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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.

Where to Park, in the Southern Tier!

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“If I had a dead fish, I’d share the carcass –
If I had a car, I’d parallel parkus.”

Stirring words from the Sherman the shark, sage of Kapupu Lagoon! But seriously, if you (or your guests) are touring the Finger Lakes, where many of our streets were laid out BEFORE the horse and buggy, you’ll sometimes find parking to be a challenge, or at least an annoyance. Here are some ideas, drawn from rich experience.
Parking in downtown Owego can be a challenge, especially since most of the on-street parking has a two-hour limit. There’s a small public lot on Church Street, but it’s often full. Two lots for county employees are available, but open to the public ONLY evenings and weekends. You don’t have to go very far to hit residential neighborhoods, with on-street parking not limited to two hours.
What you may not know is that the large Hyde Lot, off Temple Street behind the village hall, has free three-hour parking. It’s exactly what you need in Owego on a business day. Since the entrance is a block or two away from the business district, we visited Owego for decades before realizing it was there. It certainly simplified our visits!
Corning offers some challenges in the Southside business-government district. Tourists sometimes get caught (and ticked) (and ticketed) because they move from Zone A (for example) when the time limit’s up, and park at another spot. BUT if you find another area marked Zone A, THE SAME LIMIT APPLIES – it’s a TOTAL of two hours a day for ANY Zone A. So you have to move to a differently-lettered zone, or pay for parking… or pay for a ticket. There is a pay garage off Market Street, plus there are pay lots along Denison, next to the library, and elsewhere. The automated kiosk system at these lots is kind of a nuisance. You memorize your space number and go to the kiosk, key in your number, put in the appropriate money, get a slip, go back to your car, and leave it on the dashboard, after which you can finally go about your business.
This is tough on tourists who don’t know the system, the disabled or elderly who have trouble getting around, parents with small children, and anybody who doesn’t like walking or standing in sleet (snow, rain, hail, high wind, lightning). I believe the kiosks now take debit or credit cards, which helps if you’re out of cash. There’s no fee on weekends.
Hammondsport is a small town that gets large crowds. There’s a parking lot at Main and Shethar, and another at Mechanic and Shethar (both on northeast corners). There’s also a strip of head-in spaces at the waterfront, near the Depot, and two or three fringes of spaces at Liberty Square (Mechanic and Lake). Otherwise it’s on-street parking… try getting over to Lake or other away-from-the-center streets, and you may do well. For some events they arrange “remote” parking with free shuttles in and out.
Bath recently took out a few parking meters in the downtown business district, making free parking available for limited periods, helping people who need to step into a store or the post office. Many metered spaces (both parallel and head-in) are available. There’s also a large municipal lot (metered) behind the row of buildings on the east side of Liberty, between East William and East Steuben.
Watkins Glen has a small free lot on Third Street, behind the visitors center. The state park lot charges eight dollars sunrise to sunset. There are also spaces near the marina, and on-street parking… no meters in Watkins.
All of this is subject to change! And none of this is official! But it’s overwhelmingly accurate, and at least gives you a starting point for when you visit. Have fun in our small towns!
(By the way, that “If I had a dead fish” poem is by Jim Toomey, in his “Sherman’s Lagoon” comic strip. Check it out – it’s a great strip!)

Cartoonists of the Southern Tier — Johnny Hart

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From Jamestown to Binghamton, the Southern Tier is a grand place to find… cartoonists. Some of the best-known, best-loved, most enduring cartoons and comic strips were crafted day after day after day, right here where we live. And we begin on the east, with the “Hart” of Broome County.
Long after Alley Oop, but well before the Flintstones, Johnny Hart brought forth “B.C.,” a deceptively-simple humor strip about cavemen. Bill Mauldin contrasted Johnny’s style with the work of “rivet man” – cartoonists who drew every rivet on the boiler. They could overwhelm the reader with rivets! But place two cave men against a horizontal line, said Mauldin… a line that could be “the top of a swamp or the bottom of an overcast…” and you’d better get that line RIGHT. This, he enthused, Johnny Hart always did. Charles M. Schulz was another enthusiast.
“B.C.” first hit the stands in 1957, which means that the strip (now helmed by a grandson) has been running for just over 50% of the history of comic strips. Johnny was the subject of a WSKG documentary, “Hart of B.C.” – B.C. standing in the case for Broome County, Johnny’s lifelong home. He repeatedly used his characters to boost the community, including wheel-riding Thor on the Broome County buses. (Though one of his gags, as a character contemplated “nothing,” was, “This reminds me of a weekend I once spent in Endicott, New York.”)
That was in “The Wizard of Id,” which he co-created. In 2007, at the age of 76, Johnny Hart died literally at his drawing board.
In his later years Johnny drew flak for bringing Christian religious themes into “B.C.” One in particular showed a menorah transforming into a cross. I’ve studied that strip, and I think what he was TRYING to do was show Christianity’s origins in Judaism, and its debt to Judaism. But even if I’ve read him aright, appropriating somebody else’s religious symbol, and literally transforming it into one of your own, is discourteous and wrong.
With 50 years on “B.C.,” and 43 on “The Wizard of Id,” Johnny Hart racked up almost a century of jokes, gags, thought-provokers, and funny pictures, and he did it for EVERY DAY of 93 years . Al Capp wrote that one of Johnny’s books was “full of genius, and if you happen not to be an older and envious cartoonist, you’re going to have a very good time.” Rod Serling put it even more simply, in the forward to another collection of “B.C.” strips. “Just don’t sit there, Johnny Hart… go ahead and make me laugh!” Mission accomplished, Johnny. In fact, we’re STILL laughing, even at strips we’ve read a million times. Thank you. Rest well.

Fair Week

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It’s Fair Week in Steuben County. In fact, August is the month for county fairs all over this part of the state.
County fairs got started with state funding and encouragement, back in the 1800s. The Legislature was anxious to improve agriculture in what we now call the Empire State, and they figured that fairs were one way to do it.
How so? Well, put yourself in the shoes (assuming they had any) of a farm family in western New York, right after the War of 1812.
First of all, you were probably somewhat isolated. Travel was miserable back in those days, and besides, who had the time to do it anyway, if they were trying to farm for a living?
On top of that a noticeable number of farm folks were illiterate, or inadequately literate. Here in the northeast that was actually uncommon, but there were still too many to disregard. Even if you COULD read, there were no magazines to speak of, and… out here, at any rate… not enough postal service to be very helpful.
But once things settled down in the fall, maybe you COULD make a family trip to the fair, possibly sleeping in (or under) the wagon for a night or two. And at the fair, you could learn about better farming techniques.
You could find out about better strains of crops.
You could inspect tools and equipment, brought in by vendors who would never have made the journey out to your lonely farmstead.
Even the prizes awarded for everything from pies to pumpkins to squash to succotash – from horses to hens – from sheep to goats, from bread to needlework – were created to encourage improved production and techniques.
Of course the fair also provided opportunities to socialize, to politic, to be entertained, and to be separated from your money. All in all, a fair back then had just about everything that a fair has now.
As the agricultural population has shrunk to microscopic levels, the need and purpose of the fair comes into question. It still provides everything it used to, but in different proportions.
And while the full-time professional farmer still can learn and benefit from the fair, maybe it’s even more important to the hobbyist, specialist, or small operator. Here you can learn to improve your beekeeping, or your sugaring, or your cheesemaking. These operations don’t have the impact of the old small general farm, or the new large specialized farm, but they are in fact important… to the consumer, but especially to the operator. For these specialists, what they learn at the fair, or at least the contacts they make at the fair, can be vital.
Back in 1901 Hammondsport businesses closed down during Fair week, because the customers were gone anyway. Photos from 1908 show people shoulder-to-shoulder in the Fairgrounds. And the Fair was in September.
Nowadays the Fair is firmly set during school vacation. It’s not the attraction it once was. It’s not as significant, even to the farm family, as it used to be. But it still meets all the purposes that the Legislature had in mind over two centuries ago.
Steuben County Fair got its start in 1819. While there were two break periods (when state funding was dropped), the Fair has run continuously starting in 1853, and continuously on the same site since 1854. That includes the years of the Civil War, two World Wars, Vietnam, the COVID, the Spanish influenza, polio outbreaks, the Great Depression, the flood of 1935, the flood of 1972, AND the dramatic dwindling of the agricultural population. Hooray for the never-failing Ag Society!
One MODERN function of the Fair, not thought of back in 1819, is the “history corner” – the one-room school, the pioneer museum, the log cabin museum – not to mention the exhibit of old-time farm equipment on the upper level of the Fair House. Steuben County Historical Society operates the one-room school, and helps operate the rest of the history corner. Please stop in and see us!

“Faded Coat of Blue” — Steuben’s High Cost in the Civil War

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Steuben County counted 66,690 souls in the 1860 census. Since just about half of them would have been male, figure that at 33,345. The looking at males of military age – would a third of those males be a reasonable proportion? That would make 11,115. Several thousand of them went off to fight in the Civil War, where they saved the Union, destroyed slavery, and re-established democratic majority rule. But they paid a high price, and over 500 of them died.
That’s a big number, and some of it came from sickness, and some from inadequate medical care. They were lost forever, while others came home, but came home incomplete.
One man, I believe from Caton, lost his hearing entirely, due to a bomb blast. A young man from Almond was part of a small rear guard left on the wrong side of the river to delay the attacking Confederates (they expected to be killed or captured) as Union troops retreated. They escaped in the end, and he had a distinguished civilian career. But all the rest of his life the sound of a whippoorwill “filled me with horror,” flashing him back to the long and terrifying night.
An Addison man came home despite having been shot in the head, but fell into despair at how many of his friends and neighbors did NOT come home. He found some measure of peace through prayer, church, and physical labor in the farm fields.
A Howard man was shot at a battle in Louisiana. The bullet drilled completely through his pocket diary, and mangled but did not pierce a tintype of his wife and child. He returned home to father more children, and lived a long life.
Monroe Brundage of Hammondsport lost an arm at Antietam – still the bloodiest day in American military history. Brundage stayed in the field commanding his men until doctors amputated on the following day. He tried to return to duty a few months later, but soon recognized he was no longer strong enough. He went home to a successful law career, but died young ten years later.
Lieutenant Henry C. Lyon was sent home after being gravely wounded at Antietam, but he died on the way, never seeing Pulteney, or his family, again.
R.C. Philips of Prattsburgh was shot in the shoulder defending Little Round Top at Gettysburg, and while a surgeon saved his arm, he lost the USE of that arm. He then became an officer (only one arm needed) with the U.S. Colored Troops. But farming was a struggle after the war. That caused much family pain two decades later, when he demanded that his eldest son, rather than continuing his education, stay on the farm to do the work that his father couldn’t.
Morris Brown Jr. received the Congressional Medal of Honor for leading his men out into the field of Gettysburg to attack Pickett’s Charge from the flank. He was finally killed between the lines in the Siege of Petersburg, and his body was never recovered.
Benjamin Bennitt signed up for an infantry hitch and a cavalry hitch, and became a P.O.W. He escaped four times from Confederate captivity, once cutting his way through the floor of a moving train. Civilians captured him after one escape, and Confederate Home Guardsmen had to pull him away from from a lynch mob. He was finally returned to Hammondsport on a prisoner exchange, once P.O.W. camp had rendered him so weak and sick that he could never fight again.
Marine Private Charles Brother was a runner on Admiral Farragut’s flagship during the Battle of Mobile Bay. “Men blown to pieces… Killed and wounded in every form,” he wrote. “Our cockpit looked like a slaughterhouse.” He returned safe home to Bath, but the war shadowed the rest of his life, which ended in what may have been suicide.
West Pointer W. W. Averell came from Cameron, but lived much of his adult life in Bath. The army rated him disabled by wounds from Indian fighting, but he immediately returned to the colors in 1861. He then contracted malaria, but nevertheless fought through most of the Civil War, and rose to be General.
As we said earlier, they saved the Union, destroyed slavery, and re-established majority rule. But the price, for them and their families, was very, very high.

There is many a boy here who looks on war as all glory, but boys, it is all hell. – William Tecumseh Sherman

Bronze-Faced August

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AUGUST is a magnificent month. It’s also a bronze-faced, unforgiving month. It pours out many beauties and joys, but can also bring either droughts or floods, hurricanes or hammering heat waves. August may usher in thunderstorms and tornadoes. Or beauty, clement climes, and the very best of summer. The thing is, you never know. And August doesn’t care.
Caesar Augustus, Julius Caesar’s heir and grand-nephew, had finally conquered the Roman world by 30 B.C.E. Just as his great predecessor had named a month for himself, Augustus figured that he was entitled to do the same.
In August the Summer Triangle beams down on us from directly overhead. You can spot it without excessive effort, because it’s formed from three of the brightest stars. They’re among the first to appear on an August night. They’re old friends, and they visit every summer of our lives.
Sirius, the brightest star of all, is getting higher night by night. The ancient Egyptians figured it was SO bright that its rays must be adding to those of the sun, making August extra hot. Since it’s in the constellation Canis Major (“Big Dog”), we have the expression “dog days of summer.”
Also speaking astronomically, August brings us the perseid meteor shower, almost always the biggest of the year. At their peak, the perseids average a meteor a minute, so it’s not high-tech sound-and-light show. But if you’re happy to be still and wait, it’s one of nature’s glories.
One very sad note – an August 30 train crash in Wayland killed 30 people in 1943. It was the second-worst single-incident disaster in Steuben County.
Hiroshima was atom-bombed on August 6, 1945, Nagasaki on August 9. Japan announced its surrender on August 15, or V.-J. Day. Only Hawaii and my native Rhode Island still celebrate it, now called Victory Day, on the second Monday of the month.
Even with Victory Day, August is curiously bereft of any major holidays, though Britain has “August Bank Holidays,” two Mondays on which businesses are closed, and millions of Britons head for the beach. Other than that you can enjoy National Immunization Awareness Month, National Milkshake Day (8/1), Coast Guard Day (8/4), or, if in Vermont, Battle of Bennington Day (8/15), though the fighting actually happened in New York.
The fact that August is big in thunderstorms means that it’s also big on rainbows, maybe rivalling only April in that regard.
Marcus Garvey was born in August. So were movie people Jason Momoa, Peter O’Toole, Lucille Ball, Alfred Hitchcock, and Sean Connery. Orville Wright and Neil Armstrong were born in August, making a GREAT juxtaposition – the first man to fly an airplane, and the first man to step on the moon, not quite 66 years apart. WOW!
Napoleon and Mother Teresa, avatars of sharply different world views, were born in August. So were literary types Herman Melville and Francis Scott Key. Other August birthdays come to presidents Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and Lyndon B. Johnson.
Most of the birds have raised their young, but the monarchs are still struggling northward, laying eggs in the milkweed as they pass. The geese are not gathering QUITE yet, but hidden in the woods, you can see the leaves starting to turn, and the season with them. In the last week of the month, even if the weather’s still summery, the sky takes on a slightly different shade of blue. It takes a LITTLE longer for the morning air to warm up, and darkness comes just a LITTLE earlier.
August is the month for swimming, beach parties, clambakes, blueberries, corn on the cob. And suddenly – back-to-school sales. Displays change in the stores. Mothers start stocking up on school supplies, and checking how much the children have grown since they last wore their “school clothes.” If you’re a kid, it seems horribly unfair. But even so, it’s not September YET! The water’s still warm. Another swim would be great.

Margaret Sanger — Was She a Nazi?

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So – was she really a Nazi?
Before we ask that, perhaps we should ask – who the heck are we talking about? My son just walked in, and he needed about 10 seconds to place her. I venture that most people today couldn’t place her in 10 hours, without using a reference. But in her day she was one of the best-known women in America, and one of the most fiercely hated.
Margaret Higgins and her sister Ethel were born in Corning, along with almost 20 brothers and sisters. They were baptized at St. Mary’s church, but that was about the limit of their connection. Their father Michael was an activist for atheism, constantly at odds with Father Colgan, and cut off from the Irish-American community that might have been a source of support and encouragement. The family faced a hard life, and they faced it alone.
Ethel (married name Byrne) and Margaret (married name Sanger) became nurses, and grew increasingly horrified at how many women faced the ravages of endless pregnancies, or of abortion. Birth control, they reckoned, was the answer, and they opened a women’s clinic in New York City, under the banner “Do Not Kill – Do Not Take Life – But Prevent!”
Such advice, however, was against the law in New York, and in most other states. Birth control information was considered obscene materials.
It didn’t take long (as they knew it wouldn’t) before a police woman turned up in plain clothes, asked for information, and came away carrying the evidence. The sisters were arrested and taken to court, and their clinic shut down. Ethel began a prison hunger strike, and was slipping into a coma when Margaret cut a deal with the governor, vowing that Ethel would end her campaign for birth control.
But that deal did NOT apply to Margaret, who embarked on a life of propaganda (her word). Throughout Europe and America she campaigned for the right to use birth control, and for woman’s rights in general. Her life now included such figures as H.G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw, Clarence Darrow, and Arthur M. Schlesinger Sr.
What it did NOT include was abortion, which she opposed – this was, of course, the days before antibiotics, when ANY surgery was dangerous.
The Nazi charge rests mostly on the fact that she once gave a birth-control lecture to Women of the Ku Klux Klan, and that she shared some ideas with the eugenics movement. (So did H.G. Wells, Winston Churchill, Theodore Roosevelt, and Alexander Graham Bell.) Eugenics aimed at “scientifically” improving humanity through controlled breeding, and some, including the Nazis, did so by forced sterilization, or by killing those deemed unfit. Sanger basically hoped that the less fit would limit their own numbers through voluntary birth control, and she also supported immigration restriction. Her first husband (Mr. Sanger) was Jewish, and thus her children would have been rated half-Jewish (and marked for death) under Hitler. Sanger donated money to anti-Nazi causes.
She campaigned for birth control and women’s rights along with her sister Ethel and their Corning contemporary, Katherine Houghton Hepburn (relative of Amo, mother and grandmother of noted actresses). Sanger helped secure money to develop the birth control pill, and lived long enough to see the Supreme Court legalize birth control FOR MARRIED COUPLES ONLY – a right that the current court strongly suggests that it will soon repeal, scarcely a hundred years after women got the right to vote.
So, the charge that Margaret Sanger was a Nazi is (using her word again) propaganda. (So is the charge that she favored abortion.) She DID have some ideas that overlapped with some ideas of the Nazis… so did Reverend Billy Sunday, Rousas J. Rushdoony, and Dr. James Dobson. Love ‘er or hate ‘er, a Nazi she wasn’t.

Beat the Deadly Heat — on Weekends!

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So it’s being a hot, hot summer… unsurprisingly! EVERY year now is among the ten hottest years ever recorded, and it keeps getting worse.
*During heat waves the counties and other agencies often announce lists of “cooling stations,” where people can go for some relief before the dangerous heat makes them ill. Very often, these cooling stations are our public libraries.
*This makes sense – apart from the mall, the library is about the only place you can just “drop in” without charge – plus, there are books, magazines, computers and puzzles to occupy you, AND things to occupy the kids. If you want to check materials out, a card in any of the 49 Southern Tier System libraries works in just about any of the others. I wrote about this four years ago, and I decided it was time to update.
*Not every library is air conditioned, so you shouldn’t just make that assumption. Also, Dormann Library in Bath has been without A/C for a couple of months while the entire system is being replaced (they’re almost finished!). The system at Taylor Library in Hammondsport broke down for a while. But nearly all of the libraries I’ve been in (which is quite a few) ARE air conditioned.
*Sad to say, there are fewer sites, and fewer weekend hours, available now compared to four years ago.
*The smaller libraries and reading rooms are only open a limited number of hours per week, and some libraries (even large ones) close altogether for summer weekends. I understand their situation. In an institution dependent on volunteer workers, summer in the Finger Lakes makes scheduling almost impossible. (COVID doesn’t help, especially when you realize that many volunteers are older people.)
*ALL of the Chemung County libraries, sad to say, are closed for summer weekends. So are Bolivar, Richburg, and Genesee, in Allegany County, plus Montour Falls in Schuyler. Addison, Arkport, Atlanta, and Wayland, all in Steuben, each close for both Saturday and Sunday.
*But what about the other libraries in our Southern Tier Library System? My wife Joyce is a professional at Dormann Library in Bath, and she helped me assemble a list. But it’s always possible that some of information is not up-to-date, so CHECK FIRST before making a trip!
*Alfred is open on Sundays but not on Saturdays. This sounds familiar to me, coming from southeastern New England. That stretch of the country, like Alfred, is historic Seventh-Day Baptist territory. I speculate that that history underlies the unusual scheduling. As far as I can tell, Alfred is the ONLY library that still has Sunday hours.
*Andover is open the first Saturday of each month.
*Let’s look now at the every-summer-Saturday-but-never-summer-Sunday roster by counties. They vary from two hours of operation up to six – usually three or four.
*ALLEGANY: Almond; Angelica; Belfast; Belmont; Canaseraga; Cuba; Fillmore; Friendship; Rushford; Scio; Wellsville; and Whitesville.
*YATES: Branchport; Penn Yan; Dundee; Middlesex; Rushville. (Every one – hooray!)
*SCHUYLER: Watkins Glen and Odessa. Hector I’m not sure about.
*STEUBEN: Avoca; Bath; Canisteo; Cohocton; Corning; Hammondsport; Hornell; Howard; Jasper; Prattsburgh; Pulteney; Savona. I wasn’t able to locate information on Greenwood Reading Center.
*Some of these libraries (or their settings) have special features BESIDES air conditioning. Bath (Dormann Library) has its own cafe, so you can keep cool with smoothies. Hammondsport (Taylor Memorial) has its own lovely park with shade trees and a gazebo, and it’s only a few steps down to the Keuka Lake waterfront. Branchport (Modeste Bedient) is at the other end of the lake, and has its own nature preserve right outside. Pulteney also has a Keuka view. Hornell, Penn Yan, and Andover are Carnegie libraries.
*Down the hall from the Watkins Glen Library is the International Motor Racing Research Archive, where there’s almost always a classic racing car on exhibit. Angelica is in a lovely small-village setting, with a Saturday outdoor farmers’ market down the street in the Circle.
*There are also open libraries just over the edge of Southern Tier Library System territory in Dansville, in Naples, and in Wellsboro, PA (Green Free Library – they DO have Sunday hours!). Right next door in Wellsboro is Gmeiner Art and Cultural Center, where exhibits are always free admission.
*Remember that libraries, especially the smaller ones, are not necessarily open “full time.” On the other hand, most of them have evening hours at least once a week. That’s worth remembering – even those libraries that do NOT have summer weekend hours, DO have hours DURING the week, when the heat also might get dangerous.
*So keep cool, and be cool. Even on weekends, if only for a few hours, the library waits.