Tag Archives: Crooked Lake Canal

Keuka Lake — Highway or Playground?

Funny thing about Keuka Lake.

*For the first 130 years or so of European occupation, it was a highway. But HOW that highway worked kept changing.

*It’s about 21 miles along the main axis, between Penn Yan and Hammondsport… plus you’ve got that arm reaching over to Branchport.

*Twenty-one miles doesn’t seem like much. But until well into the 20th century, there was NEVER a good land connection between Hammondsport and Penn Yan.

*People and goods moved over the lake, and the traffic generally ran from north to south. The vale of Pleasant Valley started a long portage down to Bath, where goods (or travelers) could embark on the Conhocton River, poling-floating-drifting-paddling-rowing down as far as the salt water of Chesapeake Bay. (Native people had done the same for centuries.) There was even a schooner on the lake (the “Sally”), maybe as far back as the Jefferson administration.

*So the Southern Tier, and the Keuka-Seneca region, prospered on that watery highway down to the Tidewater, and Bath was laid out to become the great metropolis of western New York.

*Then that busybody DeWitt Clinton went and opened the Erie Canal. River traffic continued, but it was pretty much an act of desperation. Land pices collapsed, and farmers found themselves with mortgages that were now horrendously overpriced, and produce prices so low that they could never get free and clear. Mob actions, petitions, and conventions finally led to revaluations.

*Things perked up once the Crooked Lake Canal opened in 1831. This ran from Penn Yan on Keuka Lake to Dresden on Seneca… and from Seneca, you could access the Erie Canal system. Suddenly regional farmers were back in the game, and steamboats started chugging across the surface of Keuka. Hammondsport became a true port, with goods hauled from as far away as Pennsylvania, transshipped to Penn Yan, and thence transshipped again by canal boat. Some visionaries even shipped experimental loads of grapes to New York City!

*Lake traffic was now running south-to-north, reversing the earlier pattern.

*The Southern Tier REALLY came to life again when the Erie Railroad opened its Lake Erie-New York City main line in 1851, right through Elmira, Corning, Addison, Canisteo, Hornell, and onward.

*That might have killed off lake traffic, BUT Penn Yan and Hammondsport still lacked decent overland connections. Glenn Curtiss helped create independent land tranportation with his motorcycles, but on at least one occasion got mired in mud on the shore road, arriving hours late, after dark, and absolutely filthy for a visit with his mother. In the early 1900s the post office moved mail in the Keuka region by steamboat, contracting overland routes only when the lake froze up.

*The three end points of Keuka Lake were never joined by rail, except for a trolley between Penn Yan and Branchport. But by the 1920s Governor Al Smith was having the highways paved, beginning with Keuka’s West Lake Road. The steamers and canal were gone by then, and the railroads mattered less and less. Keuka’s surface, once a busy commercial highway, became a pleasure place – just as it still is today.

The Farming Story Part 3: Canals, Railroads, and War

Everyone was very relieved when the 1816 “Year Without a Summer” turned out to be a fluke, and growth resumed until the even-more disastrous year of 1825, when that busybody DeWitt Clinton went and opened the Erie Canal. While a spectacularly excellent thing over all, it hit the Southern Tier like a neutron bomb, completely wrenching all the patterns of travel and commerce. You can still see that Bath was laid out to be the great metropolis of western New York, with traffic running down the Conhocton and Chemung to the Susquehanna and the Chesapeake Bay. Now Bath stalled while little no-account shanty towns like Buffalo, Syracuse, and Rochester started to boom.

*Land prices down here collapsed, and farmers suddenly found themselves paying mortgages that far exceded the new values of their properties. There were demonstrations, near-riots, and conventions until they finally held a summit conference with representatives from all the towns, and the Land Office agreed to revalue all the properties.

*Opening the Crooked Lake Canal in 1833 ameliorated this to some extent. While not in Steuben, it drained commerce on Keuka Lake into Seneca Lake and thence to the Erie Canal system. Hammondsport became a true port, transshipping goods from as far away as Pennsylvania up to Penn Yan and the canal. The later Chemung Feeder Canal, linking Corning with Watkins on Seneca, also helped.

*Steuben County was larger back then than it is today, and the 1835 gazetteer showed that 43% of its land – almost 40,000 acres – was “improved,” that is, cleared and useable for farming. This was quite an accomplishment for a feat done entirely with hand tools and draft animals, in about four decades. Of course it was also an ecological holocaust, and an open invitation to flooding.

*Steubeners in 1835 owned 43,000 cattle, 11,000 horses, a hundred thousand sheep, and 36,000 swine. They owned and operated 43 grist mills, 257 sawmills, two oil mills, 18 fulling mills, two paper mills, one iron works, three woolen factories, five distilleries, two breweries, 19 asheries, and 32 tanneries. So all those sawmills, asheries, and paper mills prove that lumbering was still vital.

*The Crooked Lake Canal helped, but real revival began with completion of the Erie Railroad main line in 1851, serving Corning, Painted Post, Addison, Cameron Mills, Canisteo, Hornell, Arkport, and Almond. The Rochester Branch soon also served Coopers Plains, Campbell, Savona, Bath, Kanona, Cohocton, and Wayland. By the time of the 1860 directory there was actually LESS improved land, but there was also less TOTAL land, thanks to the loss of several townships, so the percentage had climbed from 42 to 45. Steuben folks now owned more cattle, sheep, and horses than they had in 1835, but considerably fewer swine.

*The 1860 gazetteer also tells us something about their PRODUCE. Steuben folks annually produced over 1.5 million bushels of grain; 60 thousand tons of hay; more than a quarter-million bushels of potatoes; almost 300 thousand bushels of apples; 2 million pounds of butter; and 200 thousand pounds of cheese. Much of this, ESPECIALLY the dairy products, would have been useless without fast transportation. According to this gazetteer, “In extent of territory and in agricultural wealth [Steuben] now ranks among the first [counties] in the state.”

*I can’t state this for a fact, but I assume that Steuben followed the general national trend of mechanizing its farming during the Civil War. Thousands of young men who normally would be swinging scythes were now shouldering rifles. Production was kept up by mechanical combines, reapers, and the like.

*This meant that farming became much more CAPITAL-intensive and much less LABOR-intensive. It took more monetary investment, and larger farms, to farm successfully, and it was harder to find a job in the field, even for the men who came back from the war. Many of the veterans who populated the “Soldiers’ Home” (now Bath V.A.) after 1878 were only winter residents. During the growing season they got those jobs that were still left, or they went back to family farms as unpaid extra hands. But the work wasn’t there to employ them ’round the year.