Tag Archives: Dansville

Steuben County — 225 Years!

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Happy birthday, Steuben County! Steuben was created 225 years ago, by separating territory from Ontario County. Land agent Charles Williamson, founder of Bath and a tireless promoter, had pushed the project through the legislature.
The County was much bigger back then, but it only had six legal municipalities – officially Towns, or as I sometimes call them “supertowns,” since all the municipalities of Steuben… and parts of four other counties! – were created from these original six.
BATH originally included what’s now Bath, Urbana, Wheeler, Prattsburgh, Pulteney, and Avoca, plus parts of Cohocton and Howard. This is the area that gave us Glenn Curtiss and several of our U. S. Representatives, besides hosting the county seat and county fair, giving birth to our grape and wine heritage, and becoming an incubator of fish culture.
CANISTEO included today’s Canisteo, Greenwood, West Union, Hornellsville, Hornell City, and parts of Jasper and Troupsburg, not to mention Almond, Alfred, Andover, and Independence (all in today’s Allegany County). This was the beating heart of railroading for our region, and is still significant in that field.
DANSVILLE covered our modern Dansville, Fremont, and Wayland, with parts of Howard and Cohocton along with North Dansville and Ossian (Livingston County) plus Burns (in Allegany). Here we find the gorge of Stony Brook, and much of our rich muckland.
FREDERICKSTOWN (now Wayne) was spelled just about any way you wanted. All that’s left in Steuben County are the Towns of Wayne and Bradford. But it also included what we know as the Schuyler County Towns of Tyrone, Reading, Orange, and some of Dix, AND the Yates County Towns of Barrington, Starkey, and the part of Jerusalem covering most of Keuka Bluff. Keuka, Waneta, and Lamoka Lakes largely bound Wayne and Bradford.
MIDDLETOWN is now Addison. Back then it stretched over today’s Addison, Cameron, Rathbone, Thurston, Tuscarora, and Woodhull, plus parts of Troupsburg and Jasper. With Major General W. W. Averell, and the men of Troupsburg who suffered exactly 50% casualties, “Middletown” contributed mightily to saving the nation in the Civil War.
PAINTED POST is now the Town of Corning. Besides that Town it covers our Hornby, Campbell, Erwin, Corning City, Lindley, and Caton. Besides being the seat of our glass industry, old Painted Post also has our only institution of higher education, SUNY’s Corning Community College.
And that ain’t all! Our sheriff’s office is also 225 years old! Some of our sheriffs have been very prominent men, including Dugald Cameron, for whom a Town was named. John Kennedy and John Magee were heroes in the War of 1812. Magee, who also served two terms in Congress, was the last sheriff to be appointed and the first to be elected… not to mention building the 1831 Magee House, formerly Davenport Library and now the Steuben County History Center. When WVIN radio host Dave Taylor-Smith was blocked by his doctor, Sheriff Jim Allard stepped up on less than 24-hour’s notice, and became the first person other than Dave to “jump in the lake” (Salubria) to raise “Tyrtle Beach” funds to support youth programs.
And don’t stop yet! Benjamin Patterson Inn also got its start in 1796. Charles Williamson had it built and installed “Hunter Patterson” to run it, offering a hostelry that would prove a key link in the European development of the area. It’s now Corning’s oldest building, at the heart of Heritage Village of the Southern Finger Lakes, showing local life in days gone by – all the way back to when George Washington was president. I’m a member! Have been for twenty years! You might like it. I sure do.

If You’re Looking for Art, Try Dansville

If you’re looking for art, try Dansville.

*That may seem like a surprise, since many people know Dansville as a pleasant small town with no particular artistic pretensions. But times are changing, so Dansville is more and more an easy-access venue for art.

*Last week we visited Dansville ArtWorks, a gallery on Main Street, for the 29-piece Fourth Annual Juried Photography Exhibit, along with the Mert Wager Restrospective.

*Photography’s a funny medium to judge or jury. First of all, you’ve got color photos, or black-and-white photos – how do you compare? Likewise how do you rate the relative merits of a landscape, a portrait, and a still life?

*So just to plunge into what really caught my eye – “Tender Moment” by John Adamski seized me. John captured two small fawns with their mother, a thrilling sight and a thrilling photo regardless of its artistic metits. But in this case the centrally-placed mother was alert, closely watching the photographer, with the two young ones carelessly confident in their mother’s care. I found it outstanding.

*Scott Hooker’s photo of spring thaw at Canadice Lake Inlet also got my attention. The main matter of the photo is swiftly-flowing water, but here and there the flow is punctuated by ice frozen around obstacles… water racing forward, and water standing still, impeding the flow.

*Nicole Walker’s nighttime “Rochester Skyline,” with its vivid colors exploding from the dark, unsurprisingly received an honorable mention. First place went to a black-and-white still life called “Screws” – a collection of flat-headed wood screws, arranged like the skyscrapers of a great city. It sounds odd, but it certainly caught my attention from across the room, so for whatever it’s worth I can support the award. Tom Kredo’s the photographer.

*In second place was John Adamski’s “Appalachian Sunset.” A lot of Appalachian sunsets have been immortalized over the years. This one I found very interesting because all that was shaded seemed to form one unbroken field of black. The outboard motorboat, for instance, showed no color and no detail beyond its silhouette, in the blue lake. It was a very interesting piece of work.

*L. Mert Wager, a Buffalo Mohawk lineman, taught himself to paint at the age of 40. His exhibit (paints and prints) starts off with a bang in the person of a red-breasted nuthatch, perching in its traditional head-low position but with sky beneath. That’s the first painting in the exhibit, and it drew me over instantly, and it’s defintely my favorite. I also loved the kookaburra, though I confess to having no idea what a kookaburra looks like.

*“Almost There” really gets across its concept, with a mounted cowboy leading a pack pony as he and his two animals trudge through deep snow. They’re crowding into the right lower quadrant, and ahead of them fenceposts just peek above the snow – they’re almost there. And the other three-fourths of the painting suggest all the terrain that they’ve struggled through to get to this point.

*A man and two horses also dominate “Sugar Time,” in which the man on the loaded sleigh strains forward, even as his horses plod through the snow.

*I don’t hunt, but I really liked the composition in “One Up,” where hunter, dog, and pheasant are all joined together, but each in his own space is a solo performer. In “Still Life Granny Apples,” the composition (logs, apples, blossoms, boughs) is islanded and spotlighted by surrounding white space.

*The photo exhibit is up until April 27, and the Wager exhibit through May. There are also works of numerous nedia for sale by local artists.

*While you’re in town, you might try the Fairy Doors walking tour – miniature fantasy doorways in places in or along Main Street. The library also features changing exhibits, and so does the historical society. On top of that there’s public statuary, in the person of a Civil War soldier. So, to circle back to my original statement, if you’re looking for art, try Dansville.

“Our Gem — Stony Brook State Park”

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By many reckonings Niagara Falls is the first state park in America, although quite a few people assume that it’s a National Park. The huge Adirondack State Park is protected, along with much of the Catskills, by our state constitution. And what would Manhattan be like without that vast and aptly-named Central Park, which is a city park?

Watkins Glen State Park is a money magnet for our region, bringing in visitors from around the world. (“I’ve been to Hawaii,” one lady told me on the trail one day. “I’ve been in their gorges, and they’re nothing like this.”) Bath and Hammondsport each have a Pulteney Park, and each one focuses and defines its community.

Parks are vital aspects of our lives. Watkins Glen State Park preserves the gorge. The state recently preserved the shorelines of Hemlock and Canadice Lakes, in the most significant park acquisition of almost a century.

Besides their preservation purpose, parks also serve recreational purposes – hunting, fishing, hiking, boating, birding, swimming, picknicking, just plain getting outdoors. In the 1920s many people still thought of cities as an aberration, and worried about the people who were forced to live there. Surely they needed life-giving infusions of countryside, lest they turn into Morlocks or something?

Such thinking in the 1920s helped drive creation of our modern state park system, ironically under the leadership of two quintessential city boys, Al Smith and Robert Moses.

It was Moses himself who selected the site for Stony Brook Park, and Governor Smith bought the original 250 acres for a dollar. One of the reasons for the selection was that it was, like Letchworth, an easy drive from Rochester. (Besides providing an outlet for city folks, the new system was also designed to stimulate better roads.) Another reason for selection, of course, was that marvelous gorge.

Situated about midway between Letchworth and Watkins Glen, Stony Brook often gets overlooked. It shouldn’t. It was a significant picnic and party destination at least as far back as the 1880s. Most people couldn’t swim back then, but as the 20th century advanced, Stony Brook swimming lessons… in COLD water… became a staple of life for many area kids.

Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt visited the park… still largely undeveloped… as part of celebrations for Clara Barton, who had founded the first American Red Cross chapter in the nearby Village of Dansville, in Livingston County. (The park itself is in the TOWN of Dansville in STEUBEN County.) F.D.R. and President Hoover spoke via telephone as part of the ceremony.

Much of the park, though, was still undeveloped once Roosevelt replaced Hoover in the White House. C.C.C. ( Civilian Conservation Corps) youngsters created much of the park infrastructure as New Deal work projects during the Great Depression. In those ugly years Steuben County also operated a transient camp in the park, providing temporary shelter for hundreds of homeless people.

Acquired in 1928, the park today has 577 acres, with facilities for camping, swimming, bowhunting, hiking, nature study, cross-country skiing, and more. On Friday, January 6 we’ll kick off our Steuben County Historical Society Winter Lecture Series with “Our Gem: Stony Brook Park,” an illustrated presentation by Jane Schryver and Paul Hoffman. The 4 PM event in Bath Fire Hall is free and open to the public – we hope we’ll see you there!