If you’ve ever visited Bath, you’ve almost certainly noticed the 500-foot wall that looms over the village from the south, just across the Conhocton River. That wall was formed in part by the glacier – the same glacier that gouged out Keuka Lake, then the vale of Pleasant Valley, slammed to a halt at Bath.
Mostly. While most of the glacier stayed put, its very top edged over and kept going for a spell, leaving behind “glacial erratics” – boulders and smaller stones that started out far to the north, and got swept along (actually, got inched along) by that last glacier.
Back in the early days of Bath several small groups of Native American people lived up at or near the top, and on several occasions officials from down on the flat had to trudge up to the top, in order to negotiate arrangements for peaceful co-existence.
In the 1840s a woman diarist wrote that it had become “a fad” in Bath to ride up to Mossy Bank to walk around and have picnics. Since that’s still going strong 180 years later, we probably can’t call it a fad any more!
By the 1850s the vista from Mossy Bank was noted as one of the two or three great “views” in Steuben County. Logging went on, though the slope made the work challenging. Whether with horses or on foot, you it was quite a job to get your picnic up to Mossy Bank. People found it worth the trip.
Ira Davenport built his “Riverside” mansion right over the Cameron Road bridge from Bath, roughly across from where the S.P.C.A. is now. In 1864, having seen the terrible death toll of the Civil War, he built a castle-like “Female Asylum” farther back from both the river and the road, right at the foot of the slope. He passed away in 1868, but his orphanage still made a home for distressed girls for another 90 years.
Mr. Davenport’s property included the steep slope and the Mossy Bank area, which became part of the orphanage after his death. “Davenport Girls” had their own Scout troop, and often enjoyed hikes up to the top.
The Appalachian Plateau begins at the top of the cliff, and while much of that is hilly, there’s a mile or so of fairly flat space first, and some of this is still used today as pasture. In the 1960s a forest fire burned for days between Cameron Road and Babcock Hollow Road. Folks pulled up lawn chairs onto the unfinished Southern Tier Expressway, and watched the show.
After the fire Mayor John Langendorfer fulfilled the dream of many years, turning Mossy Bank into a public park. Today there are picnic spaces, the Ted Markham Nature Center, occasional nature presentations, rest rooms, playground, a fitness trail, multiple hiking trails, and the lookout.
If anything defines Mossy Bank to most people, it’s the lookout and the view. Unsurprisingly, you get a great view of downtown Bath, the railroad, and the Conhocton River. The county fairgrounds. Several cemeteries. Lake Salubria. The West End, and beyond. Mount Washington blocks any view of Keuka Lake, but you can clearly see the roads to Hammondsport and Mitchellsville. If you know where to look, and conditions are good, you can spot the wind turbines in Howard, and the other batch between Prattsburgh and Cohocton.
Bath’s Christmas star is mounted on the lookout pavilion. Lately it’s again been lighted, this time in blue and yellow, to show support for the beleaguered people of the Ukraine.
At a little remove from the main body of the park is a smaller 14-acre section, largely taken up by a pond used for fishing and bird-watching (not to mention firefighting, if needed).
Mossy Bank is famed because eagles and osprey often nest within sight down below, and sometimes soar overhead, or even right in front of our faces. It’s a favored spot for many migrating birds and butterflies, including the monarch.
White-tail deer abound, and bears can be present, though I’m happy to say I’ve never encountered one.
The park is open to auto traffic from May 1 to October 15, and you often find families there on hot summer evenings, for the temperatures are commonly three to five degrees cooler than they are down below. Foot traffic is allowed the rest of the year, but so is hunting in season, so exercise good sense and care. Mossy Bank has 168 acres. It’s one of the crown jewels of Bath.

A couple of weeks ago I was walking trails in the Spencer Crest Nature Center at Corning Community College, and stopped to watch a hawk spiraling upward above me. Moments later the hawk swooped downward after a bald eagle passing by, and pestered it out of sight.
The next day I was stopped at the Washington Square traffic light in Bath, looking southward along Liberty Street. In the distance, out of the village, past the Conhocton, under Mossy Bank, an eagle rose spiraling into the sky, gained altitude, then glided off eastward just above the ridge.
I was well into my thirties before I saw my first eagle, soaring past almost in arm’s length at Hawk Mountain in Pennsylvania, where my family and I spent many happy hours. I had been in my twenties when I first saw an osprey, a great bird with a wingspan almost matching an eagle’s, and like the eagle a bird whose favored prey is fish.
Both, as I grew up, were rarities plunging toward extinction, partly due to habitat devastation and partly due to massive overuse of DDT – a persistent broad-spectrum pesticide that collects in fish, then builds up in these great birds that eat the fish, thinning out their eggshells so that scarcely any stay intact long enough to hatch.
Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring went a long way toward alerting us to this tragedy, and provoking change. By the way, in certain circles there’s a propaganda that Rachel Carson was an anti-business fanatic with the blood of millions of malaria victims on her hand, because she inspired the banning of DDT. But Carson, a rare woman scientist of her day, never called for banning DDT, and in fact it isn’t banned. She called for using it more narrowly and more wisely, so that we would no longer have, for example, children walking to and from school in clouds of the stuff being laid down from airplanes, and being told it was perfectly harmless. It wasn’t.
In the late ‘eighties I was a volunteer field researcher for the Pennsylvania Atlas of Breeding Birds. Over a seven-year period we confirmed a total of seven breeding eagle pairs for the entire commonwealth. That same study for the same period found eight active osprey nests in Pennsylvania, although some may have been used in more than one year.
Much has gotten worse environmentally in the 25 years since then, but eagles and ospreys are doing better. I wouldn’t be surprised if our immediate area had as many breeding eagles and ospreys today as all of Pennsylvania had back then. One site in Bath has an eagle nest and an osprey nest within sight of each other, although the osprey aren’t using theirs this year – one may have died. Steuben County, with its waters, cliffs, and extensive forests, is currently a growth area for nesting bald eagles.
These are BIG creatures. A bald eagle’s wing span can reach 90 inches, whereas an osprey must be satisfied with a “mere” six feet. The turkey vulture is our only other hawk-like bird in their league. Of these three, the osprey is the most streamlined, the eagle the most robust, with massive beak and talons.
Both of these marvelous birds, as we say, love to feed on fish. The noble eagle actually specializes in picking up carrion. The osprey (formerly called fish hawk) is a more aggressive hunter. What a sight it is to see a huge osprey plunge from a height into a lake or stream, disappear for a few seconds, and then suddenly fly up out of the water into the sky, bearing in its talons an utterly bewildered fish. Once while canoeing on the Delaware I got to see what I’d only read about before – a flying osprey fiddling its fish from talon to talon until he got it facing head into the line of flight. This seems like a waste of attention and energy, but I suppose it’s more aerodynamic that way.
Once they were hunted out as vermin, but today it’s illegal (and rightly so) to harm these marvelous birds, to keep one, or to possess even a feather, with certain exceptions for rehabilitators and for ceremonial use by Native Americans. We are honored to have the eagle and the osprey as new-immigrant neighbors. Keep your eye peeled for a sight of them.