Tag Archives: Prattsburgh

Odd-uments!

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Have you ever found any odd-uments? That’s my new word (copyright!) for monuments that are surprising, quirky, or curious. The Finger Lakes, unsurprisingly given our history of social, religious, and technological experiment, has plenty of them.

In 1793 Charles Williamson founded Bath near the Conhocton River. His job was to sell 1.2 million acres of land between Seneca Lake and the Genesee River, but he also served in multiple public offices and engineered creation of Steuben County. So when Daughters of the American Revolution honored him in 1929 with a plaque on a large boulder in Pulteney Square, site of his original land clearing, it wasn’t really surprising. Not surprising except that while Mr. Williamson WAS in the American Revolution – he was on the other side. While the Scottish officer was in house arrest as a P.O.W. he married an American and gained U. S. citizenship… and eventually, recognition by the D.A.R.

The Pilgrims hadn’t even heard of the Mayflower when a Basque explorer remembered only as Pabos died on June 10, 1618, a long, long way from home. A burial plaque was found near today’s Victor almost three centuries later, and some fifty years after THAT, historian and newsman J. Sheldon Fisher decided that the man’s memory should be preserved. Sheldon told me that he’d always wanted to build a pyramid, so he rounded up some local Boy Scouts and together they did just that. The seven-foot monument still stands on Wagnum Road, near the grave – now over four centuries old – of the all-but-forgotten explorer.

Rochester’s huge Mount Hope Cemetery includes every faith, ethnicity, and time period in the city’s history. There are special sections for Civil War veterans, 19th-century unknowns, and firefighters. Not to mention a monument to that forgotten hero of long ago, the fireHORSE. By getting the fire company to the fires FAST they saved countless lives, often at risk to their own. They’re entitled to a little recognition.

On Main Street in Prattsburgh is a monument from the Knights of Cyprus “To Madame Sarah Bernhardt, the greatest actress in the world.” Her 19th-century “lyric fire and divine voice” were indeed unforgettable, but the Knights of Cyprus existed only in the imagination of of Charles Danford Bean, who created the monument to the Divine Sarah.

At a grave in Elmira’s Woodlawn Cemetery, a stone obelisk towers twelve feet tall. In nautical terms that’s exactly two fathoms or, as a leadsman testing depths on the Mississippi River would call out, “by the mark, twain!” Samuel Clemens lies here.

It looks like a micro-spaceship, coming in for a landing on Main Street in Lima. But it’s actually a tiny old-time spherical bank vault, commemorating that exciting day in 1915 when Livingston County suffered its first bank robbery. As we understand it the case is still unsolved, but we suppose that the reward offer has expired.

Western New York is apple country. On Boughton Road in East Bloomfield is an easy-to-miss stone with a plaque commemorating the birth of the Northern Spy, one of dozens of strains originating in New York.

“Believe It Or Not,” a Canisteo hillside on Greenwood Street has a living sign spelling out the town’s name with 217 white pine trees. When created back in 1933 it may have been a guide for aircraft, and Robert Ripley featured it in his “Believe it Or Not” newspaper cartoon. Such hillside features are uncommon east of the Mississippi, and even more uncommon for being formed with living trees.

No doubt there’s more! Do YOU know of any odd-uments?

We’re Still Using New Deal Construction

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A couple of weeks ago, we looked a little at how local folks experienced the Great Depression of roughly 1929-1941. It was a nightmare, but all our efforts to get OUT of the Depression left a very positive mark on our country, and on us locally.

When New York Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt became president in 1933, he threw himself into “the New Deal,” hoping to soften the Depression and build a better future. Social Security was a New Deal program. So was repeal of Prohibition, which put Keuka Lake grapegrowers, shippers, and winemakers back into business.

Putting people to work on construction became a hallmark of the New Deal – the government paid to have the old unused trolley tracks pulled up in Penn Yan.

More visible was work done right in the heart of our coverage area. Painted Post got a new post office, still in use today, with a mural in the lobby (artists need to eat, too). And we’re still crossing the Chemung River on Bridge Street… that bridge was the biggest New Deal project in Corning.

At Bath V.A., which the U.S. had only recently taken over from the state, many of the facilities went back to the 1870s. So one day in 1936 the last surviving Civil War resident wielded a shovel from his wheelchair to ceremonially begin construction of a new modern hospital, which is still in use today.

Roosevelt was a Democrat, but Republican U. S. Representative W. Sterling Cole made sure to secure the funds for the new hospital… AND a new nursing home care unit, AND a new entry bridge… all of them still in use. The V.A. also got reforesting, to the tune of a quarter million seedlings.

Sterling further arranged to vastly expand the Bath Memorial Hospital, now the Pro Action building on Steuben Street, with a new wing joining the two original buildings.

Hammondsport got a brand new school to replace the old Academy, much of which went back before the Civil War. The Glenn H. Curtiss Memorial School, built partly on the old Curtiss home grounds donated by Glenn’s widow, was a K-12 school. It was so cutting-edge that it actually had television when it opened in 1936. Curtiss School was used into the 21st century, and is now privately owned.

Franklin Academy in Prattsburgh also got a hand up. The original 19th-century building burned in 1923 and was replaced the following year. By 1935 it already needed updating, so Prattsburgh got a thorough renovation AND a substantial addition, giving birth to Prattsburgh Central School.

Prattsburgh found that the project was going to run way over the promised funding, so two men went to New York City to plead for more. The official there said he couldn’t do anything, but urged them to go to Washington. Their story of the needs of Prattsburgh’s people had brought tears to his eyes, he said, and a higher authority might be convinced to release more funds. Down they went, sharing a railroad berth to save expenses, and got the funds they needed. Another agency went even further, putting in a ball diamond and athletic fields. The 1935-36 work is still the heart of the school.

Kanona was home to a camp of Civilian Conservation Corps (C.C.C.) lads… older teens hired for a year of conservation-related work. C.C.C. created much of the infrastructure for Stony Brook State Park and Watkins Glen State Park, and after catastrophic flooding in 1935 the boys worked mightily on flood-control and soil-conservation projects. The Army Corps of Engineers built dams and Arkport and Almond, while Avoca, Corning, and Addison got improved flood barriers. Believe it or not, the 1972 flood could have been much worse than it was. Some of the thanks should go to Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Time-Traveling Through the 1920s — Part One!

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A few weeks ago we looked at things that were happening exactly a hundred years ago, in 1920. Today let’s take a time machine back, and tour our area to see what was new and fresh then, and old friends to us now.
To begin our trip, we can sit in on foundational meetings for the brand-new incorporated Village of South Corning – home to St. Mary’s Cemetery, St. Mary’s Orthodox Cemetery, most of Hope Cemetery, a massive memorial arch for glass workers killed in a train crash, and the Town of Corning offices.
We can start 1921 in Wayland, at the Bennett’s Motors building on Route 15. Sad to say the family business closed at the end of last year, but the building will now be used by the ambulance corps.
Since we have a time machine, zipping over to Painted Post takes no time at all. Here we can see the foursquare old Erwin Muncipal Building, “built like a fortress” according to new owners, which allowed it to survive floods in 1935 and 1972. Keep your eye on it – the owners have great plans.
Just a few blocks down, but a year forward, we enter Riverside, incorporated as a village in 1922. It was formerly named Centerville, and also got hammered by those floods.
Continue on down Pulteney Street, once again jogging a year ahead, and we can look at the still-impressive Hotel Stanton on Bridge Street. In Bath the municipal building (which looks a lot like the Erwin building) was dedicated as a Great War memorial in 1923. That same year the new K-12 Haverling School opened at Liberty and Washington… most people know it nowadays as the old Dana Lyon school.
Up in Prattsburgh the Air-Flo building has been substantially altered, but it also first saw the light of day in 1923. And back at Wayland we can admire the 1923 American Legion hall, which was built to include a movie theater, and operated as such for decades.
Head south on Route 21, smoothly transitioning to 1924 as we go, and we’ll arrive at the Village of North Hornell – the last municipality to be created in Steuben County, and home to the new St. James Mercy Center. Driving on into the City of Hornell we can admire the neoclassical Lincoln School, now on the National Register of Historic Places after providing a neighborhood school for generations of families.
Back in Prattsburgh we’re bound to be impressed by the Franklin Academy (Prattsbugh Central School) and the ornate Presbyterian Church. The side-by-side structures went up in 1924, after their historic side-by-side predecessors burned down together on a memorable winter’s night in 1923. (The school’s been added to considerably in the last century, of course.)
On a less-dramatic note we can stop at the Babcock building on Bath’s Liberty Street, opened as a new-fangled movie theater (silents only) in 1924. The auditorium itself is gone, but many, many folks still fondly remember Friday nights or Saturday afternoons at the Babcock. But the street level later become part of Bath National Bank, now Five Star Bank. Unfortunately that branch has just been closed, so who knows what the Babcock faces as its second century approaches?

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.

A Trip Through (Some of) the Hamlets

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There are two cities and 32 Towns in Steuben County, and in the Towns there lie 14 incorporated villages. (Thirteen and a fraction if you want to be persnickity, since Almond lies mostly in Allegany County.)

*Then there are places that are now only the faintest of memories… Hermitage, Lumber City, Beartown, Liberty Pole, Harrisburg Hollow. Once they were homes, and they were loved, and now they’re all but forgotten.

*But the official map of Steuben County also shows 72 (!) named-but-unincorporated communities, sometimes called hamlets or settlements, and each of these is interesting in its own right.

*Coss Corners and Unionville lie in the southern upland stretches of Bath, on County Road 10. Coss Corners is now just a handful of houses around the crossroad, but Unionville still has enough homes to form its own little community… though not enough to support, as it did in 1873, a school, a tannery, a shoe shop, and a blacksmith.

*Also in Bath we find Kanona… originally Kennedyville. The Erie Railroad, the DL&W, and the Kanona & Prattsburgh railroad all had stations here, a concentration that supported five hotels along with churches and other businesses. Interestingly Kanona still earns much of its bread from travelers, supporting two large truck stops at Exit 37 on I-390.

*Prattsburgh, of course, lay at the other end of the K&P. Once an incorporated village, the community gave up that distinction some years ago. But like Kanona, it is still a settlement of some size, supporting a library, several historic churches, a lovely square, the central school, and the Narcissa Prentiss House Museum. Narcissa was an early graduate of the school (Franklin Academy), and arguably Prattsburgh’s most famous citizen. She has a monument in front of Franklin.

*Her husband-to-be, Dr. Marcus Whitman, practiced in Wheeler, in the Town of the same name. Wheeler was also (much later) on the K&P. Wheeler’s in the horse-and-buggy country. It has an active church, a Grange, a monument to Marcus, and the old one-room school (now a residence).

*Campbell lies almost in the center of the Town of the same name. Also a rail stop in days gone by, Campbell has the Campbell-Savona High School. The “Stone House” by the river was once a blacksmith shop. The old Presbyterian church (more recently an antique store) had a brush with future fame in the 1880s, for the pastor’s teenaged daughter would become the hyper-prolific novelist Grace Livingston Hill, beloved by generations of readers.

*Hornby, or Hornby Forks (in the Town of Hornby) has an active church, the town historical museum (in the old one-room school), and a very early World War I monument.

*Keuka, on Keuka Lake in the town of Wayne, used to be called Keuka Village or Keuka Landing. It was the site of a much-visited resort, Keuka Hotel, where such luminaries as Fred Waring and Hoagie Charmichael entertained the guests. The Hotel’s gone, but Keuka’s still a busy lakeside place in the summers.

*Keuka’s down at the lake level, but Wayne, or Wayne Village, is up on the height. It lies partly in Schuyler County, and it’s where you’ll find the Town offices.

*Hartsville, in the like-named Town on the western fringe of the county, has a fair number of houses, a church, and the Town offices, but no longer any consumer businesses. Jasper (in Jasper), on County 417, is a rather bigger place, with its own library. Like Wheeler, Jasper is horse-and-buggy territory.

*Gang Mills in Erwin got its name from sawmills that once operated there, where the Tioga and Conhocton Rivers come together (and where they flooded catstrophically in 1935 and 1972). If we were naming it today, we’d call it Gang Shopping Centers!

Fixing Us Up on Wikipedia

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One of the most convenient sources for information today – information on just about anything – is the online encyclopedia at www.wikipedia.org.
Wikipedia is crowdsourced. In theory, just about anyone can set up an article on just about anything. So you might have an article on Glenn Curtiss, say, or polio… and another, possibly even longer, on “Petticoat Junction.”
Most anyone would agree that Glenn Curtiss and polio are more significant topics, but on the other hand some people DO want information on the six actors who played the three Bradley girls, so why shouldn’t they be able to find it? With an on-line source, it doesn’t encumber the more significant articles.
Crowdsourcing provides a chance for knowledgeable folks to communicate that knowledge. Unfortunately it also gives a chance for the uninformed, the mischievous, or even the dishonest. One of my sons had friends who, just for amusement, edited the polar bear entry to say that the bears locate their prey through echo-location. Not true, of course, but the “fact” stood for several days before someone caught it and deleted it, reminding us that valuable though Wikipedia is, you need to take it with a grain of salt.
There are editors who challenge entries or call for revisions, and many articles have caveats included. And in a sense anyone can be an editor, which finally gets us to our point.
Years ago I set myself up with an “account” so as to make entries on Wikipedia. I don’t remember just why, but I think I was making some small corrections to articles on pioneer aviators.
Since becoming director of the Steuben County Historical Society, though, I have taken it upon myself to do what I can in cleaning up Steuben County entries. Some of this has been just a matter of correcting typos, an unglamorous but worthwhile activity.
Sometimes, though, the changes are more substantive, as was the case with a set of related entries on Prattsburgh, Marcus Whitman, and Narcissa Prentiss Whitman.
First of all, the entry said that Prattsburgh was in the Genesee Valley. I suspect I can track the line of confusion that led to this curiosity. Our whole region was once known as “the Genesee Country.” This is a much bigger area than the Genesee Valley, but the mix-up would be easy to make. Anyhow, I deleted that.
Narcissa’s entry erred in the opposite direction and even more startlingly, saying that she had attended Franklin Academy “in the Hudson Valley.” I did some checking to make sure that she had in fact gone to “our” Franklin Academy, in Prattsburgh, and made the change accordingly.
Neither entry mentioned the open-to-the-public Narcissa Prentiss House. I thought that was worth mentioning, so I did so. To the list of honors for Marcus Whitman I added mention of a bronze plaque in Wheeler (where he practiced medicine), and his listing in the Steuben County Hall of Fame.
One correction I made was in the article on W. Sterling Cole, former member of Congress and director of the International Atomic Energy Agency. His piece located Pleasant Valley Cemetery in Erwin – either Painted Post or Coopers Plains, I forget which. I verified that he was in fact buried at Pleasant Valley, then corrected the location to Urbana.
In several cases I did updates, or added facts that seemed worthwhile. I mentioned that Randy Kuhl is in the Hammondsport Central School wall of Fame for lifetime achievement. I noted that Davenport Library is no longer a library – the building is the Steuben County History Center, while the new Dormann Library’s next door. I reported that the museum at the DL&W depot in Painted Post is operated by Corning-Painted Post Historical Society. I added Corning Christian Academy to the list of schools in that city.
One job I put off for years, hoping someone else would fix it, because I didn’t know how. Town Line Church and Cemetery in Rathbone somehow got listed as Town LINKE Church, both in its own entry and on the list of National Register sites in Steuben County. This meant that if you searched (correctly) for Town Line Church you’d never find it.
So one day I bit the bullet and made the change, then sat back to see what would happen. What happened (thank heaven) was that an editor got involved. Changing the text was no problem, but changing the title required a higher authority. In our exchanges I pointed out the error in Wikipedia’s National Register list, and he kindly took care of that too.
So, maybe none of these changes are vital, but if you can’t even find the entry, that matters. Likewise the corrections mean that errors will not be perpetuated, and judicious additions can flesh out the descriptions. It’s no the most important thing I do with my days (and I don’t do it often), but it improves the world’s sore of knowledge and information on our area. Unless someone puts in echolocation. But that’s a challenge for another day.

A Decent Drive

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We took a ride on Veterans Day. We had a destination, and some business to do, but it was a beautiful warm sunny day, maybe the last gasp of fall before winter creeps in, and so it was a pleasure drive as well. We drove from Bath to Canandaigua, along what some have called “the road to the grapes and the pies.”
We could have gone along Route 415 out to Kanona, and then north on 53. But we elected the more direct course, along County Route 13, or Mitchellsville Road. This takes you out of Bath proper through three-generational Bluegill Farms, with its small apple orchard, small fock of sheep and some cattle, amongst extensive planted fields. It’s like someone drew a line with a ruler as you pass from the built-up village to farm country. Deer pass in and out pretty frequently (one bumped into Joyce’s car one evening, with no damage to either). Coyotes howl at night, and the occasional bear lumbers through.
The harvested fields are a magnet for flocks of geese and gulls, especially at this time of year. A little quieter just now is Hickory Hill Camping Resort, which just a few weeks ago was humming with dozens of RVs and campers, not to mention the cabins, pools, pond, and miniature golf. A spur trail here climbs straight up the slope to join the Finger Lakes Trail along the ridge.
We cross the FLT main trail just before reaching the hamlet of Mitchellsville with its little cemetery and its Methodist church. We’re now in well-wooded Wheeler, and we pass several ponds that are well-loved haunts of muskrats and waterfowl before crossing the Bristol Hills Branch of the FLT. When we come out at State Route 53, where we’re back in farm country.
Since we’re turning north here we just miss the hamlet of Wheeler with its Methodist church, Grange rooms, town hall, and monument to Marcus Whitman. A hundred years ago and more Wheeler was tobacco country, and if you look sharp you may spot an old tobacco barn set back from the road.
As we cruise on northward along a pretty nice road we pass the Wheeler family cemetery, where town namesake Silas Wheeler, a Revolutionary War soldier, lies buried with his kin. Passing farm after farm we keep a sharp lookout, for we are now in horse-and-buggy country. Conservative Anabaptists have been taking up the hill farms that modern folks find uncompetitive, building up Wheeler’s population and economy.
Driving toward Prattsburgh we pass an egg farm and an octagon house (popularized by Orson Squire Fowler of Cohocton) before reaching the village itself, with its pioneer cemetery and its fine tree-lined square, long the scene of parades, footraces, and all sorts of community celebrations.
Captain Pratt was another veteran of the Revolution, and the square in his namesake village is now lined with churches, businesses, the library, the post office, and the school. Franklin Academy is a venerable institution. It goes back to the early 1800s – in the same spot on the square, I believe, though not in the same building of course. Franklin boys marched off to the Civil War in huge numbers, and to the big wars of the 20th century. Narcissa Prentiss Whitman was an alumna, and her nearby home is now open to the public.
Leaving the village we climb an impressive hill, and as we reach the top Joyce reminisces about how she and our older son drove through here in November 1995, just before we moved to Bath from Bloomfield. They almost turned back at this point, but pushed on, and we hadn’t lived in the area very long before we learned that the top of this hill is often the site for mini-snow squalls and mini-rain storms, sort of like I-86 around Campbell. Both stretches have their own microclimates.
Now we’re back in the woods, and hilly woods at that, on a winding road. There’s a bit of a flat at Ingleside, a little hamlet that few people know about, and fewer still realize lies in Steuben County. On our way back, when the sun’s in a better position, I’ll photograph the still-active church for Historical Society files.
Right around the county line we meet another line, this time of wind turbines. Most of us locally seem to take these in stride, but when I guide out-of-state bus tours through this stretch I find that they’re always fascinated by the huge turning blades. Of course you need the right blend of topography, population pattern, wind direction, wind speed, and wind consistency to make wind farming work, so it makes sense that many people won’t have first-hand experience with it.
Then down another steep hill and… Naples, with its mile-long Main Street, where we once again cross the Bristol Hills Trail. Naples with its summer theater, lovely homes, busy restaurants, surrounding ridges, and striking Catholic church. Naples with its vineyard and winery right in the middle of town and its high school right on Main Street; I always expect to see Archie, Betty, and Veronica out front.
Past Naples (now on State 21) we just clip a corner of Yates County before arriving at Woodville, and the head of Canandaigua Lake. The road winds, the bare-rock cliff looms on the left, and the hamlet clings to the bank of the lake on the right. Like all of our lakes it’s a beautiful sight, but we soon turn away until reaching Bristol Springs. Here again Route 21 parallels the lake, but now we’re high on the overlooking ridge, and we get only glimpses of it. Sad to say, there are very few places to pull off and enjoy the view.
Cheshire is a busy little hamlet, where a former school is home to a country store from whose sign a Cheshire cat grins down on us. A few farms line the route now, but before long it’s suburban stretches, and then at last, Canandaigua. Definitely, a decent drive.