One special part of our communities is often overlooked, or often made the butt of jokes (sometimes, understandably so). But in our region, the jokes should be affectionate ones. We have good county historical societies.
We’ll look at most of our area county societies over the course of this year, but I want to start with the one we joined almost as soon as we arrived in the area 18 years ago… Steuben County Hiostorical Society.
Since going to work there (2010) as the part-time director, I’ve developed an informal mission of Saving Steuben Stories, Telling Steuben Tales. With a change of name, that could encapsulate many such societies.
SCHS got its start in 1949, when 146 people gathered at the Bath Presbyterian Church, agreed to create the organization, and designated themselves as founding members. The last of this visionary group has only recently passed away, but their work continues.
At that time the Corning-Painted Post Historical Society was still young, and many of the local groups that we know now did not yet exist. But today’s landscape is different, with local societies dotted across the map and official historians in most municipalities. The Curtiss Museum and Glass Museum have added themselves to the scene. This has required some rumiantion as to the role of the County Society in today’s environment.
Our first response to that has been, that we don’t get in anybody’s way. Where there’s a strong local society, or a specialized agency, our job is to encourage and support them. So we figure that Corning-Painted Post is the lead agency in that area. Kanestio Historical Society takes the lead in the area. Curtiss Museum specializes in Curtiss, and CMOG in the glass industry. We don’t compete with them, for instance in collecting artifacts or documents. In those areas, if someone offers them to us, we may take them, but we don’t go out seeking them without good reason. Our county-wide board includes members who are active in the Wayland, Canisteo, and C-PP Historical Societies.
Second, we try to fill in the gaps where there are not strong agencies currently in existence.
Third, we make it a particular mission to cover county-wide matters. We’ve gathered materials on fracking and wind farming. We archive annual reports from the Steuben County Conference and Visitors Bureau, and gather the published annual reports of the county government, plus 19th-century directories and histories.
Collections of documents and artifacts help in Saving the Stories, but we also work at Telling the Tales. There are 34 cities and towns in Steuben County, and in a typical year we will do presentations in 17 of them. Some of these are our own activities. We have a winter lecture series the first Friday in January through April, plus presentations in September and December. We conduct the Columbus Day Leaf-Peeping Cemetery Tour. We do “Look Back in Time” minutes on WVIN. Our quarterly Steuben Echoes magazine (sent free to each Steuben library) is mostly taken up with history, rather than announcements about bake sales. And we post a historic photo on our Facebook page almost every business day. A recent post on the Canisteo Living Sign attracted over 9000 individual viewers, though typically viewership hovers in the general neighborhood of 600 to 1200.
On top of that, we also take the show on the road. Flipping through my 2013 calendar tells me that I alone did presentations for Family Life Ministries, Corning Inc. Retirees, Corning Library, Dundee Historical Society, Watson Homestead, Elmira Zonta, Corning Senior Center, Hornell Rotary, Hornell Fortnightly Club, Hornby Historical Society, and Hamondsport Women’s Club.
And on top of that — we operate the one-room school at Steuben County Fair, receiving 3000+ visitors every fair week. In fact, we have made it a major project to do all we can documenting the 400 or so rural schools in Steuben County, not to mention a like number of cemeteries and burying places. Our president Helen Brink drove 4000 miles within the county to locate all of these, and published a book with her results… now going through revision with even more findings.
Another significant collection is high school yearbooks from across the county, going back to the 19th century and pushing a thousand in number. We are also beginning a push to collect church histories from across the county, along with histories of other religious fellowships. We get frequent queries on almost any matter of county people and county history, just in the last couple of weeks from as far away as Texas and Montana. Since we share facilities with the Steuben County Historian, it makes a nice synergy for pooling resources.
We’re located in the 1831 Magee mansion… old Bath library, next to the new Bath library. We exhibit historic artwork, dolls, aviation memorabilia and more, though we’re not yet wheelchair accessible. We maintain exhibits and materials on the Davenport orphan home for girls.
And, apart from my ten hours or so a week, all of this is done by volunteers, and has been since 1949. Membership ($20 a year) gets you the Steuben Echoes and helps those volunteers keep on with their great work… saving the stories, and telling the tales.