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!