Monthly Archives: September 2022

Bicentennials! Looking Back — to 1822!

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Every year is significant, but now and then we hit one that rings a little bit more loudly than others. Such is 1822, a year in which two Steuben County towns were legally created, along with a Steuben church that’s still going strong. So what was going on… in AND out of Steuben… in that long-ago year?
In 1822, Steuben County had 40,000 people, and stretched all the way to Seneca Lake. Urbana became a legal town, and so did Cameron. In Bath, five men walked into the courthouse and legally incorporated what’s now Centenary Methodist Church, which was the second church in Bath; Presbyterians had started nine years earlier, but neither group had a building yet.
Slavery was still legal in New York, and would be for five more years. There were probably about 30 slaves left in the Steuben, and the national body of the Methodist Episcopal church had just recently voted to allow pastors to own them.
John Magee was our sheriff. DeWitt Clinton was our governor, and the Erie Canal was not yet finished, but the parts that WERE finished were already wrecking Bath’s economy, based on traffic downriver into Pennsylvania and Maryland. Our U.S. Senators were Rufus King and future president Martin Van Buren. William B. Rochester was our Representative. He was the son of Nathaniel Rochester, for whom the city is named. Sixteen years later William would die in one of the first great tragedies of the age of steam, when steam packet Pulaski exploded off North Carolina.
James Monroe was our president; he had crossed the Delaware with Washington. George Washington had died in 1799, but Presidents 2, 3, and 4 (Adams, Jefferson, and Madison) were still living, so except for Washington EVERY single U.S. president, from John Adams to Joe Biden, has overlapped the life of this church and these towns. We had 24 states, but not Texas, the southwest, or any of the Pacific coast. Napoleon had died the previous year.
Harriet Tubman was born in 1822. So were Ulysses S. Grant and Louis Pasteur. Queen Victoria was three years old. Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln were 13. After 190 years, the Catholic church allowed Galileo’s book to be published, finally conceding that the earth goes around the sun, instead of the other way around. In South Carolina, Denmark Vesey was executed when he tried to seize ships and sail hundreds of slaves to (relative) freedom in the West Indies.
The Second Great Awakening was beginning, a decades-long, country-wide revival that also brought forth adventism, dispensationalism, and Mormonism. The Methodist Episcopal Church was booming, and founded Augusta College in Kentucky. Liberia was founded, and Charles Babbage designed his difference engine, the first programmable computer. There were no steam railroads in the U.S., and telegraphs had not yet been invented. William Herschel died in 1822; forty-one years earlier, he had become the first earth being to discover a planet. No one knew about the asteroid belt, or the planet Neptune. All in all, 1822 was a pretty busy year!

Join Us for a Historic Walk in Arkport!

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In the beginning, there was – muck!
“Muck” is the western New York name for a rich, silty soil that’s really good for raising crops. In Steuben County it’s mostly in the northwest corner, then extends on into Allegany, Livingston, and beyond.
Which helps explain why Arkport became a community, and how it got its name. Arkport’s “Old Main Street” was a well-traveled Native American footpath in the days before white people muscled in. (Today’s Route 36 roughly follows that old trail.) A community was created here because it was on the land route, but ALSO because it was the head of navigation on the Canisteo River.
In other words this is far as you can go upstream, and still be able to launch large “arks.” And large they were – hundred-foot monstrosities, built with the abundant local timber, laden with a year’s produce, and then poled or drifted as far down as Maryland. They’d sell their goods wherever the got a good enough price for them… then sell the “ark” for the lumber… and walk back home.
Dozens of arks would lie up, waiting for the spring freshets to raise the river, and speed the flow, so they could make their “returnless journey.” The Wadsworth brothers hauled their produce down from Geneseo to the “ark-port,” and so did just about everyone else in the region.
All well and good until the Erie Canal opened in 1825, killing the need for river traffic and impoverishing the Southern Tier. Arkport folks took advantage of a bad situation to move the river a quarter-mile westward – formerly a mighty highway, it had become only a source of floods.
So things lay fallow (not to mention quiet) until the Erie Railroad came through in the 1850s. Arkporters again had an easy outlet for their produce, not to mention passenger travel to Buffalo on one end, and New York City on the other. A hundred years later, rail traffic was less important because HIGHWAY travel, with individual motor vehicles, had taken over. The state created the new Route 36, and while Arkport continued as a farming and retail center, it also became a bedroom community, fit for the baby boom.
We’ll get a glimpse of this on Friday, September 16, when Steuben County Historical Society and Canisteo Valley Historical Society team up to lead a historic walking tour through the village. Among other things we’ll get a look at the Hurlbut House, which is about 220 years old, making it one of the oldest houses… more, one of the oldest STRUCTURES… in Steuben County.
Along with this we’ll see “Queen Anne” style houses along East Avenue, where the village started to extend about 1880. In keeping with the post-Civil War economic boom, this is a playful style – often asymmetrical, sometimes with different materials for different sections of the house, often with repeated features – such as windows – varying from floor to floor.
Farther out on East Ave is Arkport Central School, built in 1937 with help from the state (financially encouraging centralization), and from the New Deal in Washington, designed to put people back to work on construction projects. It’s been expanded and renovated repeatedly in the past 85 years, but it’s still a busy public school – a pretty good use of that money, back in the Great Depression!
After taking in some baby boom architecture, we plan to stop at “The Grove,” site of picnics, sports, Chautauquas, band concerts, and all the other joys of small-town life in the nineteenth century – and in the twenty-first, too. The free walk starts 4 PM at the village hall on Park Avenue. We hope we’ll see you in Arkport!

“The Days Dwindle Down” — September

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Try to remember the kind of September when grass was green, and grain was yellow….
Apart from June and April, September probably has more songs than any other month. Even Earth, Wind, and Fire had a hit song for September.
Why shouldn’t we sing about September? It’s a glorious month, in many ways the best of the year. Last week, on August 31, the hot hot summer weather suddenly became glorious, mild September weather. The sun becomes comfortably warm, the breeze pleasantly cool. We see the stars more clearly as the air temperature dips. The autumn wind turns the hills to flame… and you don’t have time for the waiting game.
September has one foot in summer, the other in fall. You may well swim on the first September weekend, and maybe another week, or even two. But by the end of the month, summer will be a pleasant memory. You’ll be trying to remember where you put that sweater, back in April.
Somebody pointed out that Americans by and large don’t think of themselves as workers; they believe that they’re millionaires, who just don’t happen to have any money yet. That helps explain why neither the international workers’ day (May 1) nor the September Labor Day has ever caught on as an actual celebration of labor. Johnny Hart of Binghamton capture the irony in his B.C.” comic strip: on being told that it’s Labor Day, the cave men grumble, “Let’s get it over with,” and haul out their tools.
Instead, the first Monday in September is the last gasp of summer. It slams the door of summer shut, and opens the door of autumn. After that, we turn toward school, fall, and Christmas. I learned long ago that if you have a September event, there’s no use promoting it before Labor Day. Everybody just does a mental data dump, and you have to tell them all over again.
We are now in fall; as far as meteorologists are concerned, it started on September 1. The autumnal equinox comes on September 22, marking the start of astronomical fall.
September traditionally is back-to-school month. My childhood home was often very nerve-wracking, so school for me was a relief. I always loved school. Others hate it, and many can take it or leave it, but however they feel about it, September looms huge in the life of any kid.
September 17 is von Steuben Day, honoring the German hero of our Revolutionary War – the man for whom Steuben County is named! September also brings us Constitution Day, and the birthday of Bilbo Baggins.
Banned Book Week comes in November, reminding us to be ever-vigilant, as many people try to edit other people’s ideas, or even the information that people may be allowed to have.
World War II started on September 1, 1939, and ended on September 2, 1945. It lasted for six years and one day, and Great Britain was in it for six years less one day. It was in September of 1940 that the British people, shaken but not shattered, slowly realized that they had won the Battle of Britain. For the moment they had saved their country, and much of the western world, from Hitlerism.
In our own time, of course, we saw the horrors of September 11, 2001. A hundred Septembers earlier president William McKinley was shot in Buffalo, and soon died of his wound.
September birthdays include Beyoncé , Jesse James, Buddy Holly, Grandma Moses, Milton Hershey, Clayton Moore, Marc Antony, Marco Polo, William Howard Taft, Agatha Christie, J.C. Penny, Sophia Loren, Stephen King, David McCallum, Walter Koenig, Mickey Rooney, Ray Charles, Bruce Springsteen, Jim Henson, and Will Smith. And it was in September that death came for Louis XIV, Sigmund Freud, Oliver Cromwell, Mao Zedong, Nikita Krushchev, J.R.R. Tolkien, Jimi Hendrix, Johnny Cash, and Louis Pasteur.
Get outside in September. The sun sets earlier, and after the equinox, the nights will be longer than the days. Enjoy the sun. Enjoy the fall.