For most of our time as a species, winter has been the time to gather by the fire, and tell stories. So who are we to scorn the tradition of millennia? This time, with stories ABOUT our winters. And there’ll be more to come!

1790s – Weeks Away From Home
Imagine yourself as an early White farmer on Mount Washington, between Bath and Hammondsport. You’d cleared your land, and worked like a dog, and gathered into barns, but now – you had to SELL your crop.
So you’d wait till the snow lay deep, load up your sledge with grain, hitch up the horses or the oxen, and set off for Naples, which had the nearest mill.
And it took you weeks to get there, through the snow in a roadless forest. Once you had your grain ground to flour, you could head on home, moving a little faster with your lighter load. As long as the snow held out.

1816 – The Year Without a Summer
The 1815-1816 winter wasn’t especially bad, but it never ended. Snow fell and frost formed every month of the year. The creeks still froze in April, and started again in September. Fruit died on the trees, and crops in the ground. People despaired that the sun was going out, but 1817 brought a normal summer, for the cloud of volcanic dust, undetectable at the time, had settled back to earth.

1880s
One day Lena Curtiss took her young children, Glenn and Rutha, out to Pleasant Valley Cemetery to lay flowers on the grave of the children’s father. But as Glenn stepped down from the wagon Billy the horse lurched forward, throwing Glenn to the ground and running the wagon over his head. The caretaker’s family patched him up and mother rushed him home to Hammondsport, where Grandma took over. She thought. For Ed Garton, the hired man, had promised to take Glenn skating that afternoon, and Glenn proclaimed that rather then being put to bed, he was still going skating. Grandma Curtiss was not a woman to mess with, but her young grandson was already showing some of the daring and determination that would one day make him a millionaire. She fixed Glenn up with a new poultice, he went skating with Ed, and came home no worse than he’d been when he left.

1905 – The Hornellsville Horror
On February 1, ladies from Hornell’s Universalist Church bundled up and set off in two sleighs for Arkport to celebrate a friend’s birthday. Just after dark they headed homeward.
The first sleigh crossed a railroad track safely, but riders realized that an oncoming train was far nearer than they’d thought. They shouted frantically to their following friends, but the horses spooked on the track. The engineer tried to brake, but the Angelica Express slammed into the stalled sleigh. The animals escaped unscathed, while the driver and three women were injured. The other ten women… including Mrs. Graves, whose birthday it was – were killed.

1900s – Not Really
We often hear that old-time auto owners used to fill their radiators with water from Seneca Lake – because Seneca Lake never froze in the winter.
If anybody really did that, of course, they had a sad disappointment coming – physics being what it is. But they were also bucking, or just ignorant of, history! Given the gigantic mass of the water in Seneca… which has the greatest volume of any of he Finger Lakes – Seneca does not freeze over AS OFTEN as the other lakes do. But it does fact freeze some winters, and photos prove it. As far back as the 1800s.