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.