Tag Archives: Southern Tier

Look Out for Microclimates!

Quite a few people, over quite a few years, have taken note of the fact that if you’re driving I-86, between Campbell and Savona, you often run into a band of rain, snow, or sleet. There’s something similar going on above Prattsburgh, on the height overlooking the village from the north, along State Route 53. You’ll also find it along I-390, on the height between Dansville and Cohocton.

WHY this should be the case, or even whether they result from the same phenomena, is more than I can tell you. But I take it that they reveal microclimates – small pockets where the climate (and thus the weather) differs from its surroundings. It may differ by only a tiny amount, but it’s enough to make noticeable results.

You’ve already noticed this, on a small and transitory scale, whenever you’ve stepped into the shade to escape the blast of the sun’s direct rays. Not that this has been a problem LATELY!

You’ve also seen it when you lift your eyes unto the hills, and see that they’re covered with snow, while there’s none where you’re standing.

Altitude can make quite noticeable changes, as you can learn if you’re in Bath on a hot summer’s day. Drive on up to Mossy Bank Park, overlooking the village, and you’ll instantly be MUCH more comfortable.

We aren’t the only ones to recognize this. We know that many birds migrate northwrad in summer, and southward for winter. Juncos migrate UPWARD for summer and DOWNWARD for winter. When the snow flies, we enjoy them at our feeders. We meet them again in summer at Mossy Bank Park, or in the gorge of Watkins Glen State Park. Just a few feet of elevation, and a little cover, are all that they need. The climate’s a few degrees cooler, and they’re perfectly happy.

Watkins Glen is so narrow that it blocks out most of the sunshine, meaning that the ice and snow sometimes lie on the trail for weeks after it’s a memory elsewhere, keeping the gorge closed to frustrated hikers and tourists.

In some seasons Letchworth Gorge also preserves ice for a long time, while it can lie under Niagara Falls until midsummer.

As western New Yorkers we’re aware of microclimates that create “lake effect snow.” But I’ve noticed that Steuben County seems to be in an odd little trough that frees it from most of these proverbial snowfalls. Lake Erie lake effect seems to peter out around Hornell. Lake Ontario lake effect gives up the ghost around Canandiagua, or at least around Ingleside. And coastal storms rarely dump much west of Elmira.

We live in Bath village, and drive maybe a quarter-mile to work. We often drive INTO a thick fog bank, as we approach the Conhocton River. Folks in Cameron Mills and elsewhere get similar narrow morning fog bands lining the Canisteo.

And this persists after those rivers flow together to form the Chemung… as you’ve bitterly realized whenever you’ve tried to take an early morning flight out of Corning-Elmira Airport, near Big Flats.

You can thank microclimates for our grape and wine industry. On the eastward-facing slopes (the west side, in other words) of the Finger Lakes, we get a warming effect from the combination of the sun’s rays and the lakes’ heat sink. It’s just warm enough to preserve the vines, and just cold enough to kill the pests, et voila! But I imagine, unfortunately, that global warming will open up that narrow window, and pretty well put us out of business.

Finding the Foliage

As a former resident of Vermont, I know a thing or two about fall foliage.

*And one of the things I know is that the foliage here in the Finger Lakes and Soutnern Tier is JUST AS GOOD as it is in Vermont, even if the hills are not as high.

*So where, around here, do you go to enjoy good foliage? The season’s not quite upon us, but it settles in a little more every day.

*Well, there are several places where you can get up high, and see for miles and miles around, as the countryside is splattered with color like a well-loved artist’s palette.

*One of those places is HARRIS HILL, above Big Flats and outside Elmira. You can enjoy Harris Hill Park and the foliage there, but in particular there’s a lookout right below the glider port. You can look down onto the Chemung River, enjoying the flats and the heights beyond… if you’re lucky, sailplanes will take off right over your head.

*MOSSY BANK PARK has a lookout overviewing historic Bath, the “grande dame of the Southern Tier.” You look right down into the village, the Conhocton River, and Lake Salubria. On a clear day, you can glimpse wind turbines in Prattsburgh and in Howard. The vale of Pleasant Valley stretches toward Keuka Lake, and Mount Washington shoulders its way onto the plain. Now and then eagles and osprey soar by.

*The JUMP-OFF POINT in Ontario County Park north of Naples serves up a delicious view to the west… like Harris Hill and Mossy Bank, it has a precipitous drop to the valley below, and hundreds of acres of foliage to see. (Despite the name, on the whole it’s best if you don’t jump.) This is also the northern terminus of the Bristol Hills Trail, which stretches away southward to meet the Finger Lakes Trail west of Mitchellsville.

*Park on Mitchellville Road (Steuben County Route 13) where the FINGER LAKES TRAIL crosses, and you can hike eastward through the forest along a gorgeous gorge until you come out in a vineyard. Once you exit the vineyard you can stop outside the Urbana town building and soak in the sight of PLEASANT VALLEY in the fall, with the vineyard, cemetery, and high-walled hills all bursting with color. The name of Pleasant Valley goes back to the 1700s, and it still fits perfectly.

*There are multiple points where you can take in the view on KEUKA LAKE: Hammondsport waterfront; Champlin Beach; two scenic pulloffs on Route 54; Red Jacket Park in Penn Yan; Modeste Bedient Library in Branchport; the west-side wineries (Bully Hill, Dr. Frank, Heron Hill, Hunt Country); and a little lookout platform on the Middle Road, by a vineyard.

*STEUBEN COUNTY ROUTE 10, from Bath down to Cameron, makes a great drive through the uplands (Conhocton River through Canisteo River), but it’s undergoing construction just now, so either check beforehand or bookmark the trip for next year.

*I created the tern FOLIAGE VILLAGE, and designated three of them; HAMMONDSPORT, NAPLES, and HONEOYE FALLS. In each case you can stroll and wander the village at whatever pace you like, stopping to take in the color-bursting shade trees and all the other village pleasures.

*Hammondsport has the lake, surrounding hills, and two green squares. Naples has vineyards, surrounding hills, and a mile-long Main Street. Honeoye Falls has the falls themselves, and the Honeoye Creek wending through. Every one is a pleasure, and you set the pace yourself.

The Farming Story Part 2: The Europeans Arrive

Once Europeans started muscling into our area in noticeable numbers, about 1790, the first economic pursuit, no surprise, was lumbering. Settlement at first spread along rivers, so you cut down the trees and rolled them down to the stream. You kept cutting until you didn’t want to roll any farther.

*Their construction and their implements all made heavy use of wood, plus of course they used it for fuel. But while much of the lumber could then be for own use, it was also a cash crop. Well into the 20th century long rafts of lumber were floated down the Canisteo, Conhocton, and Tuscarora to the Chemung. At places like the Gang Mills, sawmills dressed the logs, or they might be floated further down the Chemung to the Susquehanna.

*On that newly-cleared ground, you could now plant crops and pasture livestock.

*But if you produced beyond your own consumption… which is what most people wanted to do… how could you then handle your produce? Men on Mount Washington spent several weeks each winter hauling their grain by sledge through snow to Naples, where it could be milled. Before too long, though, gristmills were scattered throughout the region – Jemima Wilkinson ordered mills built on Keuka Outlet. William Ovenshire of Barrington paid off twenty dollars on his farm by making eighteen trips to Wagener’s Mill in Penn Yan, each time leading a horse carrying three bushels of grain, “by a path only recognized by blazed trees.”

*Even then, though, you still needed to get your goods to market. Well, remember all that lumber? The reason this area was attractive to the Pulteney investors, and the reason Charles Williamson founded Bath, is that those river connections on which the lumber was drifted connected all the way to Chesapeake Bay and the Tidewater – probably the richest part of America.

*The rivers were the highways, and Williamson’s business plan was to sell vast country estates to the wealthy Tidewater barons, who would settle the region lightly with their retainers and their slaves.

*This didn’t happen, thank God, but Steuben County farmers cut trees and seasoned lumber, and stored up a year’s worth of produce. Then they used the lumber to build rafts or arks, loaded up their produce, and poled down all the way to salt water, then often along the shore to Baltimore. There they sold their produce, then sold the ark for the lumber, pocketed their money, and walked back home.

*One man decided he wanted to see George Washington’s home. So after poling down to Baltimore he walked from there to Mount Vernon, made his visit, and then walked back home to Prattsburgh.

*Steuben County was officially created in 1796, and things progressed for exactly 20 years when they hit 1816 – the Year Without a Summer.

*Snow fell every month of the year. Frost formed every month of the year. The Tuscarora Creek froze over in April, and again in September. All the grain died in the fields. All the vegetables died. Almost all the fruit died. And people died with them, not so much from cold (the summer was still warmer than a Finger Lakes winter) as from poverty and hunger.

*We now know that volcanic eruptions caused the catastrophe, but people then wondered if the sun was burning out… or if the end of the world was upon them. What would the next year bring?

200 Years Ago — The Way We Were, in 1817

Leave a reply

In 1817, folks in Steuben and around the Northern Hemisphere were overjoyed to learn that the disastrous 1816 “Year Without a Summer” had been an aberration.

There were 11 towns within today’s boundaries of Steuben County — Addison, Bath, Canisteo, Cohocton, Corning (then called Painted Post), Dansville, Howard, Prattsburgh, Pulteney, Troupsburg, and Wayne. But in 1817 Steuben County stretched all the way to Seneca Lake, and further up Keuka Lake, so there were towns (Barrington, Reading, Tyrone) that are now in Yates or Schuyler Counties.

Steuben County had 21,989 people in the 1820 census, and 179 of them were nonwhite. Of them, 46 were slaves.

John Magee, who had only recently arrived in Bath, was farming for Adam Haverling at eight dollars a month. He would parley this into a banking, mining, and transportation empire, several fine mansions, and two terms in Congress. Ira Davenport, a pioneer merchant in what’s now Hornellsville, was laying the foundation of his own fortune. Joel Pratt was 73 years old, and Silas Wheeler was 67. Both men had fought in the Revolution, as had James Monroe, who became our fifth president on March 4th.

Up in Rome, work got going on the Erie Canal. Although a great thing in general, the canal, once opened, collapsed the economy of the Southern Tier, which depended on the Conhocton-Canisteo-Chemung-Susquehanna River chain. That would also kill Bath’s prospects for becoming the great metropolis of western New York. But Bath already had its beautiful boulevards and its open squares, and keeps them to this day.

In Hartford, Connecticut, the American School for the Deaf opened. Henry David Thoreau was born, and Jane Austen died. Robert E. Lee was about 10 years old, and Abraham Lincoln a year or two younger. The Lincolns had just moved from slaveholding Kentucky to the free territory of Indiana. Ulysses S. Grant was not yet born. John Brown was at a co-educational college preparatory school in Connecticut. Twelve-year-old Joseph Smith had just arrived in the Finger Lakes.

No one had ever heard of Charles Darwin, James Fenimore Cooper, Davy Crockett, or Edgar Allen Poe. A trip from Bath to Dansville would cost you a couple of days. Husbands had complete control over their wives’ income and assets. Elizabeth Cady Stanton was two years old.

Mississippi became the 20th state in 1817. Louisiana was the only state west of the Mississippi River. America did not yet include Texas, the southwest, or the Pacific coast. No steam ship had ever crossed the Atlantic. Telegraphs and cameras wouldn’t exist for another 20 years.

Here in New York, Allegany County already existed, but Schuyler, Livingston, Yates, and Chemung did not. DeWitt Clinton became governor, and George McClure was sheriff of Steuben County. The 1824 gazetteer reported that Steuben had 18 post offices, 156 school districts, 40 grist mills, 102 sawmills, two oil mills, an iron works, two textile mills, 30 distilleries, 30 asheries, and 22,600 “neat cattle” — just about one per resident!

An Ugly History — the Ku Klux Klan in Our Area

In 1925, the Ku Klux Klan held a two-day regional rally at Yates County fairgrounds, and a four-day regional rally at Chemung County Fairgrounds, culminating in a fourth of July fireworks spectacular by 250 Klavaliers from Altoona, Pa. The Klan openly held meetings and rallies in dozens of our communities, and burned crosses in dozens of our communities. They held parades in the streets of our communities, and motor cavalcades along our country roads. Members in dozens of churches applauded when Ku Klux Klan members paraded in wearing their robes. Very often the ministers were members. So were police chiefs, county treasurers, presidents of common councils. In several counties they controlled the Republican Party for years.

How did this happen?

In 1915 there appeared a silent spectacular of the silver screen, Birth of a Nation, which glorified the Ku Klux Klan, depicting blacks as monsters and their white sympathizers as dupes. Canny organizers (who made fortunes on memberships and sales) took advantage of this free advertising, adding in whispered warnings about “the foreign:” Jews, Catholics, immigrants, and city dwellers, in addition to African Americans. Rural whites were already being pressured economically – SOME ONE must be responsible, and the Klan had ready answers, PLUS a program to do something about it! AND all the usual benefits of joining a lodge.

These people were also angry (or frightened) at modernization. Votes for women; independent, educated African Americans; movies and radio making people long for something more; new technologies changing the economy; strong unions; religious ideas different from what they’d been used to; modern art; new advances in science; the fact that more Americans now lived in the city than in the country. AND Al Smith was our governor! Catholic! Urban! Progressive! Child of immigrants! He didn’t even believe in prohibition! “Take back our state!”

It’s hard for us to fathom today, but people were fiercely proud of their membership. There was a K.K.K. filling station in Bath, and another in Painted Post. There are K.K.K. gravestones in Canisteo. Members painted K.K.K. on a cliff in Cameron Mills, and maintained it for decades. The Klan had its own meeting house in Cameron Mills into the 1950s. Newspapers reported K.K.K. funerals, and K.K.K. weddings.

Yates County Historical Society has a minute book from the ladies’ auxiliary, the Keuka Klub. They had meetings with 20 to 40 members present, gathering at Milo Second Baptist Church, Penn Yan Methodist Church, and a Grange hall, then rented the Moose Hall for $125 a year.

They had lectures, singing, quilting bee, relief for the sick, etc. In June 1925 they minuted “stores in Penn Yan who are Prodident.” The spelling was not even phonetic, making us wonder whether they even understood what Protestantism was historically.

On one occasion Klan members marched in a circle in front of St. Michael’s church in Penn Yan. Father Hugh A. Crowley (pastor 1922-1930) came out and told them that if they didn’t leave he’d kick their asses. He was a big man, and they left. At a rally in Bath the speaker demanded that any Catholics in the audience leave, insisting that he only wanted to spare their feelings.

The N.A.A.C.P. fought the Klan, and so did the Grand Army of the Republic, though those Union veterans were growing few and frail by then. A mob chased Klan speakers off in Elmira in 1923. When 6000 people in Buffalo joined up the mayor had a policeman infiltrate the group and steal the membership list, which the mayor then published. African Americans from Bath crisscrossed the region jawboning mayors, who generally said they couldn’t stop peaceful parades. But anti-mask laws sprang up, and statewide the 1923 Walker Law, with some exceptions, required organizations to report annually on their memberships, oaths, and bylaws.

The Klan reportedly was still burning crosses on people’s lawns – in Prattsburgh, for instance – into the 1970s, and they still exist in small numbers today, but the big fever died out by the end of the 1920s. Scandals involving the national leadership disillusioned many. Al Smith left the scene. The N.A.A.C.P. conducted a vigorous campaign educating American about lynchings, and finally the Depression got everybody’s minds onto other things.

It’s a very ugly part of our history, but sad to say it’s also a significant part. I’ll be reporting on these chilling days in Steuben County Historical Society’s next Winter Lecture, 4 PM Friday March 6 in Bath Fire Hall – free and open to the public.

Three Ordinary Lifetimes: World War, Baby Boom, Civil Rights, and a Trip to the Moon

Leave a reply

We observed two weeks ago that three ordinary lifetimes of 75 years each would take us back to the last year of Franklin Roosevelt’s second term as President; the last weeks of Lincoln’s first term; and then the first full year of George Washington’s Presidency. So essentially the whole life of our country under its Constitution has taken place in those three lifetimes, and that almost exactly includes the history of Europeans living here in our immediate area.
In our last two blogs, we looked at what had happened in those first two lifetimes. Imagine now a baby born on this day 75 years ago, in 1940. What has happened in that third lifetime?
In the first few months of that baby’s life Hitler crushed the forces of Denmark, Norway, Holland, Belgium, Luxemburg, and France, and took over their countries in a brutal rule. They savaged the British forces, which managed to get away and defend their island from Hitler’s onslaughts. Winston Churchill came to power, and Roosevelt decided to go to the voters for an unprecedented third term – this was, as Eleanor told the Democratic convention, “no ordinary time.” Relieved voters kept him on, and local young men began to be swept up in America’s first peacetime draft.
Local men and women were in Pearl Harbor when the bombs came down, and on Corregidor when it fell. Mercury Aircraft, which had had but a single employee, soon had 850 manufacturing on contracts from the army, which also built it new facilities. Schweizer Aircraft had a similar experience, and Elmira became an early center of glider pilot training. George Haley of Bath became a combat pilot with the Tuskegee Airmen, fighting his first of three wars and starting a climb up the ladder to lieutenant colonel.
Hitler and his cronies, impatient with the inefficiencies of butchering whole populations by gunfire, created gigantic killing camps, designed in particular to exterminate all the Jewish-extraction people they could lay their hands on.
Especially in the last year of the war, local soldiers started dieing in dozens. Voters gave Roosevelt a staggering fourth term, but he died just a few months into it.
Atomic bombs brought the war to an end. New President Truman pushed on with Roosevelt’s G.I. Bill, designed to make America a nation of college-educated middle-class homeowners. He also made sweeping moves to racially integrate the military, and federal employment.
In 1946, another major flood struck the Conhocton-Canisteo-Chemung River system.
In 1952, Thomas J. Watson and Governor Thomas Dewey were key members of a group successfully boosting Dwight D. Eisenhower for the White House.
Driven by the G.I. Bill, the infrastructure development of the New Deal, and overseas prostration, America’s economy boomed… along with its population of babies.
Local people formed the Corning-Painted Post Historical Society, and the Steuben County Historical Society. Drivers ran the first Watkins Glen race. The Corning Museum of Glass opened its doors. Railroad tracks in Corning were re-routed north of the city, and Erie Avenue became Denison Parkway. Corning-Painted Post School District came into existence, and Corning Community College. Old friends and colleagues of Glenn Curtiss opened Curtiss Museum in Hammondsport. One-room schools closed their doors for the last time. A group of visionaries began the long long work of carving the Finger Lakes Trail through western New York.
Birth-control pills became available, thanks in part to research funds raised by Corning-born Margaret Sanger. Despite fierce and even armed resistance, a peaceful Civil Rights movement changed America. The country convulsed over Vietnam, and over dramatic social changes. The murder of President Kennedy ushered in a decade of assassinations.
Drivers started cruising the Southern Tier Expressway. As rail traffic declined, two major carriers serving our region merged into the Erie-Lackawanna Railroad.
Legally-encrusted bigotry was swept away from our immigration system, forever changing the composition of our nation and taking a long step toward making America true to its ideals. We started to face the fact that we couldn’t just dump our waste and pollution into the environment.
Sixty-four years (almost to the day) after Glenn Curtiss coaxed a mile-long flight out of his ungainly airplane in Pleasant Valley, men walked on the moon. We watched them on television.
In 1972 Hurricane Agnes poured on yet another cataclysmic flood, which would have been far worse without the New Deal flood control measures put into place after 1935’s inundation. Elmira began a slow population decline (matched by much of the rest of the region). Corning re-envisioned its downtown area, and began creation of today’s Market Street and Civic Plaza.
Corning Glass Works re-invented itself as Corning, Incorporated. As industry in general declined, boutique wineries stimulated the agricultural and tourism fields. As small family farms went on the market, a population of conservative Amish and Mennonites began to grow… even creating a new system of one-room schools. As America became not much more than 50% white, 95% white areas like ours became bizarre curios.
Curtiss Museum got a new home. Rockwell and Corning Museums had major overhauls. As the 21st century dawned we began a boom in library construction and renovation.
Our ridiculous electoral college brought us our fifth major crisis and once again seated the man whom the voters had rejected as President, placing George W. Bush in the immortal company of Benjamin Harrison, John Q. Adams, and Rutherford B. Hays.
We came through the Cold War victorious, but somehow couldn’t think of a way to reduce military spending, and soon found ourselves locked into asymmetrical warfare, including highly-controversial invasions overseas. Terrorist destruction of the World Trade Center hammered the nation’s economy, and especially New York’s, producing severe downturns even way out here.
Voters elected an African American, young enough that the cruel laws of segregation had applied to him, as their President.
And on the day you read this, thousands of American boys and girls are being born. They will have their 75th birthdays in the year 2090. All of us will be gone. We wonder what they will see and remember, looking back, on our country’s (and our region’s) fourth ordinary lifetime.
*****
Hey — Carl Koehler will be doing a presentation on “Talking Trees: Guides in the Wilderness,” about how trees were trained and used as trail markers in days long ago. The free Steuben County Historical Society presentation is 4 PM Friday, Feb. 6 at Centenary Methodist Church in Bath.

Back on Top

Leave a reply

Recently in this space we looked at “superlatives” – some of the best our region has to offer (in my humble opinion) in eclectic, unrelated fields. Continuing on that thought, here are some more superlatives, exemplaries, or just plain curious and unusuals from here in the Finger Lakes and Southern Tier.

*Best memoir: Back There Where the Past Was: A Small-Town Boyhood, by Charles Champlin. Charles was heading up the film desk at the L.A. Times (no small beat out there) when he started occasionally publishing vignettes and reminiscences of his upbringing in Hammondsport.
Well, who in Los Angeles knows from Hammondsport? But very soon readers were eagerly awaiting each new installment of his intermittent musings. When it was published in book form, Ray Bradbury wrote the foreword. And people all across America – people who’d never even heard of Hammondsport – discovered that they had a second home town.

*Best regional novel: Genesee Fever, by Carl Carmer. Once one of America’s most popular novelists, Carmer wrote about the very earliest days of white settlement, centering on the Bath-Keuka Lake area. Despite being originally from western New York, Carl Carmer perpetrated a few howlers for the sake of plot: the central character rides horseback from Bath to Jerusalem, and back, twice in one day; Charles Williamson and two comrades walk from Bath to Mount Morris in a single morning, and still have enough gumption left for a major brawl when they get there. But suspend the smirk, and it makes a terrific story.

*Best-loved observer: Arch Merrill. In the days before, during, and after World War II, Rochester reporter Arch Merrill wandered our entire region, soaking up all the stories he could find, turning them into newspaper columns and then into books. A River Ramble, The Finger Lakes, Slim Fingers Beckon, and a dozen or two more were beloved in their day – and they still are now. He collected stories, and I’ll warn you right now – a lot of them were not accurate. But they were all wonderful. Most of our libraries have a least a few of his volumes. Check the antique shops and used book stores if you’d like your own.

*Best-loved musician: A lady some years ago told me that she and her husband had been visiting Corfu, and were looking over the lovely Adriatic Sea, when a voice behind them said, “Now there’s someone from Rochester, New York.” They turned around, and it was Mitch Miller, record-company executive, conductor, composer, oboist, and leader of the Sing-Along Gang. After a cheerful conversation, she asked him how he’d known where she came from. “I recognized the accent,” said Mitch, who was born in Rochester on the Fourth of July in 1911, and died in New York City 99 years later. He got his musical education at Eastman School and University of Rochester, playing with both the Syracuse Symphony and the Rochester Philharmonic.

*Royal visitations: Future French King Louis Philippe toured our area in the days of his exile. Supposedly he did a painting, now in the Louvre collection, of the Montour Falls-Watkins Glen area.
According to Aileen Arnold McKinney, long-term Corning city councillor and secretary at the Curtiss plant during World War I, the future Duchess of Windsor was in town back in those days, accompanying her naval-officer husband. Nobody saw very much of her, because she kept very different hours from the local folks. Of course, the College of Heralds would no doubt inform us that the Duchess was NOT, in fact, royal, but we’ll take what we can get.

Who’s the Top!?

Leave a reply

I get around a fair amount in our region, and delve into its history pretty deeply. And idly to my mind have been coming thoughts of the “best” of… well, everything. So here’s an unorganized, eclectic, and utterly idiosyncratic look at the cream that rises to the top of our jug.

*Top innovator: No disrespect to Corning Glass researchers and many others, but the palm has to go to Glenn Curtiss. Somehow blending his eighth-grade education, a hyperactive mind, a demeanor so austere it must have seemed terrifying, and explosive flamboyance in any powered vehicle, Curtiss built a breathtaking fortune from innovations in engines, airplanes, motorcycles, and travel trailers. He’s still our star in this field.

*Top entrepreneur: With a tip o’ the hat to Curtiss, various Houghtons, Joe Meade and many others, who could we name here but Tom Watson? Born and brought up in Campbell, educated there (in a one-room school that’s still standing) and in Addison, he worked hard and dreamed big, eventually betting International Business Machines on a yet-unbuilt computer. Results were generally considered satisfactory.

*Best view: It’s a tie! Mossy Bank lookout overlooking Bath, and Harris Hill lookout overlooking the Chemung Valley are both spectacular. See the seasons change, and watch the world go by.

*Best walk in the woods: The Finger Lakes, Trail, duh. What an incredible resource – right in our backyards! It runs all the way from Allegany State Park to Catskill State Park. With its various branch trails, the system is a thousand miles long. Best walk ON the main trail… between Mitchellsville Road and Pleasant Valley. Gorges, pines, a stile, Cold Brook, expansive forest flowers in season, a vineyard – what could be better?

Library superlatives
*Best selection: Steele Memorial in Elmira, the biggest library in the five-county region.
*Coolest building: Howe Library in Wellsville. It looks like it was airlifted from Williamsburg, and it’s great fun to poke around in.
*Biggest surprise: Dormann Library in Bath, with its own in-house cafe (“Chapters”).

*Best comic-book store: Heroes Your Mom Threw Out, in Elmira Heights. Honorable mention to Comics for Collectors in Ithaca, and Pulp Nouveau in Canandaigua.

*Our comic-book hero (artist): Dick Ayers, who passed away earlier this year just after his 90th birthday. Famous for inking and penciling Fantastic Four, the Hulk, Sergeant Fury, the original Ghost Rider, and many many more, he will probably be most fondly remembered for his westerns, which he often set in the rocks and ravines of Colorado, and based on the rocks and ravines of Pulteney.

*Our comic-book hero (writer): Joe Simon of Rochester, who co-created Captain America… not to mention the proposed character that eventually morphed into Spider-Man. He and Jack Kirby also generally get credit for more or less creating romance comics.

*Best hot dog with meat sauce: a geographically-convenient three-way tie between Central Hots in Elmira Heights, Jim’s Texas Hots in Corning, and Texas Cafe in Hornell. Honorable mention for Light’s in Elmira.

*Best choreographer: Bill T. Jones, who arrived as part of a migrant worker family that made its home in Wayland. Since then he’s gotten a MacArthur “Genius” Award, a Tony, six honorary doctorates, Kennedy Center Honors… and induction into the Steuben County Hall of Fame.

*Most determined fighter: Margaret Higgins Sanger, originally of Corning. After years of fighting for women and workers, Sanger was arrested in 1914 for mailing obscene material (birth control information), after which she fled the country and took an assumed name. Back in America again she was arrested in 1916 for providing birth control information. In the 1950s she raised money for the research that created the birth control pill, and died in 1966, not long after the Supreme Court finally and definitively ruled contraception legal.

Quirky Bath — “Queen City of the Southern Tier”

Leave a reply

Most every community has its own personality. Sometimes this derives from the circumstances of its founding, or from the nature of the work done there, or from its religious and ethnic groups. Larger communities have a different feel than smaller ones, and communities blessed with the experience of many varying people are far healthier and happier than those where a great sameness prevails.
Even similarly-sized communities in the same county — Bath, Corning, Hornell — each have their own personalities. Addison, Canisteo, and Hammondsport likewise are each distinct from the other.
Arch Merrill called Bath the Queen City of the Southern Tier, an observation that would have warmed the Scottish cockles of Charles Williamson’s heart.
Williamson was one of those men who decided early in life that if you were going to dream, you ought to dream big. Where most people saw a huge forest recently stolen from the Iroquois, Williamson saw great cities and vast estates. Where most people saw a small clearing hacked by hand from the trees along the Conhocton, Williamson saw an elegant capital.
The space he cleared is now Pulteney Square in Bath, and he kept the faith even though the first person interred in the nearby Pioneer Cemetery was his own young daughter. The Land Office he set up in 1793 didn’t finish selling off 1.3 million acres until almost 1910, but the site did become the seat of a brand-new county in 1796.
Until some busybody went and put in the Erie Canal (elevating no-account shanty towns like Syracuse, Buffalo, and Rochester), the river chain of Susquehanna, Chemung, and Conhocton was the key travel route. Williamson foresaw Bath as the great metropolis of the region, endowing it with straight broad boulevards and green grassy squares. Metropolitan dreams died, but the layout lasts to this day. In its tiny scale it seems to echo the layouts of Paris and Washington… except that Bath had its layout long before Paris and Washington did.
So the history, the lovely layout, and the county seat all contribute to Bath’s personality. So do two great institutions begun during or after the Civil War… the Davenport Asylum for Female Orphans, and the New York State Soldiers and Sailors Home.
The “Davenport Home,” by all reports, furnished a true home for something like 800 girls over 90 years. “Alumnae” relate, for instance, that young men frequently came calling, and not just because it is in the nature of young men to pay such calls. They often arrived at a time when they knew they’d be invited to dinner, and everybody ate very well at the Davenport Home. Even during the Depression the girls rode horseback, played tennis, went camping, visited amusement parks, had their own Girl Scout troop.
In 2004 Chuck Mitchell and I published “Bath,” a book of historic photos in the Images of America series. For the cover image, publishers selected am 1892 photo of the girls gathered on an ornate set of steps, seated primly and properly, clad in uniform and, of course, entirely covered save for head, neck, and hands.
The photo of a similar gathering 50 years later shows the girls variously dressed and casually seated, little ones in sun suits, older girls in shorts and short sleeves, or even sleeveless. Women by then could vote and hold office. They could work, and largely control their own income. They could even join the army, and even as girls they were increasingly free from rigid convention.
That other great Bath institution, now the VA, started as a way to care for New York’s Civil War veterans — and some of them were furious when Spanish War veterans were admitted after 1898! Now much of the facility’s work is treatment for alcohol and drug problems. Stones in the national cemetery now feature symbols identifying the honored dead as Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, Wiccan, Bahai, and more, in addition to the traditional crosses and Magen Davids.
In doing our book we dedicated a combined chapter to the Girls Home and the Soldiers Home, and another to the Steuben County Fair. Not many towns have a fairground right in the center of things, but it’s part of the busy-ness of Bath.
We also found photos of pioneer pilots, bicycling postmen, and the Old-Timers Band, which played for the departure of Bath’s draft contingent every month through World War II. Bath is still a busy place. Arch Merrill would approve, and “Charles the Magnificent” would be delighted.

"Davenport Girls" in 1892

“Davenport Girls” in 1892