The Finger Lakes Boating Museum finally has a home, set to open for the public on June 21. The Meade family has gifted the museum with part of the old Taylor Wine facility in Pleasant Valley.
The extension of the vale of Keuka Lake, Pleasant Valley connects the north-south lake (at Hammondsport) with the east-west Conhocton River (which eventually flows to the Chesapeake) at Bath. Long before the coerced dispossession of the Seneca, a significant Indian trail ran through the valley, roughly following our current County Route 88, then divided down each shore as do our current state routes 54 and 54A. Once the Crooked Lake Canal was established (1831), the produce of five counties traveled down Pleasant Valley to Hammondsport (a true port in those days) for transshipment northward into the Erie Canal system.
What’s now Route 88 was the main road between Bath and Hammondsport… the road on which teen-aged Glenn Curtiss pedaled his bicycle, and along which Alexander Graham Bell motored to inspect Curtiss’s pioneer airplanes. The Bath & Hammondsport Railroad followed the same route.
The little hamlets of Rheims and Pleasant Valley were communities of their own in those days, with a grange, a depot, a cemetery, and a school… first a plank structure, then an octagon, then a lovely four-room school which operated until about 1960. Land agent Charles Williamson donated the school-and-cemetery lot (on behalf of the investors in Britain) back in the 1790s. The grange and the Rheims depot still stand, along with the Stony Brook Farm barn, made world-famous as the backdrop to Curtiss’s dramatic flights in 1908.
The grape-and-wine story starts in earnest in the late 1850s, and when it came, it came quickly. The 1860 state gazetteer makes no mention at all of grapes on Keuka Lake, but the 1868 county directory shows 110 vineyards in the town of Urbana alone! In addition, of course, are coopers, basketmakers, and a whole panoply of support services.
And there are the wineries themselves. Pleasant Valley Wine Company (1859) was almost the first, and is now the oldest — still US Bonded Winery #1 for its state and federal district. An Ohio wine industry had started about a decade earlier, importing European winemakers to take the lead. Blight wrecked the Ohio vineyards just as the Keuka vineyards were getting started, making those winemakers suddenly available… and helping to explain the European feel of the oldest buildings.
The companies bought and sold each other (and their structures) over the years. Names waxed, waned, revived, and changed. For the FLBM property, the most significant names are Columbia, Taylor, Great Western, and Pleasant Valley.
In 1919, as World War I was ending and Prohibition beginning, Walter Taylor bought the Columbia Winery; he would sell the Bully Hill homestead ten years later. Since so much of his business was in grape juice and sacramental wines, he was somewhat insulated from Prohibition. Son Greyton proposed the famous “Taylor Wine Juices” promotion, which were kits for legal home winemaking. Greyton’s brother Fred was one of five new owners who revived the Bath and Hammondsport Railroad after the catastrophic 1935 flood.
The original Walter Taylor died in 1934, and the firm continued as a private family company. In 1936 they began the manufacture of champagne, and in 1940 dropped non-alcoholic products. A stock offering in 1961 raised capital to buy the Pleasant Valley Wine Company, with Greyton as manager. Eventually the family sold out to corporate ownership, and for a time Taylor was the largest employer in Steuben County, after the Corning Glass Works. But a succession of corporate owners neglected and finally closed the operation, perhaps to reduce competition. Mike Doyle, who had been part of the operation, bought the PV label and revived it once Mercury bought the properties.
Pleasant Valley is a very special place, and it’s always been recognized as such. Finger Lakes Boating Museum will make an outstanding addition to the community.