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!