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!