Tag Archives: Kirk House

In the Days of the River Arks

In days gone by, the Conhocton and Canisteo Rivers were the heads of one of the nation’s great trade routes.

*Charles Williamson commissioned a study on clearing the rivers to make them navigable by arks of 75 by 16 feet. George McClure built the first ark, and made the first experimental voyage, loaded with lumber, staves, and wooden pipe. It took a half hour to get five miles from Bath, where they grounded… then about six days to get from there to Painted Post, where they waited another four or five days for the river to rise. “We made a fresh start, and in four days ran 200 miles.” Aiming for Baltimore he got grounded near Harrisburg and negotiated a decent deal for his cargo there, having established that the thing could be done.

*Doing business in Bath and Dansville with his brother Charles, McClure took in 4000 bushels of wheat and 200 barrels of pork. He built four arks at Arkport, and these were the first to navigate the Canisteo, running all the way down to Baltimore. One winter he built eight arks at Bath and four on the Canisteo, shipping flour to Baltimore and wheat to Columbia. “The river was in fine order and he made a prosperous voyage and a profitable sale.”

*He also bought fur, pelts, and deer hams, shipping them downriver. One year he boarded 40 head of “the best and largest cattle” onto arks, shipped them to Columbia, Pennsylvania, and drove them overland to Philadelphia, “where they sold to good advantage.”

*On April 4, 1800, Friedrich Barthles sent out two arks from the outlet of Mud Lake (Bradford): one built by Colonel Williamson, 72’ x 15’; the other by Nathan Harvey, 71’ x 15’. When he needed water, Mr. Barthles opened a gate at the mill pond. “Thus it was ascertained to a certainty, that, by improving those streams, we could transport our produce to Baltimore – a distance of 300 miles – in the spring of the year, for a mere trifle.”

*Christopher Hurlbut built an ark in Arkport in 1800, sending it to Baltimore laden with wheat. He built a storehouse on the east bank of the Canisteo, to which came farmers from Genesee Valley with butter, cheese, wheat, corn, etc., “waiting only for the ‘Moving of the Waters.’” Thousands of bushels were shipped annually, as many as 11 arks a year.

*Hurlbut also “Obtained the passage of an act by the Legislature of this State making the Canisteo river a ‘public highway,’ and made it a channel of commerce down whose waters were borne much of the products of the ‘Genesee Country.’”

*Storehouses went up in Bath, including three at the foot of Ark Street. Sleighs crowded in from Geneva and the Genesee. In spring arks were floated to the storehouses, grain was poured into them in bulk, and the pilots, “with their jolly helpers,” began their returnless journey. About 1 in 10 “emptied its contents into the river.” “When Bath was on the eve of realizing Williamson’s expectations, the canals were constructed; and lo! its glory departed. The ark of the Conhocton passed into history; the rats took possession of the storehouses; the roofs caved in; the beams rotted away, and what was left of them tumbled into ruins.” And so an age came to an end.

*At 7:00 on Thursday, October 17 I’ll be at Finger Lakes Boating Museum, giving a talk on the arks and the arkers from those early days of our region’s history. We hope you’ll join us.

Farming Today

For well over a century, agriculture was the number one business in Steuben County and its neighbors. Far fewer people are engaged today, but what IS the current (and future) state of local agriculture?

*Farms in our area went back to scrub and forest as agriculture dwindled in the 20th century, and the deer came back as the trees grew up. Much of our forest is actually very young – it’s grown up since the Great Depression, or even since the Second World War; starting in the 1950s and 60s, farms went out of cultivation in huge numbers. This is also when the Amish and Old Order Mennonites started coming in. They WANTED small farms that could be operated by a family, and bought land that otherwise had no takers.

*Another significant change took place in the grape and wine sector. Men such as Charles Fournier and Konstantin Frank had pioneered bringing in European strains and producing more premium wines. Along with that specialization, in 1976 Governor Hugh Carey signed a boutique winery act. If you produced at least 51% of your own wine, and kept output under a certain amount each year, you could sell directly to the public, operate a tasting room, pay reduced taxes and fees. As we know, the number of operations has boomed.

*So as we are well into the third century of European-style farming in Steuben County, what do we see? Those marvelous muck lands in the northwest continue to be very productive. The uplands are rather limited in large-scale farming, but Amish and Old Order communities preserve the family farm, often using draft animals. Maple production, often selling raw sap, is important in the southwest. Lumbering has continued on small scale, but dairy has dwindled almost to nothing, though the Dairy Festival continues.

*Only three or four high schools have F.F.A. programs. M. J. Ward closed and dismantled the last grain elevator in Steuben County a few years back, and has now gone completely out of business. The County Fair continues, and while it still has a large agricultural component, it must always appeal to the NON-farm folks to keep the fair running. Interestingly, Steuben County has become one of New York’s most significant hunting areas – number one county in deer take, top five in turkey – BECAUSE so many farms have gone out. Hunting, much of it by out-of-county visitors, pumps a tremendous amount into our economy.

*Besides the small family farms of the conservative anabaptists, and besides the ongoing productive use of the mucklands, there are two possible portents for the future. One is the proliferation of small farmer’s markets, which ties in with the local-food movement and the direct-to-consumer movement, particularly C.S.A’s, such as that operated by the Peace Weavers in Wheeler.

*Secondly, such changes as the transition of Blue Gill Farms, operated by the Weaver family on Mitchellsville Road in Bath. Long a substantial dairy operation, Blue Gill moved out of that ten years back or so. Now they raise hogs for Hatfield, with the pig barns in the hills of Wheeler while they grow much of the feed on the flats in Bath.

*And around Keuka Lake, of course, the story is grapes. Throughout several millennia of human history, steep, inaccessible, or unproductive land has been reserved for grapes and graveyards. Grapes, it was said in the 1870s, were the first thing Pulteney folks ever found to justify the taxes on their land. The Steuben County shield bears a picture of a wheat sheaf. In 1900 it might have been a milk can, and in the 1930s a bushel of potatoes. If the shield were being created today, it might well bear a bunch of grapes!

*At 4 PM Friday, March 1, I’ll be doing a free presentation, “From Wheat to Grapes: The Steuben Farming Story” at Bath Fire Hall, as part of Steuben County Historical Society’s Winter Lecture Series. We hope to see you there!

Trash-Talking Lincoln in the 1860s

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On Friday I’m wrapping up Steuben County Historical Society’s Civil War sesquicentennial series with a presentation on the end of the war, and the death of Lincoln, so I hope you’ll join us. But in the process of doing that research, I found out quite a lot about local OPPOSITION to Lincoln during the war.

We think of our region as being rock-ribbed Republican and dedicated to the abolition of slavery, but that’s wishful thinking. While overall people in the Finger Lakes and Southern Tier supported Lincoln, there was also strong, and even hateful, opposition against him. And the region as a whole was very iffy on abolition.

Newspapers tended to be political party mouthpieces in those days, and the Steuben County seat of Bath had two… the “Courier” for Republicans, and the “Farmer’s Advocate” for Democrats.

The “Advocate” was in something of a bind, wanting to support the war without supporting the president – “Fight against Davis, argue against Lincoln.” They steered a masterly path of applauding Union victories while sneering that the administration had nothing to do with them – our brave soldiers won the fight despite Lincoln’s incompetence.

If Union troops lost, of course that was all Lincoln’s fault. Disastrous defeat at Fredericksburg was a “bloodthirsty atrocity of the radicals” – radicals being those Republicans who, UNlike Lincoln, were strongly committed to abolishing slavery, and doing it fast.

To give them their due, the editors published presidential proclamations in full, even if criticizing them fiercely in other columns. They also insisted that the highly unpopular draft law had been passed in the regular manner, and must be obeyed until and unless set aside by the courts. On July 1, 1863, with Confederate forces rampaging deep into Pennsylvania, “Advocate” editors announced that at the government’s request they were joining a general withholding of information on Union troop movements.

They did tend to overoptimistically view the south’s military condition, reporting in 1862 on the effectiveness of the Confederate draft, the huge size of the Confederate army, and the good provisioning of that army. Not one word of this was true. On July 1, 1863, they proclaimed “Vicksburg is impregnable” and it did in fact manage to hold out for three more days.

In one bizarre 1862 passage they supposedly report rebel prisoners as stating that if the states had been given permission to leave the Union the previous year, they would already have rejoined the Union. The supposed process seems to be (1) the southern states were not even thinking about seceding. (2) But the northern states, apparently out of the blue, told them they couldn’t. (3) So they did. (4) If no one had fussed, they then would have immediately joined back up. This, of course, is gibberish of the type you could ONLY find in an official party paper.

They also mocked Lincoln constantly… his having a bodyguard of troops, which no other president had had; his accent and ruralisms; his looks; his nickname of “Honest” Abe. For good measure they scorned his wife, sneering whenever one of her family members was killed fighting for the south.

And, they stressed that Lincoln’s actions, especially the Emancipation Proclamation, would make it impossible to restore “the Union as it was,” slavery and all. They didn’t face the fact that the south had HAD the Union as it was, and left it.

Unsurprisingly, much of their opposition was racist. They attack African Americans in the foulest and vilest terms – not for them the genteel circumlocutions that ooze from our TV today. In some of their mildest attacks:
“The relation of master and slave is a proper relationship.”
“When the Abolitionists began their crusade against he South, there lived 4,000,000 of as contented, well fed, well clad and well to do peasantry as ever lived on the face of the earth.”
“This war is to ripen into the horrible scenes of St. Domingo.”

To call slaves a contented, well-to-do peasantry is staggering chutzpah.

They seem to think that worst insult they can employ against Republican leaders and supporters is to call them black, which they do frequently, adding that the Republican plan is to bring white working men down to the level of the Negro.

Despite charges that Lincoln is a despot, a tyrant, a dictator, such papers abounded… I understand the one in Penn Yan was also vitriolic. Erastus Corning was a public and prominent Lincoln critic. A regular Congressional election took place in 1862, and Lincoln’s party lost ground, while still retaining control. Despite the best (or worst) efforts on the part of the “Advocate,” Steuben County increased its Republican vote in 1863.

Lincoln also beat off challengers from within his own party in 1864, and then won re-election against a popular general. But a month and ten days into his second term, a southern fanatic murdered him. That’s what we’ll be talking about 4 PM Friday, September 11 at Bath Fire Hall. Hope to see you there.