Back in February we looked at a half-mile “history hike” on the Finger Lakes Trail (Map M12) in Pleasant Valley, northwest of State Route 54. Today we extend that hike by carefully crossing 54, still on the floor of Pleasant Valley, which already bore that name back in the 1790s. We can still see why.

Making our way up the slope of Mount Washington, pausing now and then to look backward… and depending on the foliage, on our elevation, and on the foliage below… we get a sense of the length and breadth of the valley. Even with a fair amount of acreage devoted to the cemetery, and more to a small airplane landing strip, we can see that much of it is still in cultivation or pasturage, just as it has been for at least 225 years.

On the far slope we can see the large buildings of what used to be the Columbia and Germania wineries. During the Great War Germania changed its name to Jermania, trying to duck anti-teutonic rage. The Taylor family bought Columbia during Prohibition. Since much of their sales lay in non-alcoholic juices, they were shielded somewhat from the Volstead Act and the 19th amendment.

In the 1960s Taylor bought the nearby Pleasant Valley Wine Company, makers of Great Western champagne. Founded a hundred years earlier, “P.V.” remains U. S. Bonded Winery # 1 for its state and federal district.

Taylor grew to be second only to Corning Glass Works as an employer in Steuben County. Distant corporate owners closed it in the 1990s, though local investors retrieved Pleasant Valley from the wreckage, operating from more modern facilities across from the old Columbia site, which is now home to Finger Lakes Boating Museum.

Adjoining P.V. is the Mercury Aircraft campus. Founded in 1920 as the Aerial Service Corporation, Mercury is a historic institution all on its own. Before World War II they built and serviced airplanes, and during the war made mountains of components for Curtiss-Wright in Buffalo. That experience taught them to handle those rare materials plastic and aluminum, which would serve the excellently in the postwar world.

Finally reaching the top of the slope, we walk roughly eastward along the crest to the blue-blazed June Big Trail, leading down to the Glenn Curtiss Museum. Photos from February of 1908 show that this snowy slope was where Glenn Curtiss and his colleagues experimented with hang gliders as research for their first airplane.

“June Bug” was the name of their third airplane, for which Curtiss was lead designer. Their flying field was off to our left, next to a barn that still stands as Building 88 on the Mercury campus. There a thousand people gathered on the Fourth of July, 1908 to watch Curtiss fly the first exhibition flight in America, winging a mile across the valley. Besides garnering a large ostentatious trophy from Scientific American, that flight marked the first time an airplane was filmed in America. It was the start of an aeronautical career that would turn Curtiss into a historical figure and a multimillionaire.

Drawings of Building 88 (the Stony Brook Farm barn) go back to the 1860s, but the Curtiss Museum, originally a wine warehouse, is far newer. The C-46 Curtiss Commando (R5C in navy lingo) cargo/troop carrier out front was one of thousands of such workhorses in World War II – once again, Mercury made components.

Continuing easterly, we should recognize that much of this land was cleared for farm or pasture in the 19th century. In the 1790s, farmers here on Mount Washington spent weeks each winter hauling their grain to Naples by sledge, since there was noplace closer to mill it.

We come out on the Winding Stair Road, and the trail moves southward. Turn northward, though, and you may get a feel for how steep the road becomes. Glenn Curtiss and J. S. Hubbs made local history in 1901, when they drove a one-cylinder Orient Buckboard all the way from bottom to top, ushering in the motor age.

After a northward short walk we can leave the road on the east side to take up the Triad Trail, a short non-F.L.T. spur. The Triad was a 1911 Curtiss model, the first practical amphibious float plane, which could go in the air, on the water, and onto the land. The Trail leads to a height from which we can see the village of Hammondsport, with the cleft of the Glen rising above it, and a good view of Keuka Lake, including where the train chugged up to the village waterfront, where passengers and cargo interchanged onto or off of steamboats making their way up to Penn Yan. (An 1803 schooner preceded the steamboats, which ran until 1922.)

Kingsley Flats down below, bounded by the Inlet, the school and the public beach, was the Curtiss flying field – wheeled airplanes on the land side, seaplanes on the lake side. The first woman pilot in America made her first flight down there – so did the men who created the air arms for the American and Japanese navies. Curtiss created the flying boat seaplane down there. On a typical day before World War I there were more airplanes on the Flats than in most entire countries.

The Indian trail that came along our Fish Hatchery Road reached the head of the lake at today’s Hammondsport, where it divided, just as Routes 54 and 54A do now, into a path hugging the east shore of the lake path and a path hugging the west.

So our walk along this stretch of the F.L.T. embraces the Native footpath; the horse-and-wagon Fish Hatchery Road; the steamboats; the B&H Railroad; the old bicycle sidepath; the birth of motorcyling; the pioneer days of aviation; the new auto age, which made a road up “hospital hill” desirable; and, returning to the earliest days even before the Iroquois, the newer footpath of the Finger Lakes Trail.

It’s not the best hiking weather just now, but better days are coming, so I’ve been looking at some of my maps and doing some planning.

Hiking is a good way to connect with nature, but there are certain stretches that also connect us with history as we hike. And we can pack in a huge amount of history on a single half-mile in section M12 of the Finger Lakes Trail, in the Town of Urbana near Hammondsport.

We can pick up the trail at County Route 88 in Pleasant Valley, just about across from the Urbana town building. Heading westward we pass through a lovely vineyard… how fitting for Pleasant Valley… then dip down a short slope into the woods, and over a footbridge across the Keuka Inlet, near where it receives Mitchellsville Creek. A short distance more, and we connect with history by crossing the old (disused) Bath & Hammondsport Railroad. We’ve been walking more or less in step with the train tracks, the stream, and the Fish Hatchery Road.

All of which illustrates how geography formed the settlement and economic patterns of the area. The rivers and lakes were highways back in the 1790s, and Keuka Lake at Hammondsport was joined to the Conhocton River at Bath by Pleasant Valley… a long portage between the two bodies of water.

Slopes rise on either side, constricting travel. Five highways laid out over centuries overlie each other here, roughly following the stream: a footpath going back probably before Iroquois days; the Fish Hatchery Road; the B&H; a turn-of-the-century bicycle sidepath along the edge of Fish Hatchery; and yet another footpath, the Finger Lakes Trail, proving that the more things change the more they stay the same.

AT LEAST as far back as the 1820s there were schemes to dig a canal along the route… that never happened, but the railroad bridged the gap in the 1870s.

The railroad carried out tons of grapes and numberless gallons of wine, making both enterprises truly successful in the Hammondsport area. They also carried out first motorcycles and then airplanes for Glenn Curtiss. Without the B&H he could not have created his industrial operations. He might have ended his days in obscurity at the bike shop, or he would have had to move… at least to Bath… and make someplace else the “Cradle of Aviation.”

With separate railroads coming in to Penn Yan and Hammondsport, Keuka Lake also became a tourism destination, with visitors connecting from the train to the steamboat, then being whisked away to lakeside resorts. Finger Lakes tourism came to be in the years after the Civil War.

Back at the road you’ll find the lovely Grange hall a few rods down to the left, with wineries and Hammondsport beyond, but dominating all else is Pleasant Valley Cemetery. Charles Williamson gave land in the 1790s for a school-and-cemetery lot. The school continued until the 1950s and was succeeded by a Mennonite church, and that property is now private. But thousands rest in the still-active cemetery, where Glenn Curtiss was brought home in 1930 at the age of 52; ten airplanes flew overhead and dropped flowers on the crowd.

To the right, the road swings around toward the fish hatchery and Bath. Alexander Graham Bell cane this way to visit Glenn Curtiss in 1908, and young Curtiss traveled it himself, on his bike a decade earlier. Charles Champlin in the 1930s biked this way to Bath for cornet lessons… generals and admirals used the route to insect the airplane factory during World War I. Thirty-four year-old lawyer Benjamin Bennett drove by horse this way on business in 1861, becoming the first Hammondsporter to learn that the Civil War had begun. When he got to Bath, he enlisted on the spot.

Continuing eastward on the F.L.T. we cross the very busy State Route 54, which turned Fish Hatchery into a byway when it was opened after World War II. Horses, oxen, mules, and early motor vehicles would not have managed that hill. Modern vehicles do, and that’s also history.