Monthly Archives: February 2022

A Walk in Watkins

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We took a walk in Watkins recently, and it’s a good place to do so. Although we associate Watkins with its spectacular glen, most of the village itself is as flat as a pan. The streets are rectilinear. While the town is busy, especially in summer, most of the time you can get around comfortably on foot, and while Franklin Street is also Route 14, Watkins Glen has a good array of signals and crosswalks. There’s plenty to look at, and there’s even a free municipal parking lot (Third Street, just behind the Chamber of Commerce).
Watkins Glen is like Bath and Corning, in that it doesn’t have a “Main Street” – Watkins has Franklin Street instead. (Some places, like Wayland and Hammondsport, DO have Main Streets, but changing traffic patterns leave them not quite as “main” as they were planned to be.) Bath DOES have a “Maine Street,” though, right next to Vermont Street.
Seneca Lake draws walkers like a magnet draws iron filings. While Cayuga Lake is a little longer, Seneca is decidedly broader and definitely deeper, making it the largest Finger Lake in both volume and area. It’s not quite an inland sea, but it behaves like one, with waves running up the lake to crash against the stone seawalls of the Watkins marina. Of course there are gulls aplenty, but depending on the season you can also spot coots, buffleheads, loons, eagles, osprey, cormorants, and plenty more. A pier jutting well out into the lake has a famed pavilion at the far end. In season you can also see (and book a cruise on) the schooner “True Love,” on which Bing Crosby and Grace Kelly honeymooned (and sang the song of that title) in the movie musical “High Society.”
This waterfront is mostly for pleasure craft nowadays, but time was when it was a hardworking transshipment point. Roads converged here from Horseheads, Corning, Hammondsport, Geneva, and Ithaca. More importantly, Seneca Lake welcomed a canal at Watkins, connecting down into Pennsylvania. And even more important yet, several railroads and a trolley line stopped here. By 1876, as tourism boomed, a brand-new elegant station welcomed visitors. It’s now the Seneca Station Harbor Restaurant, with a spectacular view of the lake.
Most of the Franklin Street structures are historic. A. B. Frost bought a marble business as soon as he got back from the Civil War, and around 1870 put up the three-story iron works at 2 North Franklin. Municipal Hall (303 North Franklin) was a Works Project Administration project during the New Deal. The garage at 111 North Franklin started out in 1874 as a livery stable. Which makes it especially cool that the Glen Theater (112 North Franklin) opened its doors in 1924. Thirty years between livery stable and picture palace! Wow! What a transition, in far less than a single lifetime! (They preserve the original period interior. We love it.)
While you walk you can also keep your eyes peeled for hall of fame blocks set into the sidewalks, honoring racing car drivers – or look up a little and you’ll find huge racing murals on exterior walls. Watkins Glen folks take their racers seriously. There’s now a closed course a little outside of town, but you can visit the original 1948 Grand Prix start line in front of the courthouse. Pick up a brochure, and you can drive the original route yourself.
The Glen, of course, is the town’s stellar attraction, and the state park includes hiking and walking trails (though believe me, they aren’t flat). The 580-mile Finger Lakes Trail wends through the park, and then on sidewalk to the other end of town, where it hits open fields and starts to climb again. Likewise the Catharine Valley Trail begins in Watkins at Lafayette Park, following the old canal-and-trolley route down to Montour Falls.
We first saw Watkins Glen in 1995 when we stopped downtown for lunch as we passed through, just before my wife had open heart surgery. When we moved to Bath a year and half later we said, “Oh, good – we’ll be near Watkins Glen!” It’s a good town to visit. We like it a lot. Good memories.

Is It Spring Yet?

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Is it spring yet?
The meteorologists and the astronomers both agree that spring starts in March, though they have different dates and different reasons. So when we ask if spring has, come, the answer us no, not quite.
And yet…
The goldfinches are getting their yellow coloration back. The bulbs that we planted last fall are starting to send up shoots.
The sun is getting up earlier, and going down later… a process that has continued a few minutes each day since late December, but is truly noticeable (and inspiring!) by now.
The sap is active in the maple trees again, and those who tap are hard at work. It runs best when the day’s above freezing, and the night’s below, and that’s where we are right now (most days, and most nights).
Some of those who collect still use buckets, but tube systems are widely used here in the 21st century, making life easier for the farmer, and sap cleaner for the boiler.
Cartwright’s Maple Tree Inn, between Birdsall and Short Tract, is serving now, and hopes to continue through April 10 (except Mondays and Easter). For generations of western New Yorkers a visit to Cartwright’s, standing in a chilly line to get pancakes and “estate” syrup, is a sure sign of spring. (And while Cartwright’s may be the most venerable of our producers, it’s far from the only one.)
Ice is melting in the ponds and streams and gullies. Once the wetlands are clear, the red-wing blackbirds will return, rattling out their skeeeeeeeeee call from the cattails.
Snow is receding, shrinking back from its own edges. The piles at the supermarket, and next to our driveways, are sinking lower and lower. One day they’ll be gone altogether, and we won’t even notice. One day we’ll put on our gloves or our mittens or our earmuffs, and it will be the last time this season, and we won’t know it, or even notice it.
The bears will start getting up, and those with cubs will be argumentative, and all of them will be famished. Most people will spend a lifetime hiking in the woods and never see a bear, but we still need to be alert and cautious. Here in western New York, when the bears awake we need to take the birdfeeders in – fill them from Thanksgiving to Easter is a good rule of thumb.
Hepatica, Mayapple, trillium, and arbutus will peek out at last, and so will skunk cabbage. It’s not very attractive, but it should ignite a spark of joy. When the skunk cabbage appear, spring is at hand at last!
Easter fashions are not what they used to be, but Easter candy will soon overflow the shelves in the stores. Churches will ring their bells and celebrate Christianity’s great day.
A few students will stare out the windows of their classrooms, then surreptitiously make a set of marks to count the days until summer vacation, and then cross them off one by one. This will require a hard decision. Cross the day off when you arrive in the morning, or wait until you leave in the afternoon?
One day the forsythia will burst with yellow. One day we’ll see the first robin, and another day the first monarch. It will be spring. At last.

Happy Bicentennial to Urbana!

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This year marks a big anniversary for the Town of Urbana – now 200 years old.
The Town was legally created from Bath in 1822, the same year that Cameron was similarly created to the SOUTH of Bath. Bath’s Methodist church was also founded in that momentous year.
The most obvious feature of Urbana is Keuka Lake. Look at a map, and think of Keuka Lake as a slingshot or catapult. Urbana is the hand that grasps the shaft.
The incorporated Village of Hammondsport, at the head of the Lake, is Urbana’s largest community. It’s also the birthplace of Glenn Curtiss, the place where he manufactured motorcycles, airplanes, and engines from 1901 to 1918, building a commercial-industrial-technological giant.
Urbana includes an UNincorporated community of the same name, plus Pleasant Valley, Rheims, and Mount Washington. The Finger Lakes Trail wends through Urbana, as does the Keuka Inlet. Ira Davenport Hospital and the New York State Fish Hatchery are both in Urbana, though many people assume they’re in Bath. Native footpaths, the highways of a continent with no draft or riding animals, laid out the routes now followed by Fish Hatchery Road, Pleasant Valley Road, West Lake Road, and East Lake Road. Back around 1900, a bike path connected Hammondsport with Bath, as did the Bath & Hammondsport Railroad.
Hammondsport is often called the Jewel of the Finger Lakes, but just about every square foot of it was under water in 1935, when flooding took 44 lives, and devastated thousands of structures, throughout the region. Hammondsport and Urbana also suffered from the 1972 flood, but not as badly as they had done 37 years earlier.
Steuben County was bigger back in 1822, stretching all the way to Seneca Lake, and farther north along Keuka’s East Branch. Today’s Town of North Dansville was donated to the new Livingston County in 1822, but Yates County would not be born for another year, while Schuyler’s birth lay more than three decades in the future. Chemung County wouldn’t appear until 1836. The 1820 census showed 22,000 people in Steuben. Slavery was still legal in New York.
James Monroe was president, and John Marshall chief justice; they had both crossed the Delaware with Washington, 46 years earlier. DeWitt Clinton, of Erie Canal fame, was our governor, but his “big ditch” was yet unfinished. Traffic from the Southern Tier still ran mostly down the Susquehanna to Chesapeake Bay. There were 24 states, and America ended at the Rocky Mountains. Texas, the Southwest, much of the Rockies, and most of the Pacific coast belonged to Mexico.
Freed slaves from America established Monrovia in 1822, giving birth to the nation of Liberia, but Denmark Vesey was hanged in South Carolina. Charles Babbage created his difference engine, forerunner of the computer. Civil War figures Harriet Tubman, Ulysses S. Grant, Edward Everett Hale, and Mathew Brady were born in 1822, and so was landscaping pioneer Frederick Law Olmstead. Gregor Mendel and Louis Pasteur, future scientific luminaries, were born. The poet Percy Shelly died, and the astronomer William Herschel – the first earth being ever to discover a planet.
In 1822 Urbana already had its hills, its slopes, its fields and vales and forests. It already had its lakeshore, but what it DIDN’T have was Hammondsport, Lazarus Hammond not yet having bought the place. All there was was a tired collection of structures called Pegtown. But better times were coming!

Happy February!

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So February’s a funny little month. The other eleven have either 30 days or 31, but February has 28, except when it has 29, which it does every year divisible by four, except when it doesn’t.
February’s also a crazy mixed-up kid in other ways, uncertain whether it’s the depths of winter, or the first breath of spring. This year most of the nation was clobbered by a gigantic winter storm in the first week of the month. There have also been notable February blizzards in 2013, 2007 (almost 40 dead), and 1978. After the powerful ’13 storm traversed the continent it even crossed the ocean, dumping six inches on England.
Yet one February in the 1980s, the temperature went up to 70 on the first weekend, bringing the trees into bud and killing the whole maple season. Maple sap is normally a February specialty, running best when the nights are below freezing, and the days are above.
America honors George Washington (and much of the world joins us) on his February 22 birthday, though it was actually the 11th until a calendar change when he was just reaching adulthood. Curiously two of the 19th century’s most influential men – Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln – were both born on February 12, 1809, though separated by 4000 miles, and an even bigger gap in social standing.
Groundhog Day comes on February 2, when it provides a few minutes of amusement before dropping into oblivion for the next 364 days. Valentine’s Day on the 14th is a bigger deal, with cards and candy and decorations, and tiers of participation rising from little kids to passionate lovers, who manage just fine without a special day anyhow. (Valentine, by the way, is the patron saint of Hallmark – ho ho.)
The BIGGEST event in February is that new secular holiday, Super Sunday (or Super BOWL Sunday). I have no particular interest in the NFL, but I enjoy the day. We really needed something big between New Years Eve and Easter. Groundhogs, Cupids, and Darwin didn’t cut it, and Washington doesn’t lend himself to frivolity, but Super Sunday fills the void.
Heavier-than-air aviation came to the Finger Lakes in February of 1908, when Glenn Curtiss and his friends experimented with hang gliders on Mount Washington’s snowy slopes.
For those denominations that observe it, Lent usually begins during February, though it can begin as late as March 10. Some churches also observe Candlemas Day, which is on or near February 2. The old rhyme “Candlemas Day, Candlemas Day, half your wood and half your hay,” reminded farmers that if they had used MORE than half of their stores by that date, they were likely to be in deep trouble before winter ended.
February was named for an ancient Roman purification ritual. Since there are almost 30 days between full moons, every month has one, and sometimes two. Except curious February, which occasionally misses it altogether, even in Leap Years.
In normal years in our parts, February is maple sugar season, tapping the sap from any of five commercially-viable species. It’s still big in Allegany and southwestern Steuben Counties, and in Pennsylvania’s Northern Tier, with some producers selling sap directly. Others boil it down to syrup or sugar and sell to wholesalers, while some do their own processing and sell it at retail. We used to do it as a hobby activity. You should get some! And enjoy your February.