While real estate is proverbially about location, community growth and economic development is often about transportation. Steuben County got its start and grew thanks to river transportation, then crashed when the Erie Canal rerouted the traffic.
We didn’t really recover well until the Erie Railroad main line came through in the early 1850s, quickly followed by its Rochester branch. We can see the impact of this new technology from the fact that there are two cities and 14 incorporated villages in Steuben County – and except for Hammondsport, every one of them was on the Erie Railroad.
Railroads made enough of an impact to leave their marks on our modern-day maps. In addition to the Erie, our other major line was the Delaware, Lackawanna, and Western, or DL&W… the two lines merged in 1960 to form the Erie-Lackawanna. This helps explain why Bath has an Erie Avenue, a Delaware Avenue, a Lackawanna Street, and a Railroad Avenue. Wayland has Lackawanna Street AND Lackawanna Avenue.
Canisteo has Depot Street, and Almond (Town of Hornellsville) has Depot Road, while Cameron has Depot Street and Railroad Street.
What we now call Denison Parkway in Corning used to be Erie Avenue, with multiple tracks running right down the thoroughfare. Corning has a different Erie Street now, plus a Delaware Avenue and a Lackawanna Street. (In 1942, there was also a Lackawanna Avenue.) Then there’s Roundhouse Lane, running to where the old Fall Brook-New York Central roundhouse stood. Trolley Lane, which skirts Denison Park on two sides, memorializes the days when the trolley connected Corning, Elmira, Watkins Glen, and Painted Post.
Hornell of course was a major center for the Erie Railroad, and site of the line’s main repair shops, so it’s unsurprising that the Hornell map still shows Erie Court and Erie Avenue. There’s also a Depot Street, a Delaware Avenue, and a Shawmut Drive, for the Pittsburg and Shawmut, which ran up the western edge of the County. Division Street perhaps notes the fact that Hornell was the meeting place of two divisions on the Erie Railroad. Transit Drive may recall the trolley line that joined Hornell with Canisteo.
Of course these types of names spread out much farther afield than Steuben County. Those approaching Rochester from the south encounter Lehigh Station Road, while the Fairport area has Railroad Mills Road. Auburn has Train Drive, Cortland’s got Delaware Avenue, Elmira has its Erie Street, its Junction Street, its Railroad Avenue, and its Pennsylvania Avenue (which might refer to the railroad or the state). Geneva offers Railroad Place and Honeoye Falls enjoys Lehigh Street, while Ithaca has Delaware Avenue. Part of Horseheads is named Holding Point.
Many communities have a Canal Street (Geneva, Elmira) that goes way, way back. Some (Hornellsville) have an Airport Road that’s relatively recent. But LOTS of towns have names remembering railroads and their glory days. Which tells us which form of transportation most deeply touched people’s individual lives.
Tag Archives: Erie Railroad
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.
A Stroll in Hornell
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Once upon a time, it was just an inconsequential hamlet in Hornellsville. Then the Erie Railroad came through, and by 1851 Erie had located its main repair shops in the isolated settlement. The little hamlet became a much bigger place, and then an incorporated village, and then the City of Hornellsville, finally changed a few years later to our modern City of Hornell.
*This was a pretty prosperous place, thanks to the railroad. Shade trees lining the streets inspired the nickname “Maple City.” An electric trolley line ran around and about in the city, and even dipped into a “subway” under Main Street, and connected with Canisteo.
*The young city had monumental churches, a Catholic hospital, a Catholic orphanage, an armory, an impressive school system, multiple bands, and a very busy Y.M.C.A. Manufacturers made silk, and even “Ferris wheels.” Maude Adams, John L. Sullivan, Tom Thumb, and even Oscar Wilde trod the boards at Shattuck Opera House. (No clue, unfortunately, what Oscar thought about Hornell.) Aviation pioneer Charlie Day went to Hornell High School. Former flying star Blanche Stuart Scott ended her broadcasting days on Hornell radio, and future TV star Bob Crane started his.
*For many years Hornell held its own annual fair to rival the one in Bath. The fairground made a convenient landing place in 1916 when Ruth Law flew in non-stop from Chicago in an open biplane, setting the American distance record and the world women’s distance record. Cal Rodgers stopped in Hornell on America’s first coast-to-coast flight (which took three months).
*U.S.S. Hornell, a tug in the “Erie Navy,” once plied waters of the Port of New York. For many years Hornell was home to minor-league baseball – future all-stars Don Zimmer and Charlie Neal both played for Hornell in 1950.
*The 1935 flood shattered the city. New Deal flood control programs insured that 1972 wasn’t as bad, but three men surveying damage were killed in a helicopter crash. The flood also spelled doom for what was then the Erie Lackawanna Railroad… which meant declining population and prosperity in Hornell.
*Things have come back since then – not to the glory days of the Erie, but then railroads just aren’t what they used to be. Alstom is busy manufacturing and assembling traction engines, railway cars, and passenger locomotives. The Hornell Erie Depot Museum is a “must visit” for railfans. The city’s peak population was 16,300 in 1930 (also pretty much the peak of railroads), and 8,600 in the latest census.
*It’s gratifying to stroll around the city center, where the streets and the sidewalks are wide enough to give you a fine feeling of openness. I wander in and out of antique shops (rooting out old comic books) and little eateries, and if I really want to know the time, I check the town clock.
*A few steps away from the city center the 1916 post office, no longer in use, is an imposing edifice from the age of imperialism. It was created under the watchful eye of Steuben County native James A. Wetmore, Acting Supervising Architect of the Treasury Department. A little farther down Seneca Street is the still-active 1894 armory. Off a little on Genesee Street is Hornell Public Library, in its lovely 1911 Carnegie Building.
*Hornell has a downtown walk-in movie theater… a daily newspaper (our sister publication, the Evening Tribune)… a Catholic school (St. Ann’s Academy)… Steuben County’s only formal Jewish congregation (Temple Beth-El)… a much-loved St. Patrick’s Day parade… and the longest-serving mayor (Shawn Hogan) in New York history. (His father was mayor too.) Hornell is well worth a stop and a stroll. I like it there. Maybe you would too.