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Join Us for a Historic Walk in Arkport!

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In the beginning, there was – muck!
“Muck” is the western New York name for a rich, silty soil that’s really good for raising crops. In Steuben County it’s mostly in the northwest corner, then extends on into Allegany, Livingston, and beyond.
Which helps explain why Arkport became a community, and how it got its name. Arkport’s “Old Main Street” was a well-traveled Native American footpath in the days before white people muscled in. (Today’s Route 36 roughly follows that old trail.) A community was created here because it was on the land route, but ALSO because it was the head of navigation on the Canisteo River.
In other words this is far as you can go upstream, and still be able to launch large “arks.” And large they were – hundred-foot monstrosities, built with the abundant local timber, laden with a year’s produce, and then poled or drifted as far down as Maryland. They’d sell their goods wherever the got a good enough price for them… then sell the “ark” for the lumber… and walk back home.
Dozens of arks would lie up, waiting for the spring freshets to raise the river, and speed the flow, so they could make their “returnless journey.” The Wadsworth brothers hauled their produce down from Geneseo to the “ark-port,” and so did just about everyone else in the region.
All well and good until the Erie Canal opened in 1825, killing the need for river traffic and impoverishing the Southern Tier. Arkport folks took advantage of a bad situation to move the river a quarter-mile westward – formerly a mighty highway, it had become only a source of floods.
So things lay fallow (not to mention quiet) until the Erie Railroad came through in the 1850s. Arkporters again had an easy outlet for their produce, not to mention passenger travel to Buffalo on one end, and New York City on the other. A hundred years later, rail traffic was less important because HIGHWAY travel, with individual motor vehicles, had taken over. The state created the new Route 36, and while Arkport continued as a farming and retail center, it also became a bedroom community, fit for the baby boom.
We’ll get a glimpse of this on Friday, September 16, when Steuben County Historical Society and Canisteo Valley Historical Society team up to lead a historic walking tour through the village. Among other things we’ll get a look at the Hurlbut House, which is about 220 years old, making it one of the oldest houses… more, one of the oldest STRUCTURES… in Steuben County.
Along with this we’ll see “Queen Anne” style houses along East Avenue, where the village started to extend about 1880. In keeping with the post-Civil War economic boom, this is a playful style – often asymmetrical, sometimes with different materials for different sections of the house, often with repeated features – such as windows – varying from floor to floor.
Farther out on East Ave is Arkport Central School, built in 1937 with help from the state (financially encouraging centralization), and from the New Deal in Washington, designed to put people back to work on construction projects. It’s been expanded and renovated repeatedly in the past 85 years, but it’s still a busy public school – a pretty good use of that money, back in the Great Depression!
After taking in some baby boom architecture, we plan to stop at “The Grove,” site of picnics, sports, Chautauquas, band concerts, and all the other joys of small-town life in the nineteenth century – and in the twenty-first, too. The free walk starts 4 PM at the village hall on Park Avenue. We hope we’ll see you in Arkport!

Join Us for a Walk Through Prattsburgh

When I was growing up in rural Rhode Island, many of our neighbors were Pratts and Wheelers. That’s one of numerous reasons I feel at home here.

*Silas Wheeler, who founded the Town that bears his name, was also from Rhode Island. Joel Pratt, first white resident in Prattsburg, had New England roots.

*(Both Towns were part of Bath when Towns were created in 1796, and have been separated out since then.)

*Mr. Pratt and his family are buried in the Pioneer Cemetery on State Route 53, at the southern edge of the unincorporated settlement of Prattsburgh (with an h, unlike the Town), on land he gifted to the community.

*The settlement itself (part of the larger Town of the same name) grew up around the Pratt farm, a little before the War of 1812. It lies at the foot of a steep slope to the north, toward Naples, Ingleside, and Canandaigua. I speculate that this slope led travlers to overnight in Prattsburgh, or at least to change to a fresh team of horses, mules, or oxen. Assuming I’m correct, this would have meant steady business.

*Mr. Pratt saw to it that a church was soon established… Congregationalist, later changed to Presbyterian. Baptist, Methodist and Catholic churches followed, and an academy was established in 1823.

*This was an extraordinary institution, for it offered what amounted to a high school education at a time when many communities were still struggling to set up one-room schools. Narcissa Prentiss (later Whitman) and Henry Spalding are perhaps the school’s most famed alumni, being early explorers and missionaries in the American northwest, where Narcissa and her husband were killed. Franklin Academy would eventually become the public central school.

*The original Academy building burned in 1923 (exactly a hundred years after its founding), along with the next-door Presbyterian church. Both were rebuilt and reopened with considerable fanfare, and both are still in use almost a hundred years later (with additions and alterations).

*Also still in use (with considerable alteration) is the 1860s St. Patrick’s church. It’s no surprise, given the name, that the original congregation was largely Irish-American. They built the church themselves, and it’s now the oldest Catholic church edifice in Steuben County.

*It’s located maybe a quarter-mile down the street from the Baptist church. A hundred years ago there must have been considerable tension between the two, as the Baptists welcomed a Ku Klux Klan delegation during a service in the 1920s.

*Prattsburgh has the original (and still operating) Air Flo location (manufacturing truck equipment) and is also home to Empire Access, the telecommunications provider. It has a library and a small supermarket (with ice cream stand), a Dollar General, a gas station-convenience store, and a large grassy tree-lined town square.

*On Friday, August 10 I hope to be leading a free historic walk of Prattsburgh, sponsored by Steuben County Historical Society. This was put off one week because of weather, but we expect to gather at the bandstand at 4 PM. Maybe you’d like to join us.

Join Us For a Walk and Some Stories — in Bath

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So how about Bath? Arch Merrill, half a century ago, called it “the grande dame of the Southern Tier.” Older folks remember it as the region’s market town, lit up like a Christmas tree on Friday and Saturday nights as farm families came in from miles around. Charles Williamson planned it as the great metropolis of western New York, and accordingly laid it out with the green squares and broad straight boulevards that it still enjoys.

*Bath is the seat of Steuben, home to the clerk, the courthouse, the surrogate, the county office building, the prison, the county historical society – not to mention the county fairgrounds. It’s the place where people go to get help.. from the ARC, the V.A., the Davenport Hospital, and (from 1863 to 1958) the Davenport Home (or orphanage) for Girls.

*At 4 PM on Friday (June 2) I’m leading a free historic walk through the village, sponsored by Steuben County Historical Society. We’re going to start at Historical Society headquarters, the 1831 Magee House (old Bath library, next to the new Bath library). It’s going to be kind of a mixed bag, taking in architecture, church history, transportation history, community history, and tales of days gone by.

*Take Pulteney Square, for instance. This is said to be where Charles Williamson and his party first started clearing trees in 1793, making space for the new home that he had already named Bath. Until 1910 the Land Office faced the Square, still selling off those 1.2 million acres that Williamson represented. Desperate farmers sent angry delegates where after the Erie Canal opened and collapsed their land values. They demanded, and finally received, revaluations on their mortgages.

*William Jennings Bryan thundered forth here in the 1900 presidential campaign, condemning imperialism and calling for a government that worked on behalf of its people.

*The courthouse faces the Square from the east side. This is where draft contingents gathered every month during World War II, to be sworn in and then marched (very badly, I suppose) to the depot and off to their fates, while the Old-Timers Band (augmented by a few callow youths awaiting their own call-ups) serenaded them.

*John Magee erected the large brick building facing the Square from the west as home for the Bank of Steuben, the first bank in this county. He built it at the same time as he built the Magee House, and later generations would know it as the Masonic temple.

*Facing the Square from the south is the magnificent First Presbyterian Church, with its rose window, its monumental stonework, and the carillon that from time to time fills the Square with music.

*Running straight north from the Square is Liberty Street, long the business and shopping district of Bath and indeed, as we said earlier, of the whole countryside. Alexander Graham Bell knew this street, while Glenn Curtiss and Charles Champlin knew it intimately. Civil War general William Woods Averell made his home on Liberty Street. James Wetmore, who grew up in Bath and became Acting Supervising Architect of the Treasury Department, made sure that Liberty Street got a fine new post office in 1928. He came to lay the cornerstone himself, and treasured that trowel forever after.

*Liberty Street is where you went to the movies (at the Babcock); where you bought shoes (from Orr’s or Castle’s); where you sent or received funds at Western Union; where you got your prescriptions (at Dildine’s, among others); where you did your Christmas shopping (at Grant’s), got an ice cream (the Olympia), grabbed some lunch, or even had Thanksgiving dinner (at the Chat). You could even go bowling on Liberty Street.

*You can do Town or Village business on Liberty Street, or get help from the Village police. Up at the north end, you can go to church (Methodist or Episcopal). Take a few more steps, and until fairly recently you could go to school. A few steps more, down East Washington, and you could go to the fair… since before the Civil War.

*All in all, Bath is worth a visit! Come join us, hear some stories, and share a few of your own.

Come and See — Canisteo!

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We very reasonably begin the Steuben County story with Charles Williamson establishing Bath in 1793. But of course people had been living here for thousands of years, and in particular European-descended people were already living here before Williamson arrived. Europeans had been living in Canisteo for five years before anybody around here ever heard of Williamson.

*The main Iroquois cities were up at the north end of the lakes, but there was a substantial Seneca town here well before Europeans stared muscling in. There’s a long-standing story that Marquis de Denonville marched down from Montreal and burned the town in 1690. Actually in that year he would have been marching from France, so it’s more likely to have been during a major expedition that he led in 1687, BUT despite the antiquity of the story, many scholars are pretty sure that he never got anywhere near this far.

*There’s another story that “Kanestio Castle” was a fortified town populated by local Indians, refugee Indians, white renegades, and escaped slaves, and was broken up in the 1700s. It’s quite possible that something along that line did in fact happen.

*By 1796 Canisteo was well-populated enough that it became one of the six original towns of Steuben County. I call these “supertowns” – Canisteo gave rise to another half-dozen current towns, plus Hornell and part of Allegany County.

*From an early date Canisteo was was an important point for road and river travel. Stages and mail came overland, while arks and rafts were poled downstream to Chesapeake Bay, carrying the produce of the region. Taking advantage of the same natural paths, the Erie Railroad came through in 1850. The nearby unincorporated hamlet of Hornellsville (today’s City of Hornell) started to boom with Erie work, and neighboring Canisteo grew along with it.

*In later years the New York-Pennsylvania railroad reached Canisteo, as did an electric trolley line linking to Hornell, and also circulating through each community. The Village incorporated, and became the market and business town for the surrounding countryside.

*The rail lines guided pioneer aviators, who made Canisteo a stop on long-distance flights. Cal Rogers cane through when he made America’s first coast-to-coast flight (1911, seven weeks elapsed but only 84 hours in the air). Canisteo at one point in the 1800s even had its own professional minor league baseball team.

*In 1933 Canisteans laid out the living sign on a hillside – 260 pines spelling out “Canisteo.” It was reported in Ripley’s Believe It or Not!, and listed on the National Register of Historic Places. It’s being recreated now (80 years takes its toll), and only the “O” is in place.

*The 1935 flood inundated the whole downtown area knee-deep, and also killed off the New York-Pennsylvania, which was already on its last legs. Two years later, with New Deal help, the community built a fine modern school that’s still in use. A fleet oiler, USS Canisteo, served in the US Navy from 1945 to 1989.

*We’ll be exploring the village in a historic walk (free and open to the public) at 4 PM Friday, May 6, sponsored by Steuben County Historical Society. We’ll meet at Kanestio Historical Society (23 Main Street), and if weather precludes a walk we’ll get a tour of K.H.S. and its museum. We hope you can join us!