Tag Archives: Bath Fair

What You Can Do at Steuben County Fair

“The lads in their hundreds to Ludlow come in for the fair,” A. E. Housman wrote. And so they do, so they do… lads and lassies, and kids and old folks, young marrieds and middle-aged, in they come for the fair.

*I counted it up, and over the years I’ve been (in most cases, multiple times) to two state fairs (New York and Rhode Island); to county fairs in Vermont (Orleans, Addison) and New York (Steuben, Ontario); to the Washington County Pomona Grange Fair (which is BIGGER than the Rhode Island state fair); to Woodstock Fair in Connecticut; to the “Big E” Eastern States Exposition, or Springfield (Massachusetts) Fair; to Steuben County Dairy Festival; to the New York World’s Fair in 1964; and to various 4-H fairs and such.

*So what can you do at OUR fair, Steuben County Fair, now, this week?

*Drop in and visit your County Historical Society at the one-room schoolhouse. There were almost 400 rural schools in Steuben… see how far the Society’s come in documenting them. And experience a little about one-room school days.

*Visit the rest of the “history corner,” including the Steuben County Fair Museum and the Memorial Log Cabin.

*Go to the Grange building, and check out the entries in this year’s Dairy Festival photo contest.

*Enjoy the antique farm engines… gas, diesel, steam, hot air. Some of them will be running at various times.

*Stop in at the conservation cabin for info on wildlife, parks, hunting, fishing, boating, invasive species – one-stop shopping for the outdoors.

*Visit the livestock, by all means! This is the heart of the fair. The Fair has competitions in beef cattle, dairy cattle, meat goats, poultry, and rabbits. The simultaneous 4-H competitions include most of the same, plus cavy, dairy goat, sheep, and swine.

*Get hungry by inspecting the fruit, produce, vegetable, and culimary entries. Likewise look over the 4-H entries, and see how the rising generation is doing.

*Learn about beekeeping.

*Pick up interesting information from dozens of agencies and community groups.

*Watch harness racers! Harness racing has been a feature of Steuben County Fair since the 1850s.

*Take in the carnival and the midway. I personally like the Scrambler and the Tilt-A-Whirl. I also like to get a root beer, and a hot dog with a squirt of yellow mustard.

*Try your skills at turkey calling.

*See if you can handicap the truck and tractor pulls.

*Speaking of trucks, feel overawed at the Monster Truck Show.

*If you go in for that sort of thing, enjoy the Demolition Derby.

*Groove to the country music strains of Lonestar.

*If you haven’t been… go. If you USED to go… go back. If you go every year… carry on. Do the stuff you ALWAYS do at the fair. Nostalgia’s great. But try one new thing too… one thing you wouldn’t normally do. This is Steuben County Fair’s bicentennial year. If you go, you’ll be helping the Fair make history.

Steuben County Fair Bicentennial: 1819 Was CRAMMED with Activity

In 1819 a group of visionaries met at the courthouse in Bath to form a county agricultural society. They got a $150 state subsidy under “an act to improve the agriculture of this state,” and the first Steuben County Fair was soon under way! But what ELSE was going on in that exciting year?
*Steuben County was bigger back then, stretching all the way over to Seneca Lake. Within the current boundaries there were 11 towns, though Wheeler and Hornellsville would be created in 1820. (Today’s it’s 32 towns and two cities.) Schuyler, Yates, Chemung and Livingston Counties did not yet exist.
*On the far side of Seneca, the village of Burdett was formed. Alabama became the 22nd state, and President James Monroe bought the Florida Territory from Spain. Governor DeWitt Clinton had thousands of men beavering away to build the Erie Canal, while hundreds more (including slaves) rebuilt the U.S. Capitol, which the British had burned five years earlier. In England King George III was still on the throne. He would die the following year, after almost 60 years as king, but his son, as Prince Regent, was already filling the old man’s role. (This was the “Regency” period so beloved of romance writers.)
*The 1820 census would show over 9,600,000 people in America. New York and Pennsylvania became the first states with populations over a million, and New York City the first municipality with a population in six figures. Albany was the eleventh-largest city in America. There were 23,000 people in Steuben County… and 46 of them were slaves.
*Washington Irving published the story of Rip Van Winkle, and James Fenimore Cooper was working on his first novel (which would flop).
*Queen Victoria, Prince Albert, Walt Whitman, Julia Ward Howe, and Herman Melville were all born in 1819. Charles Darwin, Abraham Lincoln, and Edgar Allen Poe were ten years old, Charles Dickens was seven, Elizabeth Cady (Stanton) was four, and Robert E. Lee was 13.
*Jemima Wilkinson, the “Publick Universal Friend” who lived near Penn Yan, “left time” in 1819. Hawaiian King Kamehameha also died, and so did naval hero Oliver Hazard Perry.
*Barrington Baptist Church was organized, and held its first regular service. Bath Masons received a warrant to form a new lodge. Baltimoreans created the Independent Order of Odd Fellows.
*America finally had an economy big enough to suffer its first economic depression – the Panic of 1819, which would last for two more years. We had no standard currency, so local newspapers printed weekly quotes as to the values of money from each state.
*British cavalry troops attacked peaceful demonstrators in St. Peter’s Field as they called for parliamentary reform. They killed almost 20, with at least 400 injured. Sarcastically recalling the army’s glory at Waterloo four years earlier, an enraged nation quickly labeled this massacre as “Peterloo.”
*On the brighter side, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison founded the University of Virginia, even as Norwich University was founded in Vermont.
*The Supreme Court protected the sanctity of contract in the Dartmouth College Case, and affirmed federal supremacy over the states in McCulloch versus Maryland. Daniel Webster successfully argued each case, and Chief Justice John Marshall delivered both judgments.
*Bolívar freed Columbia from Spain. Erastus Corning was in business in Albany. John Magee, became a deputy sheriff. Ira Davenport was setting up stores along the Steuben-Allegany line, and running river arks down to Baltimore. And folks congregated to Bath, to take in the new county fair.

Try Out the One-Room School — at Steuben County Fair!

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One of the treats at Steuben County Fair is visiting the one-room school, operated by Steuben County Historical Society. This is one of almost 400 such schools that once were scattered across the county, and this particular one was moved from Babcock Hollow. Some folks renew old memories, while other (and younger) folks find out what school was like in days gone by.

Nobody had a car. Nobody had a bike. The five-year-olds walked, and the teacher walked, unless she got a ride in a horse-drawn buggy.

Nobody got a hot lunch, unless they lived close enough to run home at noon. Everybody else carried their cold lunch with them, or went without. The teacher couldn’t get any coffee, unless she heated it on the wood stove. There was no electricity, so they needed oil lamps on cloudy days. They used outhouses out back.

Everybody sat in one big room, and they all had the same teacher. She taught the five-year-olds to read, and she taught the teenagers to do algebra. But most teenagers quit to go to work, especially the boys, even before they finished eighth grade.

Sometimes parents dropped off kids too little for school, and the teacher had to baby-sit while she taught.

The teacher prepared all the lessons, and graded all the papers. She cleaned the school. She had to lay the fire in the heating stove, and maybe chop the wood. She probably had to board with the closest family, and if she got married, she usually had to quit!

There’s a lot of nostalgia about one-room schools, but like everything else they hd their good points and their bad points. State law let people teach in one-room schools even if they were still teenagers and didn’t have much training. Usually they didn’t get “promoted” to bigger schools.

Some teachers were great, and they have become the stuff of movies and legends and TV shows… an assertion that all was right in America, in those simple rural days before so many people lived in cities. Other teachers, though, were incompetent, appalling, predatory, or abusive.

Some students went on to become doctors and lawyers and generals and corporate presidents. But one-room schools were dead ends for many others. Even in the 1950s, scarcely half of the one-room students in the Corning area went on to high school.

The one-room schools seem like a piece of Americana, but it was mostly northern and western Americana. When unreconstructed Confederates seized the state governments of the south – often by force – one of the first things they did was close the public schools that had been opened by the postwar biracial governments. The white supremacists were determined to keep whites as well as blacks uneducated and economically desperate, so that the leaders could barter the labor of the poor. The one-room school wasn’t perfect, but it offered at least the HOPE of a chance to rise.

Anyhow – while you’re at the fair, stop in at the one-room school! Bring the kids! Try out the old games, look at the photos of hundreds of schools, and tell YOUR stories.

*****

We went to one-room schools in Steuben County!

Joe Paddock (Brundage [Cold Springs] School): veterinarian, president of Steuben County Historical Society

Tom Watson (Red School House): president of IBM

Benjamin Bennitt (Mount Washington School): lawyer, lieutenant colonel in the Civil War, Judge of Sessions

W.W. Averell (Gulf School): West Point graduate, Civil War general, diplomat

Join Us at the Fair — in Our One-Room School

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What was life like in the “good old days” of one-room schools?

Nobody had a car.  Nobody had a bike.  The five-year-olds walked, and the teacher walked, unless she got a ride in a horse-drawn buggy.

Nobody got a hot lunch, unless they lived close enough to run home at noon.  Everybody else carried their cold lunch with them, or went without.  The teacher couldn’t get any coffee, unless she heated it on the wood stove.  There was no electricity, so they needed oil lamps on cloudy days.  They used outhouses out back.

Everybody sat in one big room, and they all had the same teacher.  She taught the five-year-olds to read, and she taught the teenagers to do algebra.  But most teenagers quit to go to work, especially the boys, even before they finished eighth grade. When it was time for haying, or berrying, school closed anyway so the children could be out to work.

The teacher prepared all the lessons, and graded all the papers.  She cleaned the school.  She had to lay the fire in the heating stove, and maybe chop the wood.  She probably had to board with the closest family, and if she got married, she usually had to quit.

Some students went on to become doctors and lawyers and generals and corporate presidents.  But one-room schools were dead ends for many others.  Even in the 1950s, scarcely half of the one-room students in the Corning area went on to high school, even though they had several options close at hand.

State law let people teach in one-room schools even if they were still teenagers and didn’t have much training.  Often they didn’t get “promoted” to bigger schools – teaching in one-room schools became a life sentence.  Some people loved it, but it could be rough. Many schools were very isolated. You might have to board with the family closest to school, but just because they were close didn’t mean they were nice.

Rhoda McConnell, teaching near Prattsburgh in the Civil War, wrote her soldier boy friend about how furious she was because one of the mothers had sent her two-year-old to school along with the older kids, so that Rhoda had to mind the child while teaching. If school board members were going out, it wasn’t unusual for them to summon teachers to their homes and require them to send the evening babysitting.

At Steuben Couny Historical Society, we dedicate a lot of time and energy to one-room schools. One entire shelf is filled with town-by-town binders, in which we try to identify all 400 Steuben County schools. If 400 seems like a lot, remember that the county’s big enough to be a state, and the schools had to be spotted within fairly reasonable walking distance.

Identifying schools is more challenging than it sounds. The last of them closed over half a century back, and memory plays tricks. Names were unofficial – it’s depressing how many “Red Schools” there were, and how many “White Schools.” It took us quite a while to figure out that Twelve Mile Creek School is NOT Twelve Mile Creek ROAD School – though they’re fairly close to each other. Sometimes a school was named for the nearest farmer, but over 150 years those names would change.

Each town had its own numbering system for its districts, but those also changed over a century and a half, and so did the number of schools. On top of that, a town might have, for instance, a District 2 School and a JOINT District 2 School. Joint districts straddled town lines, and had students from both municipalities.

Steuben County Historical Society operates the 1849 Bath District 11 School (Babcock Hollow), now on the grounds of Steuben County Fair. We like to have folks drop in during their fair visits, to get a feel for one-room school days. We’ve got our binders with us, so we may be able to share information and photos if you have a particular school you’re excited about. We also get excited, because a lot of times folks bring US information and photos.

Anyhow, please come see us while you’re at the fair!

Get a one-room school education, when you join us at the fair.

Get a one-room school education, when you join us at the fair.