Tag Archives: Montezuma National Wildlife Refuge

The C.C.C. Left Its Mark — on Us

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In the midst of the calamitous Great Depression, President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “New Deal” poured forth new programs designed to put people back to work. One of the most fondly-remembered New Deal programs was the Civilian Conservation Corps.
While some companies (as the local units were called) were reserved for Great War veterans, most C.C.C.’s were older male teens who did a year’s service (usually not in their home states), simultaneously getting training. They were clothed, bedded, boarded, and paid, but most of the money went to their parents, who thus had more income and fewer expenses. In addition to that it removed the boys from the job market for a year, making job-seeking just a little bit easier for the unemployed. Photos show that the local contingents were racially integrated, but that wasn’t the case everywhere. (There was a smaller similar program for women, jokingly called the she-she-she, but I don’t believe it operated in our area.)
The main C.C.C. camp for Steuben County was in Kanona, with a “side camp” at Painted Post and temporary camps when and where useful. (The Kanona facility later became a P.O.W. camp in World War II, and then a seasonal camp for migrant farm workers.)
A company of C.C.C. spent the better part of a year camped near Addison with the idea of putting a dam across the Tuscarora Creek, but it was finally decided that the ground was unsuitable. C.C.C. also built a camp for men coming in to construct the Arkport Dam.
Schuyler County had Triple-C camps in Watkins Glen (later Hidden Valley 4-H camp) and Burdett. Their legacy includes a lot of the work in the state park – buildings, trails, stonework, bridges (including the Sentry Bridge near the entrance to the Gorge Trail), and more.
C.C.C. and W.P.A. (Works Progress Administration) also did quite a lot of development in Stony Brook State Park, though with the passage of time it’s hard to tell which group did what. Much of the older park infrastructure, including the two Rim Trails, comes from this period.
In the Ithaca area, according to the Ithaca Journal, C.C.C. fellows were “trucked to work sites in Enfield Glen (later Robert H. Treman), Buttermilk Falls, and Taughannock Falls State Parks. There they excavated flagstone and did masonry work, blasted, excavated fill, graded, planted trees, shrubs and grass, built roads, bridges, and water systems, erected park buildings, and – after the disastrous floods of July 1935 and August 1937 – repaired damaged facilities that in many cases they had only recently completed.” The Gorge Trail at Treman comes from this work.
C.C.C. also completed major development at Allegany State Park near Salamanca. Sections of the Finger Lakes Trail and North Country Trail were originally created by the C.C.C.
Many of the state parks had been designated, if not fully executed, by Robert Moses back in the early 1920s. What we now call Montezuma National Wildlife Refuge, in marshes at the north end of Cayuga Lake, got its start in 1937. C.C.C. established a camp at Montezuma and performed much of the earliest work, including creating low dikes to restore the historic marsh area.
And that ain’t all – as we’ll see next week! In addition to all the work manifestly done, C.C.C. played an indirect role in the winning of World War II, and that will also be part of next week’s story.

Glorious Montezuma — Our Own National Refuge

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Couple of weeks ago, on a beautiful fall Saturday, we rolled on up to Seneca Falls (and beyond!) to visit Montezuma Wildlife Refuge.

*For the visitor, perhaps the greatest thing about Montezuma in the fall is the huge numbers of waterfowl and wading birds. Another fellow who was there volunteers at Missisquoi National Wildlife Refuge in Vermont, on Lake Champlain. When asked what brought him down to our area he answered simply, “This.”

*The fact that a fellow who spends his days in a National Wildlife Refuge would make a 300-mile trip to see THIS refuge speaks volumes.

*Montezuma and Missisquoi are both on major tracks of the Atlantic Flyway, that broad sky path from Greenland and the Arctic Ocean down to Mexico and the Caribbean. It’s an exhausting journey, and refuge is he right word. They are safe spaces where the birds may touch down to rest and recover for a night, or for a few days.

*Although other birds and butterflies use the flyway… we saw a monarch, and a monarch caterpillar on the milkweed… Montezuma managers engineer the site to maintain and expand the Cayuga Marshes, where shore birds and waterfowl have landed for millennia.

*After admiring osprey nests along Routes 5 and 20, we stopped at the very first pool, just past the entrance. The pool was packed, and immediately I spotted some green-winged teals. Not to mention mallards, black ducks, Canada geese, greater yellowlegs, and multitudinous gulls.

*Climbing back into the car, we headed down a short distance to the visitors’ center, where a birder had a spotter scope set up on a bald eagle perched on a distant branch, and was kind enough to give anyone a view. Here on the deck of the center you’re raised up a bit, giving you a better view of the pools and of the surrounding countryside. Sometimes we’ve watched deer from here, but not today.

*Today there were all the friends that we’d seen at the first pool, plus redheads, plus lots of small waders including snipe, plus killdeer… hundreds on hundreds of birds, mostly on their way to the south, coming in honking or quacking or squawking, then spreading their wings and shoving out their webbed feet as they glided the last few yards, splashed down, and within seconds were slowly and serenely sailing along.

*On this gorgeous day we walked the mile-long Seneca Trail, past a lone guitarist serenading the world from an observation tower. There were still blossoms, and there were still butterflies, while songbirds flitted in and out of the reeds and tall grass. A great blue heron strutted through the Cayuga-Seneca Barge Canal. Catbirds, robins, and blue jays vociferated in the trees. Back at the visitor center a northern harrier glided just above the reeds, creating a rolling stir among the birds in the water.

*We drove out on the long loop through the refuge, seeing coots, egrets, and cormorants as we drove, then doubled back to Seneca Falls for pizza before beginning our drive home to Bath.

*Bald eagles were established at Montezuma in hopes of repopulating them in New York, and the eagles we see in the Southern Tier today very likely descend from that flock. We also have the Iroquois National Wildlife Refuge within driving distance. Back in March we spent three days at Pelican Island – the very first National Wildlife Refuge, created by Theodore Roosevelt in 1903. The island itself lies in the Indian River Lagoon, which has just been lashed by Hurricane Matthew. As I write, we still wait for news. We hope that that wonderful place, so foundational to our nation’s history, has not been badly scathed.