The Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo was ending, not with a bang, but a whimper. The Bath & Hammondsport Railroad canceled its twice-weekly special, though the Erie Railroad kept on. Pan-Am commemorative stamps were discontinued after the 31st. Germania Wine Company’s Grand Imperial Sec won the only gold medal for champagne, and Harry Champlin from Pleasant Valley Wine Company got a gold medal for his two-year-old stallion Star Chimes at the horse show. But the spectacular world’s fair was winding up its business at a loss, plagued by appallingly hot weather, the assassination of President McKinley, and its own astronomical expenses.
October was kind of a dreary month for a lot of folks. Sheep worrying was a problem around Hammondsport—dogs killed 13 at M. H. Dildine’s farm, two at L. Ward’s, and six at Abe Depew’s. A hundred people got food poisoning at a party in Cass Corners, requiring the speedy services of every doctor in the southwestern part of Steuben County. A Mr. Crinton broke his arm while working on the new Opera House in Hammondsport, then developed sciatica and had to go to the county farm. His daughter was sent to the Davenport Home for girls in Bath, but the son proved more difficult to place.
Grasshoppers and tobacco worms ruined 30% of the crop in the Southern Tier. Fred Shults, apparently intoxicated and asleep on the tracks, was killed by the B&H locomotive at the Erie yard in Bath. British troops in South Africa suffered a sharp defeat. A U. S. Infantry company in the Philippines was attacked at breakfast and nearly wiped out, suffering 48 dead and 11 wounded out of 72 officers and men. Over in London, King George had surgery for throat cancer. In the America’s Cup Race, Columbia beat Shamrock II in three straight. But the losing yachtsman, tea baron Sir Thomas Lipton, was such a good sport that he remained a hero on both sides of the ocean.
Of course, there was also plenty of pleasure to be found as fall slipped toward winter. The Hammondsport Band played October 12 in warm sunny weather (the first snow fell on the 23rd). Nationally-known cartoonist Sidney Smith gave a chalk talk at Hammondsport High School. Pleasant Valley Grange held its last dance of the year on Halloween. Back in the village, at the Presbyterian Church, the King’s Daughters hosted a 95-cent dinner that night, serving up rolls, escalloped oysters, salads, donuts, cheese, coffee, and pumpkin pie.
Speaking of pumpkins, the first ones came to Market in Hammondsport on the 17th. Chestnuts, which were “large and abundant,” sold at $2.50 a bushel, cabbage at $8 to $10 a ton. Hay was getting $10.50 a ton around Pulteney. Fifteen to 25 boxcars of grapes were shipping out of Penn Yan every day. But Hammondsport Preserving Company had too few apples to process, although it still had apple and other juices from the 1900 season. Speed and Snyder, cigar makers in Hammondsport, increased their work force – wonder how much they paid for tobacco with the crop so bad?
All this agricultural activity meant big business. H. M. Champlin invited farmers to take advantage of his Hammondsport Steam Roller Custom & Flour Mills and the Hammondsport Box Factory and Lumber Yards. This impressively-named institution offered new sheds for teams, new scales for weighing in, and up-to-date equipment, including “All the modern machinery for Buckwheat custom milling.” W. E. Cook offered much of the stoneware you would need for preserving your yield, including butter crocks at eight cents for each gallon of capacity and meat tubs at 10 cents a gallon. L. D. Masson had shears, picking boxes, covering slats, corn knives, stencil brushes, paste, rubber stamps, pads, and inks. At Smellie’s Pharmacy you could get feed that would keep your hens laying, bringing in $5.00 worth of eggs for every 25 cents spent on poultry food.
At W. T. Reynolds, fall footwear was in. Mr. Reynolds carried boots, shoes, and rubbers, “Not a scrimpy little lot in a few different styles, but big, generous assortments that make you feel sure you have come to the right place to be satisfied.”
In Buffalo a group of visionaries formed the Frontier Telephone Company. Over in Bayonne, France, bullfight promoters replaced the picadors’ horses with motorcars. All seven bulls ran away, and that was the end of that.
Tag Archives: Pan-American Exposition
September 1901: A Pretty Fair Month
Leave a reply
Hammondsport School was closed. On the streets and in the Square, scarcely a sound was heard. Shops stood idle, almost empty, and in some cases were even closed. In vain did the retailers peer wistfully through their plate-glass windows, hoping for a glimpse of potential customers. Hammondsport was empty. Everyone had gone to the Bath Fair.
Steuben County Fair was at the end of September in those days, and was so popular that school was indeed called off for Thursday and Friday of fair week, when the B&H groaned from carrying all those eager Hammondsporters down the line. Not only did the fair provide entertainment in a world with no TV, no radio, only a few hand-cranked gramophones, and only occasional crude movies; it was also an important educational showcase for agricultural products and techniques. Steuben County, like many rural counties, was still primarily agricultural in those days.
The State Fair in Syracuse ran from the 9th through the 14th; admission cost a quarter. September 11 was Carrie Nation Day at the Yates County Fair in Penn Yan.
There was another fair still going on in Buffalo at the time, of course—The Pan-American Exposition, or, as we would now call it, the world’s fair. Mr. and Mrs. C. G. Wheeler visited the Pan-Am from Catawba, as did Rua Gay and Elmer J. Orr of Rheims, not to mention Victor and Julia Masson of Hammondsport and a whole excursion from Steuben County Pomona Grange. The fair’s publicity director, former Hammondsporter Marc Bennitt, suavely recommended that visitors plan to stay at least two weeks, “to enjoy more fully this rare opportunity for pleasure and study…. No one who can possibly raise the money to visit the Exposition should for a moment think of denying himself this signal advantage.”
Admission was 50 cents, including all the grounds, the exhibit buildings, and the Stadium, where visitors could see athletic events, livestock shows, and vehicle parades. Midway concessions ranged from a dime to half a dollar. Fifty cents would get you comfortable lodgings, while accommodations closer to the Pan-Am ran as high as a dollar a night. Marc estimated daily expenses in Buffalo at no more than $2.50 “for those who want the best.” One visitor apparently decided to defray his costs by stealing the Mexican Liberty Bell.
President McKinley, who thoroughly enjoyed world’s fairs, visited and was shot on September 5. He later died of his wounds, as we aw two weeks ago.
Harvest was on the minds of many people. Delaware grapes were selling at $50 a ton, while potatoes got 65 to 75 cents a bushel, and peaches $1.50 a basket. Apple buyers paid $3.12½ to pick their own. Amos Roberts of Addison stated that “he never knew how uncertain things were until he invested in a vineyard.”
The baseball season was winding up, although “rowdies” from Penn Yan made an unfortunate presence in a game at Hammondsport’s Kinglsey Flats. Out on the lake, a tramp named Peter Gunning assaulted William Maxfield, an African-American fireman aboard steamer Halsey. When Gunning pulled a pistol, “Max” knocked him down with the flat of an axe. Gunning was subdued, trussed up, bustled off the boat in Penn Yan, and sent to Monroe County prison for four months. There was also considerable excitement at Sub Rosa landing, where a wharf collapsed and dunked 20 people waiting for a steamer, apparently without serious harm. More sedate excitement prevailed at Keuka College, which had just met its goal of raising $25,000, thereby qualifying for a $50,000 challenge grant from the Ball brothers, canning-jar magnates of Muncie, Indiana.
The plate glass for the new Hammondsport Opera House arrived damaged, which threatened to hold up the opening of the facility, but J. S. Hubbs’s new residence was proceeding on schedule. The Bath Fish Hatchery shipped 40,000 trout to Seneca Lake, while the Soldiers’ Home started its switch from female nurses to male nurses. Mrs. James Shannon of Mount Washington, whose husband had been killed by lightning in June, received her full $2000 from his life insurance policy with the Knights of the Maccabees Royal Tent #72 in Bath. Scientific American informed its readers that if you wore rubbers in a thunderstorm, and refrained from touching anything, you had nothing to fear. Do you think that would have helped Mr. Shannon?
The Death of the President
September 1901 turned into a month-long tragic drama as America’s President struggled unsuccessfully for his life. This world event had a western New York setting, and deeply affected the people of the region.
William McKinley was a gentle man and a gentleman, diligent rather than brilliant, soft-spoken, well-liked. He had entered the Civil War as a private at 18 and left it as a major at 22, after fighting gallantly at Antietam, Winchester, Kernstown, and a host of other actions under Rutherford B. Hayes. As a captain in one battle he had directly ordered a recalcitrant general to put his division into motion, and the general had obeyed.
After climbing the ranks of Republican politics, McKinley was elected President in 1896, defeating William Jennings Bryan, whose reform proposals, plus support for organized labor and small farmers, terrified the big-money men by then controlling the Party of Lincoln. McKinley conducted a “front-porch” campaign; while Bryan stumped the nation, the Republican candidate treated friendly delegations to set speeches at his home.
In 1898 America fought its “splendid little war” with Spain, taking over Puerto Rico, the Philippines, Guam, some smaller islands, and (temporarily) Cuba, besides picking up Hawaii on the side. Northern and Southern soldiers fought together, winning an empire in three months by spectacular victories and almost no loss of life. Orators enthused that the wounds of the Civil War had been healed, and McKinley beat Bryan in their 1900 rematch.
The national healing was, of course, a partial reconciliation of whites, made possible only at the expense of black Americans, including those who had fought alongside Teddy Roosevelt at San Juan Hill. Bryan, by the way, opposed imperialism, and ran the 1900 campaign on that basis. Even so, he had raised his own regiment of volunteers, which was assigned to guard Tampa for the duration of the war. McKinley may have been a gentleman, but he was no fool. Bryan would get no chance to do anything remotely heroic.
McKinley’s second inauguration was the last for a Civil War President. Roosevelt, his energetic young VP who had been given the second spot to keep him “on the shelf,” had been a small boy when he watched Lincoln’s funeral procession. Roosevelt had recently been governor of New York.
McKinley loved world’s fairs, and eagerly visited the 1901 Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo. Besides highlighting our domination of the hemisphere, the Pan-Am emphasized electricity. Most of the country had none at all, and many that did had it only part-time. With an inexhaustible supply being generated at Niagara Falls, Buffalo staggered the world with its oceans of lights.
On September 5 the President made a speech to 50,000 visitors, proclaiming that America’s era of isolation was over. On the next day he visited Niagara Falls, attended a luncheon along with his semi-invalid wife, then returned to the fair over the objections of his secretary, George Cortelyou, who worried about his safety. “No one would want to hurt me,” scoffed McKinley, who was determined to shake hands with visitors. Cortelyou stationed police who overlooked a bland young man with his right hand wrapped in a bandage. As the ever-courteous McKinley stretched out his left hand, Leon Czolgosz shot him twice with a revolver concealed in the bandages. Stumbling back, the President whispered to Cortelyou, “My wife—be careful how you tell her.” His next words, as police and spectators piled on the assailant, were, “Don’t let them hurt him.”
One of the bullets had gone deep, and doctors, ignoring an x-ray machine displayed at the fair, couldn’t find it. But they had high hopes, so Roosevelt and the cabinet, who had raced to McKinley’s side, dispersed several days later. On September 13, doctors recognized gangrene. Word was flashed to Roosevelt, vacationing in the Adirondacks (blackflies and all) 12 miles from a telephone and up a steep slope. Three driver working in relays rushed TR to the train along a narrow mountain road in the dark. But McKinley died, faintly singing “Nearer, My God to Thee,” before Roosevelt arrived to be sworn in as the youngest President America has ever had. Judge Hazel, who administered the oath, would later rule against both Henry Ford and Glenn Curtiss in acrimonious patent disputes. The train carrying both Presidents to Washington stopped briefly at Arcade before passing out of New York through Olean.
One of Roosevelt’s first acts was to declare Thursday, Sept. 19, a day of mourning. Schools and businesses closed, although Hammondsport Post Office stayed open to 11:00 because the morning mail arrived so late. The Presbyterian Church there held a memorial service Sunday night, but St. James Episcopal waited until Thursday, with McKinley’s brother Masons attending in a body. Hammondsport’s G. A. R. Post passed a resolution honoring its fallen comrade. The loss was traumatic to Americans who had already endured the assassinations of Lincoln (1865) and Garfield (1881). The equivalent for us would be having had Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama killed. Robert Todd Lincoln, son of Abraham, endured the agony of being on hand for all three assassinations.
Czolgosz, an anarchist, had shot McKinley simply because he headed the government. Emma Goldman and other outspoken anarchists were clapped into jail, then truculently released when it became clear that Czolgosz had acted alone. The law moved swiftly back then. Czolgosz’s trial opened September 24. He was electrocuted at Auburn within the month, and quickly forgotten.
Attention turned to the vibrant, not to say hyperactive, new President, who quickly thrilled or scandalized the nation by inviting Booker T. Washington to lunch at the Executive Mansion. United States Senator “Pitchfork Ben” Tillman of Georgia screeched that the South would have to lynch a thousand Negroes to force them back into their place. McKinley’s friend and campaign manager, Mark Hanna, steamed, “Now that cowboy is in the White House!” Teddy Roosevelt would set the standard for 20th-century presidents; his activist example would not be lost on Teddy’s niece, Miss Eleanor Roosevelt, nor on their distant cousin Franklin, who was in 1901 a student at Harvard.
One structure remains from the Pan-Am… the Buffalo and Erie County Historical Society, which is worth both a visit and a separate blog entry (stay tuned). The Buffalo home where TR took the oath of office is now Theodore Roosevelt Inaugural National Historic Site.