him President”. The Republicans had adopted the grassroots corruption of buying an adequate number of votes.
Having taken the White House by kicking out the president that the voters wanted to keep, and not getting along very well with many of his own party leaders, Harrison struggled in office. The surplus and the gold supply both went down. He couldn’t get civil rights legislation passed. He raised tariffs, tried and failed to annex Hawaii, agreed to carve up Samoa with the British and Germans. He DID enlarge and modernize the navy, and pushed for new technologies, installing electricity in the White House.
For some reason he went to the well again in 1892, and once again came up short, but this time the electoral vote echoed the people’s votes. Cleveland returned to the White House, right where the voters wanted him, serving the only non-consecutive terms as president. He shared with Andrew Jackson the honor of being elected president three times – the only men to accomplish that, other than Franklin Roosevelt – but like Jackson, the electoral college pulled the rug from under his feet, and limited him to two terms.
History is my profession, my calling, and an avocation. In getting ready for this blog I realized that I literally knew less about Benjamin Harrison than about any other president. He had been in the Civil War, he lost the popular vote, he had a distinguished ancestry – and that was it. Every other president I could tell you of their careers, their lives, their ups, their downs. Not Benjamin Harrison. I even knew more about his 30-day-wonder grandfather than I knew about him!
And history in general has done the same, treating him as the most justly forgettable of American presidents. Honest, conscientious, and qualified, he and the nation both suffered from having him installed in the White House for four years, after being told by the voters to go back home. The system was legal and constitutional, but it cheated the voters, and it cheated Cleveland. It didn’t do Harrison any good either.
1920 — How We Were, a Hundred Years Ago
Out in the big world in 1920, Joan of Arc was named as a saint. In that same year, in Poland, future Pope (and saint) John Paul II was born. Joan needed five centuries to become a saint, while John Paul took just nine years.
In Russia, science fiction writer Isaac Asimov was born. Other births for the year included Mickey Rooney; Werner Klemperer; Jack Webb; Yul Brynner; DeForest Kelly AND James Doohan (from Star Trek); torch singer Peggy Lee; and baseball great Stan Musial.
In Bath, George Haley was born – future Tuskegee Airman in the old segregated army, and combat pilot in World War II, Korea, and Vietnam.
Also first seeing the light of day was a brand-new character created by Agatha Christie – Hercule Poirot.
The world was still reeling from aftershocks of the Spanish influenza pandemic. Over in Europe, many of the Irish were fighting their war for independence. Under pressure from new member Adolf Hitler the German Workers Party adopted the swastika symbol and renamed itself the National Socialist German Workers Party, or Nazis.
Here in the U.S. the Negro National League was formed, and so was the National Football League. James Cox and Franklin D. Roosevelt ran for president and vice-president, losing out to Warren G. Harding and Calvin Coolidge.
In Pittsburg station KDKA, the first commercial radio station in America, made its first broadcast on election night… they’re still on the air. Woodrow Wilson was still in the White House, and his “Justice” Department made nationwide roundups and attacks on people, especially immigrants, considered to have dangerous political ideas, and either jailed them or shipped them overseas – the Red Scare. Young J. Edgar Hoover sat in his office, wrote up lies about people he disapproved of, then went to court and committed perjury to get people deported. This perhaps helped inspire the birth, also in 1920, of the American Civil Liberties Union.
American women nationwide finally got the vote in 1920 (New Yorkers had done so two years earlier), and the League of Women Voters was born.
Prohibition was in full force, devastating the economy around Keuka Lake, but to cheer things up a little, 1920 saw the very first Zorro movie (silent, of course, and starring Douglas Fairbanks, Sr.).
Representing us in Congress was a Republican named Houghton from the Corning Glass Works. Eighty years later, our representative in Congress was a Republican named Houghton from the Corning Glass Works. (“Amo” would be the grandson of Alanson.) James Wadsworth of Geneseo was one of our senators in 1920, and Al Smith was our governor. Unfortunately many western New Yorkers were so enraged by a Catholic governor that they would join the Ku Klux Klan in thousands, even using the Bath, Yates, and Chemung fairgrounds for their rallies, and having “K.K.K.” carved on their gravestones.
Locally in 1920, the Penn Yan was the last steamboat running on Keuka Lake. Brown’s Crossing and Mossy Glen, in the Town of Corning, were merged and incorporated to form the Village of South Corning. Saxton’s barn burned in Cameron Mills. Firefighters in Corning bought a new American LaFrance fire engine, made in Elmira. The Corning Daily Journal issued its last edition, and sold their subscription list to the Leader.
This means that they missed the stories of how burglars blew open a safe in the Corning Post Office, and how the Centerville (now Riverside) Bridge washed away in flooding accompanied by high winds that blew off roofs and uprooted trees in Hornby, Erwin, Lindley, Caton, and Campbell. Scottish Rite Masons advanced 850 members in Corning, where the city agreed to financially support the library. Embalmers held their state convention in Corning, where three local undertakers formed the entertainment committee.
In Wayland, the brand-new American Legion post built a home for itself, and that home included just what every town of good size needed in 1920 – a movie theater! In Hammondsport Henry Kleckler opened a new business, the Aerial Service Corporation. We know it today as Mercury Aircraft – now 100 years old.
The American Multiplane Company in Bath made their third attempt in three years to convince the army to buy their huge and complex airplane. Since it failed to fly for the third year in a row, that was the end of the project and the company.
If you’d been in Bath in those days, you’d have been getting your mail across Liberty Street from today’s post office, and going to the “old” Haverling School.
Haverling graduated 23 students, including grads with such well-known local names as Daniels, Faucett, Switzer, McCabe, Van Gelder, Bonsor, Kleckler, and Stocking. The basketball team was a financial success, despite winning two games and losing nine. The track team did rather better, and insisted that Hornell cheated them out of victory in the Steuben County track meet with the help of bad officialing. They had to be content with watching one of the Haverling players break the county pole vault record by almost two feet. In a meet at Colgate he had already done better than the Colgate collegiate record.
In September of 1920, W. Sterling Cole started his senior year at Haverling. He would later be elected to Congress from our district twelve times, and become the first chairman of the International Atomic Energy Commission.
According to the yearbook ads you could get your notions at the Racket Store… your Pyrex glass baking dishes from George W. Peck…
your shoes from Castle’s and cigars from Walter’s. You could climb and save at the Up-Stairs Clothing Store, or get choice meats and groceries from Van Gelder and Sons. You could get flowers from Van Scoter, and ice cream at the Olympian.
One 1920 landmark would not be recognized for decades to come. Not only was it the first year in which all American women had the right to vote. The cohort of girls born in 1920 were the first group of girls in which the majority of them lived until their children were grown up. That all by itself made 1920 a glorious year.