Tag Archives: National Register of Historic Places

Penn Yan — A Place to Ride the Storm

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Last week in this space we took a look at the Pulteney Square Historic District in Hammondsport. (A moment of bragging… the folks pulling the nomination together asked me to take photos of the Square to support their nomination. Mission accomplished!)

*So this week I thought it would make sense to take a trip to Penn Yan and look at Keuka’s OTHER large district on the National Register of Historic Places, at the OTHER end of the lake.

*PENN YAN HISTORIC DISTRICT: THE HISTORY Penn Yan’s district is huge, with 210 historic buildings covering 65 acres. Ever since Yates County was created, Penn Yan has been its seat. And while industry, transportation, and tourism have all been tremendously significant here, Penn Yan still wears its 19-century mantle as a courthouse town… medium in size, conscientious in demeanor, well aware of its past without being marooned in it.

*Grand homes, once-proud hotels, busy commercial blocks, elegant churches, and dignified public buildings all welcome the visitor to Penn Yan. White encroachment started with followers of frontier prophetess Jemima Wilkinson, back when this ground was still in Ontario County (and Ontario itself was still very sketchy).

*The magnet for settlement was Keuka Outlet, the stream that drains Keuka Lake into Seneca. Water power was the name of the game, and mill wheels were soon turning all along the flow.

*THE VISIT. Right in Penn Yan itself you can walk the Keuka Outlet Trail, seeing the old industrial buildings from the river side. This includes the huge Birkett’s Mills, making buckwheat for 220 years. In fact, it runs 16 hours a day when it’s NOT busy, and it’s one of the world’s biggest buckwheat suppliers.

*You can pick up the Outlet Trail on either side of the stream and cross to the other via footbridge. Looking UPstream (toward the lake) you can see the area where the steamboats docked through much of the 19th century, bringing in grapes and wine to be shipped out via rail or canal, and taking out summer visitors who spent the season at hotels or resorts along the lake.

*Where the Trail passes under the Main Street bridge, you can find flight of steps up to street level. Wander across the bridge, look both ways along the Outlet and both ways up and down the street, and you can get some sense of how the town developed.

*Being a hub of lake, canal, rail, and highway travel… plus a courthouse town… demanded LOTS of hotel space… like the gigantic Knapp Hotel, with facade sprawling across two streets. Walk farther up Main to find the 1913 Colonial Revival post office. Another block or two and you’ll find Penn Yan Methodist church, “the castle on the corner” with its breathtaking 1899 stonework and rocket-ship steeple.

*The hotel, the post office, and the church are all signs of growing prosperity roughly between the Civil War and Prohibition. Oliver House (1852) is home to the Yates History Center. Keep walking and you’ll pass the contemporary-style 1959 Presbyterian church and the public library. The oldest section (1905) is one of two Carnegie libraries in the five-county region.

*Past the library is the white-columned Yates County Courthouse, anchoring what’s technically ANOTHER historic district. Many folks won’t consider old courthouses to be worth much more than a glance, but step into the green space in front, and spend some time by memorial after memorial to Yates County folks who went to our country’s wars. During one of those wars, in the 1940s, Arch Merrill wrote that Penn Yan was a good place to ride out the storm. I’d say he had it right.

History Feels at Home in Hammondsport

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A little while back, I thought it might be fun to take a look at locations around Keuka Lake that are on the National Register of Historic Places.

*Think again. There are 42 of them in the six Keuka towns. So I had to pull my horns in a little!

*So I decided to concentrate, for right now, on one historical DISTRICT from the National Register… a place where the public can visit, wander around, and focus on whatever they like.

*PULTENEY SQUARE HISTORIC DISTRICT IN HAMMONDSPORT: THE HISTORY. Pulteney Square has been a center of action for more than a hundred years. Alexander Graham Bell visited here, and so, some say, did the future Duchess of Windsor. Glenn Curtiss’s bike shop once stood on this Square.

*The Square appears on the very earliest plans for this community, even before there was much of a village here. The founders stayed true to the vision, and resisted the profits that could have come from selling off. At first, though, no one paid much attention. Hammondsport was a true port, and Water Street was the business district. Economic changes, and a series of fires, migrated the business up to the Square.

*Excursion tourism began after the Civil War, though locals weren’t sure they approved of having all those strangers around spending money. During World War I Curtiss’s airplane factory overwhelmed the town, as engines roared in test stands all along the slopes. After the war, Hammondpsort finally started welcoming the auto-borne family visitors that we enjoy today.

*THE VISIT. The village green defines Hammondsport as much as the lakefront does. It’s shady and grassy, with park benches for the footsore traveler. Highlighting the green is the bandstand. Well over a hundred years old, it’s been the site of thousands of concerts, events, and presentations. Santa Claus greets the children here, and future film critic Charles Champlin, then in high school, played here with the town band. We don’t have any “official” figures, but we imagine that a poll would turn up hundreds and hundreds of grownups who treated themselves to imaginative playtime on the bandstand when they were little.

*By the way, take a look at the music staff and notes that run around the bandstand. They actually make a tune.

*If Alexander Graham Bell were here he’d recognize the place in an instant, except that the streets are paved. When lightning struck the Presbyterian church in 1950, destroying the front half, new construction restored the look of the old. The white church with its town clock and tall spire still smiles down on the Square and the people – local and visitor alike.

*Stroll the sidewalks and study the buildings that line the downtown streets. Most of them went in between 1820 and 1920… from the age of oxcarts to the age of airplanes. The iron fence at the J. S. Hubbs place has stood since 1901, and so has the Opera House (which hosted many entertainments but never, so far as I can tell, an opera).

*Strolling downhill will take you past the marvelous new library and the delightful old depot, right onto the lakefront with its loons, mergansers, and grebes… not to mention swimmers, fishers, and boaters. You can settle on a bench in the waterfront park and watch the winds and the shadows play with the lake. Or, you can take a bench in Pulteney Square… let your eyes droop… see in your mind’s eye the eminent Doctor Bell making stately progress across the Square alongside young Glenn Curtiss, tense with quick nervous energy. Ladies in long skirts… small boys in knickers… soldiers in blue, and later in khaki… history feels at home in Pulteney Square.