Tag Archives: Campbell

A Trip Through (Some of) the Hamlets

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There are two cities and 32 Towns in Steuben County, and in the Towns there lie 14 incorporated villages. (Thirteen and a fraction if you want to be persnickity, since Almond lies mostly in Allegany County.)

*Then there are places that are now only the faintest of memories… Hermitage, Lumber City, Beartown, Liberty Pole, Harrisburg Hollow. Once they were homes, and they were loved, and now they’re all but forgotten.

*But the official map of Steuben County also shows 72 (!) named-but-unincorporated communities, sometimes called hamlets or settlements, and each of these is interesting in its own right.

*Coss Corners and Unionville lie in the southern upland stretches of Bath, on County Road 10. Coss Corners is now just a handful of houses around the crossroad, but Unionville still has enough homes to form its own little community… though not enough to support, as it did in 1873, a school, a tannery, a shoe shop, and a blacksmith.

*Also in Bath we find Kanona… originally Kennedyville. The Erie Railroad, the DL&W, and the Kanona & Prattsburgh railroad all had stations here, a concentration that supported five hotels along with churches and other businesses. Interestingly Kanona still earns much of its bread from travelers, supporting two large truck stops at Exit 37 on I-390.

*Prattsburgh, of course, lay at the other end of the K&P. Once an incorporated village, the community gave up that distinction some years ago. But like Kanona, it is still a settlement of some size, supporting a library, several historic churches, a lovely square, the central school, and the Narcissa Prentiss House Museum. Narcissa was an early graduate of the school (Franklin Academy), and arguably Prattsburgh’s most famous citizen. She has a monument in front of Franklin.

*Her husband-to-be, Dr. Marcus Whitman, practiced in Wheeler, in the Town of the same name. Wheeler was also (much later) on the K&P. Wheeler’s in the horse-and-buggy country. It has an active church, a Grange, a monument to Marcus, and the old one-room school (now a residence).

*Campbell lies almost in the center of the Town of the same name. Also a rail stop in days gone by, Campbell has the Campbell-Savona High School. The “Stone House” by the river was once a blacksmith shop. The old Presbyterian church (more recently an antique store) had a brush with future fame in the 1880s, for the pastor’s teenaged daughter would become the hyper-prolific novelist Grace Livingston Hill, beloved by generations of readers.

*Hornby, or Hornby Forks (in the Town of Hornby) has an active church, the town historical museum (in the old one-room school), and a very early World War I monument.

*Keuka, on Keuka Lake in the town of Wayne, used to be called Keuka Village or Keuka Landing. It was the site of a much-visited resort, Keuka Hotel, where such luminaries as Fred Waring and Hoagie Charmichael entertained the guests. The Hotel’s gone, but Keuka’s still a busy lakeside place in the summers.

*Keuka’s down at the lake level, but Wayne, or Wayne Village, is up on the height. It lies partly in Schuyler County, and it’s where you’ll find the Town offices.

*Hartsville, in the like-named Town on the western fringe of the county, has a fair number of houses, a church, and the Town offices, but no longer any consumer businesses. Jasper (in Jasper), on County 417, is a rather bigger place, with its own library. Like Wheeler, Jasper is horse-and-buggy territory.

*Gang Mills in Erwin got its name from sawmills that once operated there, where the Tioga and Conhocton Rivers come together (and where they flooded catstrophically in 1935 and 1972). If we were naming it today, we’d call it Gang Shopping Centers!

Local Girl Makes Good: Grace Livingston Hill

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Some time back I sort of stumbled onto some local connections for Grace Livingston Hill, who once upon a time was far and away one of the best-selling authors in America.

*Grace was born in Wellsville in 1865. She lived in Campbell from September 1883 to September 1885 (ages 18 to 20) while her father was pastor of the Presbyterian church — now an antique mall. She also briefly attended Elmira College.

*Grace’s father was frequently troubled by severe problems with his throat — bad news for a preacher — and they moved to Florida after leaving Campbell, hoping for a better climate.

*There Grace wrote her first story, later expanded to a book, to earn enough money for a family trip to Chautauqua Institute. Her mother, her father, and especially her aunt were all published authors. Aunt Isabella Macdonald Alden actually published a story about a visit to Campbell. She wrote copiously, often under the pen name Pansy. Professional librarians sneered at works by “Pansy,” which did not meet their standards for Serious Literature. By the time Grace came along librarians were getting a little more relaxed, or at least more resigned.

*Which was a good thing! Because Grace’s output outshone the rest of the family combined, even when you include Grace’s daughter’s work. “GLH” published over a hundred books between 1887 (A Chautauqua Idyll) and 1947 (Mary Arden). The exact count can be argued a little, but I make it at 116 — Danielle Steel is now up to 125.

*Grace’s readers ran into eager millions, who persevered past (and finally overcame, or maybe overwhelmed) disgruntled librarians. Perhaps Jan Karon would be a rough contemporary parallel… Grace’s books had a spiritual tinge, or at least were wholesome, and her primary readers were women, many of whom still fondly recall reading long into the night, unable to tear away from the story and the characters.

*The professionally hip have been known to call her Grace Livingston Seagull, but she being dead (since 1947) yet speaketh. An author check of our own Southern Tier Library System catalogue reveals FOURTEEN PAGES of entries for Grace Livingston Hill. To compare with other hyper-prolific writers, the system shows 46 pages for Danielle Steel, 29 for John Grisham, 23 for Isaac Asimov, 13 for Frances Hodgson Burnett, 10 for P. G. Wodehouse, 7 for Robert Silverberg, 5 for Barbara Cartland, and 1 for Horatio Alger. (These figures include books, e-books, audio books, movies, etc.)

*Of course it’s not surprising that contemporary authors would be better represented, and that interest in the older ones fades away over time. So just for the fun of it, I decided to “equalize” all that through multiplying the number of pages in each listing by the number of years since the author’s death — using “1” as the multiple for the three living authors.

*In that case we get: Burnett 2096 “popularity points”; Hill 966; Asimov 552; Wodehouse 410; Alger 117; Cartland 80; Steel 46; Grisham 29; Silverberg 7.

*While this calculation puts Grace Livingston Hill well behind Frances Hodgson Burnett (most famous for The Secret Garden, A Little Princess/Sara Crewe, and Little Lord Fauntleroy, all of which have been made into multiple movies), it also puts her decidedly ahead of Asimov and far beyond any of the others. Not bad for someone who published her first book 129 years ago!

Campbell Man Was Top Cop in the Big Apple

Richard E. Enright traveled a long way from the country lanes of Campbell, and a long way on the sidewalks of New York.
Born August 30, 1871, Enright left Campbell as a young man to work as a telegrapher in Elmira, and later joined the New York Police Department (in 1896). Starting out as a patrolman he plodded up the ranks, pushed up from below and held down from above. He was president of the Sergeants’ Benevolent Association, and later of the Lieutenants’ Association. He was also a popular member of the Steuben County Society of New York City… a group of successful transplants who hosted a hugely popular annual banquet in which they wined and dined themselves, visitors from back home, and big city bigwigs. Naturally, they “wined” with Steuben vintages.
His union activities repeatedly kept him out of the captain’s rank, but on January 23, 1918 he was called from his desk at his precinct to become the first man to rise through the ranks and become New York City’s police commissioner. This was no small accomplishment. One of his predecessors (William Gibbs McAdoo) had become secretary of the treasury, and another (Theodore Roosevelt, with a different title and organizational structure) was president of the United States.
The mayor hoped Enright would be more pliable than his predecessor. Reformers hoped he was a new broom sweeping clean. Both would have their disappointments.
Once on the job he attacked gambling, set up a vice squad, beefed up the missing persons bureau, hired more policewomen, improved police working conditions, and strengthened the pension fund. He organized an international conference that helped lead to the creation of Interpol. In 1921 he was one of a jolly group that accompanied Franklin D. Roosevelt on a boat trip to the Bear Mountain Boy Scout encampment — quite possibly where FDR contracted polio. On the way FDR conducted a mock trial for Enright, who brought with him a liquid that his fellow-passengers suspected might violate the Prohibition laws.
Many supporters turned on him when he got rid of some famous members of the force.  This was either a move to divest himself of some veteran who had successfully exposed city hall corruption, OR a move to get rid of 19th-century fossils and bring in new blood — depending on how you looked at it.  Enright had little success in rooting out corruption within the force. This problem only deepened as Prohibition went on, and reform groups began to call for his resignation, which he submitted effective December 30, 1925. Only one person has ever served longer as police commissioner. (Enright’s predecessor only lasted 23 days.)
Enright later published both fiction and non-fiction on police work, served as a reserve colonel on the army, worked for the National Recovery Administration, and on September 4, 1953 died as the consequence of a fall. His term as commissioner consisted of an endless drive to modernize and professionalize the New York Police Department.
Richard E Enright