A retail business started in 1849 on what we now call University Street in North Cohocton… and there’s been a store there ever since! On Saturday, July 6, the Olde Country Store and More (a fun place) is celebrating 170 years, with German food, live music, fudge tasting, fire trucks, displays by Cohocton Historical Society and others – plus the store’s own vast stock of candies, cookies, honey, and plenty more.
*So, 1849 was a historic year for North Cohocton! But what ELSE was going on back in 1849?
*The Town of Wayland was one year old. Steuben County stretched over to Seneca Lake, but would soon lose those easternmost Towns to create a new Schuyler County. In the current Steuben boundaries there were 29 Towns. Still to come were the Towns of Fremont, Rathbone, and Tuscarora, plus the Cities of Corning and Hornell. The newly-incorporated VILLAGE of Corning held its first election in January.
*The Town of Cohocton (or Conhocton) had been created back in 1812. But in 1849 Cohocton Village was called Liberty; Atlanta was Blood’s; and North Cohocton was Blood’s Corner (or sometimes Cohocton, and sometimes even North Cohocton). The Town of Corning was the Town of Painted Post.
*James K. Polk became the first president to be photographed while still in office. He retired from the White House on March 4, and died later that same year. General Zachary Taylor followed Polk as president. The two of them had been instrumental in ripping away almost half of Mexico in just the previous year. Millard Fillmore, who had lived for a spell in nearby Sparta, became Taylor’s vice-president. He would succeed to the White House on Taylor’s death in 1850.
*In our new territory of California, a gold rush was on. Many Steuben men who had enlisted for the Mexican War took their discharge in California, and became ‘forty-niners. The first regular steamboat service started up between our new west coast and the old east coast. The first trip took four months and 21 days (one way).
*In Washington, the Department of the Interior was established. In Texas, Fort Worth was founded. France issued its first set of postage stamps. The Erie Railroad reached Owego (it started in Hoboken). The Pennsylvania Railroad stretched from Harrisburg to Lewisburg. Stephen Foster published a book of songs.
*There were 30 states in the union, the latest one being Wisconsin. Albany was the 10th-largest city in America – Buffalo 16th, Rochester 21st, and Syracuse 28th. America had over 23 million people, and three million of them were slaves.
*The Great Potato Famine was underway in Ireland, taking millions in death. (A state visit from Queen Victoria didn’t seem to help… perhaps because British landowners were still shipping food OUT of Ireland, where people could pay more for it.) John F. Kennedy’s grandparents came to America to escape, and were married in Boston.
*Captain Robert E. Lee was guarding Baltimore harbor, and turned down a chance to lead a revolution in Cuba. Abraham Lincoln finished up his sole two-year term in Congress. In Rochester, Frederick Douglass was publishing the abolitionist newspaper North Star. Also in Rochester, Susan B. Anthony had missed the previous year’s women’s rights convention, but she now started running the family farm. Lieutenant Ulysses S. Grant started out the year in Sackett’s Harbor, but the army transferred him to a quartermaster’s post in Detroit.
*Over in Europe, the last of the revolutions of 1848 were petering out, without much success. Peter Colgan fled Ireland after the uprising there was crushed, came to Buffalo, and started studying for the priesthood. He would pastor St. Mary’s church in Corning for 35 years.
*Harriet Tubman escaped from slavery. In Russia, future literary giant Fyodor Dostoyevsky was literally taken out of line in front of a firing squad, and sent to Siberia instead. British writer Anne Brontë died, as did American writer Edgar Allen Poe and Polish composer Frédéric Chopin. So did former first lady Dolley Madison. So did William Miller, whose (incorrect) interpretations of Biblical prophecy helped lead to the founding of the Adventist churches.
*Future plant scientist Luther Burbank was born. So were Lord Randolph Churchill (Winston’s father); German gunmaker Georg Luger; German admiral Alfred von Tirpitz; German automotive pioneer Bertha Benz; Statue of Liberty poet Emma Lazarus; industrialist (and union crusher) Henry Clay Frick; and writer Frances Hodgson Burnett.
*Steuben County had 63,771 people in the 1850 census – and 1,993 of them lived in the Town of Cohocton. The Town had lost a third of its population in the previous decade – but that was because of giving up land to create Avoca and Wayland!