Monthly Archives: May 2020

A Walk in the Cemetery

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Looking for a place to take a walk? Think about the cemetery. Cemeteries are quiet, they have roads to stroll on, you’re not scrambling out of traffic, the settings are usually pleasant, and you can do some bird watching at the same time, or maybe connect with history.

PLEASANT VALLEY CEMETERY outside Hammondsport goes back to the 1790s, but the star “attraction” is Glenn Curtiss. Until quite recently there were still people living who had attended Glenn’s burial in 1930, or taken part in the 10-plane flyover. He repeatedly pushed American aviation to higher levels than anyone expected, before dying at 52.

ELMWOOD CEMETERY in Caton has Steuben County’s first Civil War memorial, a short obelisk. BATH NATIONAL CEMETERY has a tall obelisk while NONDAGA in Bath has a monument and flagpole. There are Civil War statues at CLEARVIEW (North Cohocton) and HORNELL RURAL CEMETERY, and a Civil War cannon at HOPE (Campbell).

One section of Bath National is dedicated to 18 unknown soldiers from the War of 1812, found in Canada and reinterred with joint honors by both nations. Also while you’re at Bath National – look at all the religious and philosophical symbols now authorized on military headstones – a far cry from the formerly ubiquitous Roman cross, with an occasional Star of David thrown in.

WOODLAWN NATIONAL CEMETERY in Elmira is the resting place for many Confederate soldiers who died in the “Hellmira” prison camp. The civilian portion of Woodlawn includes the graves of Underground Railroad leader John Jones, Heisman Trophy winner Ernie Davis, and Samuel L. Clemens, whose gravestone measures two fathoms – Mark Twain.

ST. MARY’S CEMETERY in Corning includes a monumental arch that honors 19 men and boys, mostly glassworkers from Corning, killed in an Ohio train crash in 1891. HOPE CEMETERY ANNEX in Corning has a sweeping terraced space where members of the Houghton family are buried. (It looks at first like Albert Speer designed a Japanese garden, but it actually works.)

From Canisteo’s WOODLAWN CEMETERY you can enjoy the “living sign,” but scrounge around a little and you may find two stones inscribed “K.K.K.” a hundred years ago, by people who thought that joining the Ku Klux Klan was something to be proud of.

Within living memory sheep used to graze in PRATTSBURGH PIONEER CEMETERY, as a way of keeping the grass cut. PIONEER CEMETERY in Bath goes back to 1793, the first year of the community’s existence, when founder Charles Williamson buried his six year-old daughter who died of Genesee fever (probably malaria).

At TOWNSEND-ERWIN CEMETERY you can visit the gravestone of Benjamin Patterson (from Patterson Inn fame). But you’re not necessarily visiting “Hunter Patterson,” since the place has been flooded so often, and stones so often washed out of place, that nobody’s sure whether many of them are still where they started out. Even so, it’s a lovely setting.

The jewel of cemeteries for our region is, of course, 200-acre MOUNT HOPE in Rochester. It’s a good place to walk while you’re taking a break from visiting at Strong Hospital, or Highland Hospital. It’s the final resting place for luminaries such as freedom fighters Frederick Douglass and Susan B. Anthony, newspaper tycoon Frank Gannett, numerous Strongs, many Rochesters, Mr. Bausch AND Mr. Lomb, and Seth Green, the father of pisciculture.

Think about wandering your cemetery. It may help you find your place in the web of life.

Our Changing Wildlife

“The times change, and we are changed with them.”

The Latin saying speaks sooth. “Change and decay in all around we see.” Sometimes change is sad, and sometimes it’s scary. But it’s sometimes exciting, often fascinating, and always inevitable.

In the space of a couple of weeks recently I saw several deer… a wild turkey… a beaver dam… and some black squirrels.

All of them represented CHANGE here in the Finger Lakes and Southern Tier. In parts of our region deer are so plentiful that they’ve become a nuisance, and Steuben beats every other county in the state for deer take during hunting season. But there are old men and old women who remember being taken from school and put onto a bus so that they could be taken to a field where they would see that exciting rarity… a deer.

Much of our region was cleared for farming by 1900 or so, and much of our native wildlife had disappeared. As farming dwindled after World War II, the forest came back, and with it came the fauna.

With the deer came the turkey. It’s not unusual to find them along main roads and back roads alike. I know two spots within five miles of Bath where the flocks roost in trees along the Finger Lakes Trail. They’re forest birds, and they come with the trees. Just as Steuben is number one in the deer hunt, it’s consistently in New York’s top five for turkey take.

As the turkey increase, the pheasants decrease. Ring-necked pheasants are an Asian species, introduced after 1900 as a game bird, since the turkeys had vanished. (The state raised them at Bath Fish Hatchery.) But pheasants are a field bird. More trees, more turkeys. Fewer fields, fewer pheasants.

More TREES also mean more BEAVER. The last quarter of the 20th century saw their busy families return in delightful numbers… though of course they can be a nuisance when their dams flood our homes or our highways.

Our son and I observed a lot more black squirrels this year. Black fur is a natural morph for the gray squirrel, but why were their numbers going up? I’m told, by someone I’ve consistently found knowledgeable, that most squirrels were black when the first Europeans arrived – it provided camouflage in the shaded forest. Gray fur did better in open fields, and proportions swung in that direction. As more squirrels live again in forests, the numbers swing the other way.

As with the deer, the turkey, and the beaver, so with the black bear. Fifteen years ago the Encyclopedia of New York State estimated about 200 bear in the Alleghenies of the Southern Tier, where they were creeping across the state line from Pennsylvania. It’s a whale of a lot more than that now, as they’ve spread throughout the reforested parts of the Finger Lakes, and extended their range eastward to meet the westward-growing population from the Catskills.

Fishers and bobcats have taken so much advantage of the returning forest that we now have hunting and trapping seasons.

One native animal that has NOT returned since being hunted to extinction is the wolf. But the wolf’s absence, along with farmland going fallow, opened the door for the highly adaptive coyote, which is now perfectly at home in most of the state, field and forest alike, and even makes incursions into cities.

Besides the turkeys, other birds have ebbed and flowed with the changes. Cardinals, once rare above the Mason-Dixon line, have become commonplace, partly due to widespread planting of the decorative multiflora rosa since World War II, providing a year-round food source. They’ve also profited from global warming has made our winters less severe.

The Canada goose has also benefited from global warming, as grain is now grown much farther north in Canada than ever before, and their numbers boom. In many communities they now stay put all year. But their haunting call on their southward journey is still the herald of winter to come, and summer slipping away.

Presidential Rejects (4) George W. Bush

Without our 18th century electoral college system, there would have been no crisis in 2000. Al Gore clearly won the election, though not by any great amount. But in America, that doesn’t matter. What matters is who gets the electors from each state, usually allocated on a winner-take-all basis.

Exit polls showed, and news agencies judged, that Gore had carried Florida. Then the actual vote counts ran against the polls – an extremely unusual event. It was then observed that many ballots there had been printed and arranged (perhaps unintentionally) so that they were likely to drive intended Gore votes to either Bush or Pat Buchanan.

Bush now showed a very narrow victory in Florida, and a one-vote majority among electors. Gore and the Democrats demanded a recount, which lower courts granted. As the constitutional date for the electoral college vote roared closer, Bush got a Supreme Court hearing.

Court employees handed copies of the bitter 5-4 decision to reporters even as the justices fled out the back under cover of darkness. They deliberately omitted the customary summary, so reporters read the decision out loud on air until they could figure out what it said. The justices were long gone before reporters informed the world that five members of the Court had effectively made Bush president because (by the count that they in practice accepted) he had carried Florida by 547 votes out of almost six million. Gore had actually won the national election by more than half a million votes, out of 101,000,000+. Many of the new Bush team came in like conquerors, crowing that God had put them in the White House, which only drove Bush’s already-low opinion poll ratings even lower. As did their gleeful efforts to ram his programs and appointments down the throats of a country which had just rejected both.

But Bush won praise for his work to rally the nation and the world after the horrendous September 11 terrorist attacks… then quickly squandered that unity.

America, “the world’s only superpower,” had led the west to peaceful victory in the Cold War, and to the end of the Soviet Union and European Communism. Now we were united in the face of terrible tragedy. The world responded with an outpouring of support, and even love, and rallied to join the U.S. in a campaign against the terrorists.

Unfortunately the often-passive Bush relied heavily on his advisors (mostly brought in from his father’s team), and THEY had learned all the wrong lessons – lessons, if fact, that the elder Bush had publicly warned about.

During the Clinton years, some Bush men had urged that the United States, as the world’s only superpower, should just go ahead and do whatever it wanted to, and ignore the other nations. Rather than consulting, negotiating, or leading, we should just ACT, and the rest of the world would soon learn that it had to comply.

So we quickly jettisoned international support, simply announcing without consultation what we were going to do, and what we expected the other nations to do. When they raised objections or even questions, or even just asked for more information, Bush announced “If you aren’t for us, you’re for the terrorists,” and told domestic critics the same.

They also revived their campaign, vetoed by the first President Bush, to conquer all of Iraq and depose Saddam Hussein, falsely charging that Iraq had been behind September 11, or at least had helped. This has been discredited, and was ridiculous on its face, since Saddam and Osama had despised each other for years.

By 2002 we were in two wars – fighting Al Qaeda and the government in Afghanistan, and fighting Saddam Hussein in Iraq. The war rationale kept shifting in Iraq, just as it had in Vietnam. Saddam (who was, in fact, a brutal dictator and a sometime sponsor of terrorism) was found, captured, tried, and executed. But rather than universal Iraqi applause, this went almost unnoticed in a decade-long insurgency against U.S. occupation. People began to recognize that just as we had not had an adequate rationale, we also had no exit strategy.

All this hurt Bush, who’d been riding high since September 11 and a quick initial victory in Iraq. He was hurt again by photos and film of American soldiers torturing Iraqis in an official U.S. program. Even so, Bush won the 2004 election – the only “Reject President” to go on and win a second term.

But Iraq kept getting worse, and victory still eluded us in Afghanistan. Many military personnel left the sefvice as soon as possible. When Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans and killed 1500 people – many dieing of thirst while waiting at designated spots for rescues that never came – the disbelieving nation recognized that despite promoting themselves as the “national security” administration, in four years since September 11 they had not made adequate plans or preparations to evacuate a major city.

Bush was term-limited out in 2008, and the public was increasingly unhappy with him, and with his party in general. Republicans, ever against government regulation, had repealed many New Deal restrictions on Wall Street, set in place during the Great Depression. The unsurprising result was a Depression-style crash, right in the midst of the election campaign, and Obama won. Numerous scholars seriously labeled Bush as the worst president in American history. He would not have to bear that burden long.

Hiking Into History (Part II)

Back in February we looked at a half-mile “history hike” on the Finger Lakes Trail (Map M12) in Pleasant Valley, northwest of State Route 54. Today we extend that hike by carefully crossing 54, still on the floor of Pleasant Valley, which already bore that name back in the 1790s. We can still see why.

Making our way up the slope of Mount Washington, pausing now and then to look backward… and depending on the foliage, on our elevation, and on the foliage below… we get a sense of the length and breadth of the valley. Even with a fair amount of acreage devoted to the cemetery, and more to a small airplane landing strip, we can see that much of it is still in cultivation or pasturage, just as it has been for at least 225 years.

On the far slope we can see the large buildings of what used to be the Columbia and Germania wineries. During the Great War Germania changed its name to Jermania, trying to duck anti-teutonic rage. The Taylor family bought Columbia during Prohibition. Since much of their sales lay in non-alcoholic juices, they were shielded somewhat from the Volstead Act and the 19th amendment.

In the 1960s Taylor bought the nearby Pleasant Valley Wine Company, makers of Great Western champagne. Founded a hundred years earlier, “P.V.” remains U. S. Bonded Winery # 1 for its state and federal district.

Taylor grew to be second only to Corning Glass Works as an employer in Steuben County. Distant corporate owners closed it in the 1990s, though local investors retrieved Pleasant Valley from the wreckage, operating from more modern facilities across from the old Columbia site, which is now home to Finger Lakes Boating Museum.

Adjoining P.V. is the Mercury Aircraft campus. Founded in 1920 as the Aerial Service Corporation, Mercury is a historic institution all on its own. Before World War II they built and serviced airplanes, and during the war made mountains of components for Curtiss-Wright in Buffalo. That experience taught them to handle those rare materials plastic and aluminum, which would serve the excellently in the postwar world.

Finally reaching the top of the slope, we walk roughly eastward along the crest to the blue-blazed June Big Trail, leading down to the Glenn Curtiss Museum. Photos from February of 1908 show that this snowy slope was where Glenn Curtiss and his colleagues experimented with hang gliders as research for their first airplane.

“June Bug” was the name of their third airplane, for which Curtiss was lead designer. Their flying field was off to our left, next to a barn that still stands as Building 88 on the Mercury campus. There a thousand people gathered on the Fourth of July, 1908 to watch Curtiss fly the first exhibition flight in America, winging a mile across the valley. Besides garnering a large ostentatious trophy from Scientific American, that flight marked the first time an airplane was filmed in America. It was the start of an aeronautical career that would turn Curtiss into a historical figure and a multimillionaire.

Drawings of Building 88 (the Stony Brook Farm barn) go back to the 1860s, but the Curtiss Museum, originally a wine warehouse, is far newer. The C-46 Curtiss Commando (R5C in navy lingo) cargo/troop carrier out front was one of thousands of such workhorses in World War II – once again, Mercury made components.

Continuing easterly, we should recognize that much of this land was cleared for farm or pasture in the 19th century. In the 1790s, farmers here on Mount Washington spent weeks each winter hauling their grain to Naples by sledge, since there was noplace closer to mill it.

We come out on the Winding Stair Road, and the trail moves southward. Turn northward, though, and you may get a feel for how steep the road becomes. Glenn Curtiss and J. S. Hubbs made local history in 1901, when they drove a one-cylinder Orient Buckboard all the way from bottom to top, ushering in the motor age.

After a northward short walk we can leave the road on the east side to take up the Triad Trail, a short non-F.L.T. spur. The Triad was a 1911 Curtiss model, the first practical amphibious float plane, which could go in the air, on the water, and onto the land. The Trail leads to a height from which we can see the village of Hammondsport, with the cleft of the Glen rising above it, and a good view of Keuka Lake, including where the train chugged up to the village waterfront, where passengers and cargo interchanged onto or off of steamboats making their way up to Penn Yan. (An 1803 schooner preceded the steamboats, which ran until 1922.)

Kingsley Flats down below, bounded by the Inlet, the school and the public beach, was the Curtiss flying field – wheeled airplanes on the land side, seaplanes on the lake side. The first woman pilot in America made her first flight down there – so did the men who created the air arms for the American and Japanese navies. Curtiss created the flying boat seaplane down there. On a typical day before World War I there were more airplanes on the Flats than in most entire countries.

The Indian trail that came along our Fish Hatchery Road reached the head of the lake at today’s Hammondsport, where it divided, just as Routes 54 and 54A do now, into a path hugging the east shore of the lake path and a path hugging the west.

So our walk along this stretch of the F.L.T. embraces the Native footpath; the horse-and-wagon Fish Hatchery Road; the steamboats; the B&H Railroad; the old bicycle sidepath; the birth of motorcyling; the pioneer days of aviation; the new auto age, which made a road up “hospital hill” desirable; and, returning to the earliest days even before the Iroquois, the newer footpath of the Finger Lakes Trail.