Tag Archives: Addison

An Addison Walking Tour

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I recently had the fun of leading a historic walk in Addison, starting with the CENTRAL SCHOOL built in 1929 and still in use. We gathered across the street at VALERIO PARK AND VALERIO PARKWAY. Mr. Valerio paved the street and the sidewalk at his own expense when the new school opened so that the children would not have to walk in mud, because he loved them.  The town held a big celebration to thank him, and the small park is now a center of community events.

*The park includes a VETERANS OF ALL WARS MEMORIAL. Now that our country is 240 years old, and has been at war for a good deal of that, communities are increasingly resorting to this approach.

*Right next to the park is the LIBRARY, originally built (1889) as the YMCA.  “Y” was big in those days, especially in industrial towns and railroad towns, to provide the young man with wholesome environment and activities.  It’s now the public library, one of 18 in Steuben County and 49 region-wide.  Addison’s library was incorporated in 1840, which may make it the oldest in our region.

*OLD VILLAGE HALL MEMORIAL PARK across the street is a small space, but it held a pretty good-sized village hall!  They ran out of money part-way through, and had to get underwriting from the Odd Fellows, in exchange for giving them use of the third floor.  Completed 1907, it unfortunately was finally lost due to arson, after the offices had been moved. Floods came down to here from the Canisteo River AND from Tuscarora Creek.

*Nearby on Main Street stood a major hotel, the AMERICAN HOUSE, very popular with travelers in days gone by.  It was demolished in 1971. 

*A few steps farther up is MIDDLETOWN HISTORICAL SOCIETY. The good folks there will make you welcome Wednesday and Friday afternoons, or by appointment. Just about everyone will enjoy the working model railroad.

*Today’s Main Street was mostly erected after a bad fire in 1879. When you’re walking the street you’re also walking the CRYSTAL HILLS TRAIL, a major branch trail of the Finger Lakes Trail. Keep going north and you’ll strike the main FLT in the woods, around the Bradford/Campbell town line. But you’re simultaneously on the GREAT EASTERN TRAIL, a National Scenic Trail. Keep walking south and you’ll end up in Alabama.

*An earlier MAIN STREET BRIDGE came from the Owego Iron Bridge Company.  Downstream, on the line of Goodhue Street, was a decorative suspension bridge.  This was used for foot traffic only after the 1935 flood, and removed altogether after the flood of 1946.  Osprey and eagles both soar up and down the river.

*Another few steps brings you to the METHODIST CHURCH. The congregation goes back to an 1830 meeting in a schoolhouse.  This site was selected, and work begun, in 1875 after a fire at another location – they wanted more space.  It was dedicated in 1876, and used locally-made bricks in construction.

*Up the hill by WOMBAUGH PARK, the EPISCOPAL CHURCH OF THE REDEEMER congregation also goes back to schoolhouse meetings, about 1847.  This building, which was finished, consecrated, and paid for in 1860, is in a very interesting Carpenter Gothic style… including pointed arches, steep gables, towers, and vertical planking. Diagonally across the way 12 WALL STREET, built in 1849, also shows Carpenter Gothic style, including lots of gingerbread under the eaves.

*The PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH congregation goes back before 1834.  This building on he other side of the park, dedicated in 1882, also used local bricks.

*Doubling back toward Main Street is the EAGLE HOTEL, built as tavern in 1805 and later expanded to a hotel with livery stable.

*The main line of the ERIE RAILROAD came through in 1850-51 – Daniel Webster and Millard Filllmore rode the ceremonial first rain.  Presidential candidates spoke from the observation cars at the ends of trains pulled up to the still-standing ERIE DEPOT, bringing such luminaries as Theodore Roosevelt, Ulysses S. Grant, and Charles Evans Hughes. More prosaically, local producers used the Erie to ship out millions of gallons of milk.

*The WADE’S RENTAL buildings once held a company making “Reliance” bicycles and motorcycles, back in the Glenn Curtiss days. And here, by lovely flower beds along the street, we end our tour.

Slavery Days in the Southern Tier

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When our region was opened to white settlement in the 1780s, it was opened to black settlement as well, because the early white settlers brought along their slaves.
Slavery was forbidden in the Northwest Territory, bounded by the Ohio and Mississippi, and Massachusetts abolished slavery by court order in 17??. But apart from that, slavery was legal everywhere in U.S. Territory, including New York.
Since our area had direct connections with Chesapeake Bay and the Maryland-Virginia Tidewater (via the Conhocton-Chemung-Susquehanna River route), this became a “natural” area for slavery to extend. Indeed, land agent Charles Williamson, who had 1.2 million acres to dispose of, marketed this region to southerners as a place to buy huge estates, bring your slaves, and live like a king. This never came to pass, but Steuben County and its neighbors did become home to a noticeable slave population.
A hundred years ago you could still see buildings in Canisteo and in Bath that were reported to have been slave dwellings, and you could also find slave cemeteries that have since disappeared.
By and large, white men didn’t record much about the lives of slaves, just as they didn’t record much about the lives of women and poor people (of any race). We do have record of Colonel L. A. Jones in Addison, who won a woman and two sons in a game of cards (!) around 1820. According to a town history he passed the woman on to his brother, but recognizing the impending end of slavery enrolled the sons in school. “They were refused admission on account of color. He called a meeting of the citizens at the school house…. He said, ‘Gentlemen, the law will soon free these boys, they will have no master to look after them. They must earn their living as white men do, they must have a chance, they must have some education. They are going to attend this school and by the great Jehovah I will mop the ground with the man who refuses them admission and throw this building in the river stick by stick.’”
While this is stirring, the story also suggests the horror of casual, offhand transfers and the breakup of families as slaves (even children!) were routinely sold for payment of debts or taxes, or in liquidation of assets to settle estates.
Austin Steward left a remarkable slave narrative in which he described being brought to Bath from Virginia and hired out along with other slaves, including his sister. “One pleasant Sabbath morning, as I was passing the house where she lived, on my way to the Presbyterian church, where I was sent to ring the bell as usual, I heard the most piteous cries and earnest pleadings issuing from the dwelling. To my horror and the astonishment of those with me, my poor sister made her appearance, weeping bitterly, and followed by her inhuman master… flourishing a large raw-hide. Very soon his bottled wrath burst forth, and the blows, aimed with all his strength, descended upon the unprotected head, shoulders and back of the helpless woman, until she was literally cut to pieces. She writhed in his powerful grasp, while shriek after shriek died away in heart-rending moanings; and yet the inhuman demon continued to beat her, though her pleading cries had ceased, until obliged to desist from the exhaustion of his own strength…. The kind reader may imagine my feelings when I saw the smooth-faced hypocrite, the inhuman slave-whipper, enter the church, pass quietly on to his accustomed seat, and then meekly bow his hypocritical face….”
Steward describes being hired out to a man who clubbed and beat him frequently, not on any grounds, but simply because he could. Encountering attorney Daniel Cruger as both men crossed a bridge, Steward asked whether he shouldn’t in fact be free under New York law. Cruger loudly stated that of course Steward was NOT free, but the two men later held a private consultation (“you didn’t hear this from me”) in Cruger’s office.
A New York law for gradual emancipation had gone into effect in 1799, and court rulings since then had held that importing a slave, then hiring that slave out, was an evasion of the law’s provision against slave sales, and that the act ipso facto emancipated the slave. Cruger helped Steward get in touch with anti-slavery activists; at the age of 22 he walked away from Bath to settle in Manchester, where the activists helped him maintain his legal freedom when his owner later found him and tried to reclaim him. Facing the legal reality, the owner tried to lure Steward back “with honeyed words.” Unsurprisingly, this didn’t work.