Tag Archives: Steuben County Historical Society

Steuben County Historical Society conducts two historic walking tours every summer (weather and illness permitting!). We’ve put together a “Sidewalk History Spotting” packet with notes from four of them – in Wayland, Canisteo, Addison, and Corning’s Northside – plus information on established historic walking tours in Bath and Hammondsport. If you e-mail us via steuben349@yahoo.com, we’ll send you the free 20-page packet as a pdf attachment.

We hope that this will give you a way to get some fresh air and exercise (while socially distanced!), besides spotlighting some of our communities and pointing out a little history. Once you’ve had a guided look at history “from the sidewalk,” you’ll probably spot more on your own as you walk or drive through “old Stew-Ben.” Here’s a little sampling of what each walk has to offer.

At the heart of ADDISON is the Canisteo River. In fact, sometimes the river is IN the heart of Addison, but modern flood control makes that a rare occurrence nowadays. Eagles and osprey hunt for fish and build their nests along the river, so keep your eyes peeled.

Two small parks on the south side collect several memorials, and one of them honors Mr. Valerio. When the new central school went up in 1929, he paid to pave the street and put in the sidewalk, because it broke his heart to think of children walking to school through mud.

Cross the Main Street bridge and the railroad tracks (once the Erie main line) and you can climb the little hill to Wombaugh Park, surrounded by beautiful homes and historic churches. It’s a little showplace for the carpenter gothic style.

CANISTEO also flooded frequently in days gone by. In the late 1800s a trolley ran through the village and connected it with Hornell.

Canisteo’s green along Main Street has been a gathering place just about ever since the village was born. Greenwood Street has the Wesleyan church, which was a-building from 1934 to 1942; the 1856 Methodist church, whose pastor was the only local white Protestant minister we’ve found who opposed the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s; and the 1880 Baptist church, whose two very different towers give evidence of a long-ago lightning strike.

Further up Greenwood you get the cemeteries, including two stones inscribed K.K.K. by proud Klan members a century back, the schools, and the famed Canisteo Living Sign.

CORNING NORTHSIDE: While Addison and Canisteo both lie on the Canisteo River, Corning is divided by the Chemung. The Northside area around Bridge Street includes Benjamin Patterson Inn, built around 1796 and now the heart of Heritage Village of the Southern Finger Lakes.

The first block or two north of the bridge includes a commercial area largely built from 1900 to 1920 or so. Grace Methodist, North Baptist, and the old St. Vincent’s each have historic edifices, while Ontario Street has large old homes, a former church, and a 19th century fire station. All of this was under water in the Hurricane Agnes disaster of 1972.

WAYLAND is not on a river, but it was on two major railroads. It has Bennett’s Motors, an auto sales and service business opened by two brothers when they got back from World War I, and still in business until the end of 2019. It also has a Legion hall built by veterans – when they put it up in 1920, they included a good-sized movie theater – just what every town needed back then!

Wayland also has historic churches, of course, the old Main Street business district, and Gunlocke Library. When it opened in 1974 it was the first modern library built in Steuben since Hornell’s, in 1911.

For BATH our packet has just a short section introducing the existing random-access audio tour. Bath of course includes historic churches, the fairgrounds, the county buildings, the Liberty Street business district, and a number of fine old homes, including our own 1831 Magee House.

Our HAMMONDSPORT section likewise is short, introducing a historic tour created for a Girl Scout Gold project. Any tour of Hammondsport of course includes Keuka Lake, plus Glenn Curtiss history, the village square, more old homes, and the Elmwood Cemetery.

So that’s enough to keep you busy for six trips on six days! We’ll be happy to send you a packet!

Running the Rivers: Old-Time Arks and Arkmen

“To run the rivers on the freshets was the universal ambition of all the younger men for the first half of the present century in Steuben.” (Clark Bell, 1893)

In the late 1700s our area was hard to get to, and almost impossible to ship stuff out of… until Charles Williamson and others got the rivers cleared, and built 75-foot “arks” to carry the region’s produce. They started as far up as Bath (on the Conhocton), Bradford (on Mud Creek), or Arkport (on the Canisteo), then used the current to make their way to the Chemung, then the Susquehanna, and finally Chesapeake Bay and the markets of Baltimore.

George McClure (working for Williamson) built perhaps the first ark, and made the first experimental voyage, laden with lumber, staves, and wooden pipe. It took a half hour to get five miles from Bath, where they grounded… then about six days to get from there to Painted Post, where they waited another four or five days for the river to rise. “We made a fresh start, and in four days ran 200 miles.” Aiming for Baltimore, he got grounded near Harrisburg and negotiated a decent deal for his cargo there, having established that the thing could be done.

Joel Pratt (for whom Prattsburgh was named) cleared 110 acres four miles west of Pleasant Valley. The following year he hired men from Bath and Pleasant Valley to cut his wheat with sickles. They threshed that winter with flails, then took the wheat to Bath by ox team and sent it out on the high spring waters of 1802. Captain Pratt finally came back from Baltimore on foot, with nearly $8,000 in his pocket.

Doing business in Bath and Dansville with his brother Charles, McClure took in 4000 bushels of wheat and 200 barrels of pork. He built four arks at Arkport, and these may have been the first to navigate the Canisteo, running all the way down to Baltimore. One winter he built eight arks at Bath and four on the Canisteo, shipping flour to Baltimore and wheat to Columbia, Pennsylvania. “The river was in fine order and he made a prosperous voyage and a profitable sale. His next project was to build a schooner on Crooked Lake.”

He also bought fur, pelts, and deer hams, shipping them downriver. One year he boarded 40 head of “the best and largest cattle” onto arks, shipped them to Columbia, and drove them overland to Philadelphia, “where they sold to good advantage.”

The list of entrepreneurs who ran their arks downriver is a list of many of the region’s founding fathers: the McClure brothers, Charles Williamson of Bath, Frederick Barthles of Bradford, Benjamin Patterson of Painted Post, Joel Pratt and Jacob Van Valkenberg of Prattsburgh, Ira Davenport of Hornellsville, Christopher Hurlbut of Arkport, John Arnot of Elmira, and General Wadsworth of Geneseo all made fortunes in the arking traffic.

Bath in particular boomed, and warehouses bulged on Ark Street, but it crashed to an end when the Erie Canal opened in 1825. According to Ansel McCall, “The ark of the Conhocton passed into history; the rats took possession of the storehouses; the roofs caved in; the beams rotted away, and what was left of them tumbled into ruins.”

For decades to come lumber rafts in hundreds still made their way downstream to salt water. And the new canal system, while crippling Bath, was the making of Penn Yan and Hammondsport. Both of those are stories for another time. But join us at 4 PM Friday, January 3 in Bath Fire Hall, when I’ll kick off our 2020 Winter Lecture Series with a free presentation on the old-time days of lumber rafts and river arks.

300 Years in American Kitchens

A few years ago, in one of my World Civ courses at Genesee Community College in Dansville, one of my students became fascinated by how people ate in various places and at various times. As we read each chapter, he’d research the topic and report to the rest of us. We all became quite interested – and looked forward to his comments!

One thing we learned was that in days gone by, about three-quarters of what people ate was bread, and it took about three-quarters of their income to buy it. If supply went down, or price went up, millions might be pushed into death by starvation. So when we read about bread riots in the French Revolution, or the Russian revolution, they weren’t really bread riots – they were food riots.

Some religions maintain distinctness in part by dietary rules… kosher in Judaism, halal in Islam.

In the Epic of Gilgamesh… one of the oldest stories in the world… a woman tames Enkidu, the Wild Man of the Forest, in part by introducing him to baked bread and brewed beer. Much of humanity was still hunting and gathering, and those folks must have seemed like wild animals to the settled city dwellers of Mesopotamia. Brewing and baking were among the arts of civilization.

Cooking required something along the lines of a kitchen, at least in built-up areas. Western Europeans did not adopt the chimney until about 1100. Imagine how smokey their homes must have been! Many homes didn’t run to a kitchen, or at least their kitchens were very small. In A Christmas Carol, when the Cratchit family roasts their tiny goose, they join many of their neighbors in taking the goose to the baker, who makes his ovens available after the morning’s bread is done.

Stoves or ovens or hearths… they all operated by fire. Imagine cooking a meal by fire when it’s already 98 degrees in July. This problem was half-way solved with “summer kitchens” – spaces away from the main living quarters, and possibly even in a separate building. (Summer kitchens also helped to contain fires before they reached the main house.)

In 1868 the Magee House (Steuben County History Center) had a long extension reaching about to the middle of what’s now Dormann Library parking lot. I suspect that at the end of that extension was a summer kitchen.

WHEREVER the stove was, it STILL burned awfully hot. The cook had a choice between closing the kitchen windows (thus risking heat exhaustion) or opening them up… thus inviting every fly in the neighborhood to come and share the feast. (And to spread germs.) Screens weren’t invented until the late 1800s. Gas and electric ranges, with their small burners, helped to solve the heat problem, but the oven still made issues.

Much of their food we would rightly consider unhealthy and insalubrious. One Civil War soldier wrote his family in Prattsburgh that the tub of butter they sent was still fresh when it reached him in northern Virginia. This suggests that their standard of freshness varied considerably from ours.

Cooks back then had no accurate way to measure oven temperature, and no reliable way to tell time. So cooking times were by guess and by God, probably leading to underdone and overcooked portions on the table at the same meal.

American cookery varied from region to region, and many ethnic groups had their own traditional favorites. I grew up in Rhode Island on spaghetti, quahog chowder, corn-meal johnnycakes, and New York System hot dogs. Ask me some time about grinders and cabinets.

Linda Ferris is doing a free Steuben County Historical Society presentation on “The Evolution of American Cookery: From the 1600s to the Early 1900s.” It will be at 4 PM on Friday, December 6 in the Bath Fire Hall. Maybe you’d enjoy it!

The Finger Lakes Trail — a Regional Trasure

When we first moved to Bath from Holcomb, I got a map of Steuben County. And there, running a whimsical route from east to west (or west to east) was a broken line labeled “Finger Lakes Trail.” So I drove out to one of those spots where the trail crossed a road, and started following the white blazes. And I’m still following, 23 years later.

*The F.L.T. is a hiking trail, “a walk in the woods,” or occasionally across fields, now and then along roads, once in a blue moon on village streets, as in Watkins Glen and Burdette.

*The Main Trail goes between Catskill State Park and Allegany State Park, meaning you can hike the 580 miles from one to the other, all across the Southern Tier. By far most of it is on private land, with access through the generosity of the property owner. Nearly every foot of it was laid out and created by volunteers, and nearly every foot is also maintained by volunteers.

*A 1962 meeting at Keuka College laid plans to emulate the Long Trail in Vermont, and set up the Finger Lakes Trail Conference. It took years to finish actually creating the Trail, and the whole system now adds up to a thousand miles of hiking.

*That includes half a dozen major Branch Trails. The longest is the 180-mile Conservation Trail, with one terminus near Niagara Falls, and the shortest is the 12-mile Interloken Trail in the Finger Lakes National Forest, overlooking Seneca Lake. Letchworth Trail runs the length of the park along the gorge. Onondaga Trail is south of Syracuse. The Bristol Hills Trail has one end by the Jump-Off Point north of Naples, and the other end near Mitchellsville. The CRYSTAL Hills Trail runs from Bradford southward (through the Village of Addison) to the state line. It’s the northern end of the Great Eastern Trail, which runs (walks?) all the way to Alabama.

*For much of its route the Main Trail also carries the Great Northern Trail, from Lake Champlain to the middle of North Dakota. Then there are spurs (usually to amenities, or to points of interest), or loops, such as one around Queen Catherine Marsh and one through Montour Falls.

*One two occasions while hiking the trail I’ve suddenly been at the center of a cloud of songbirds, circling all around by and chirping away. Twice I’ve had the same experience with butterflies.

*I often see deer while hiking, occasionally foxes, once a fisher. Squirrels and chipmunks are commonplace, of course, but near Birdseye Hollow County Park is a colony of black squirrels, actually a naturally-occurring color variant of the gray. In the right places, I find beavers or muskrats.

*I know two places where there are flocks of bobolinks. I’ve encountered hairy woodpeckers, and peregrine falcons. I’ve watched the turkeys range through fields, or settle into their trees as night draws in. There are gorges and waterfalls, some of which must wait for days before someone hikes out to see them. In one place, the Trail goes through a vineyard.

*Hiking the Trail is a walk through history on one-time roads, or farm tracks, or railroad routes. In the woods of Bradford you skirt an almost-forgotten country graveyard. Near Campbell, and again in Liberty Pole, you pass one-room schools. In Howard (drainage ditch) and in Bradford (evergreen plantation) you hike through the work of Civilian Conservation Corps lads, during the Great Depression. In multiple places you hike across stretches flooded in 1935 and 1972.

*In Urbana you’re walking where Glenn Curtiss flew, and passing the cemetery where he lies buried. A spur route down to Curtiss Museum descends the same slope down which Glenn and his friends experimented with hang gliders in the snow, back in 1908. You cross the route of the first Grand Prix. At some points you look down on Keuka Lake, Seneca Lake, Canandaigua Lake.

*After a year or two I stopped at a Trail register box, signed in, and pilled out a Trail Conference membership form, figuring that since I walked on the thing so much, I should at least pay some dues toward upkeep, and so I still do, every year.

*At 4 PM on Friday, September 6, F.L.T.C. Board member Laurie Ondrejka will make a presentation about the Trail for Steuben County Historical Society’s quarterly lecture. It’s a free presentation at Bath Fire Hall, and we hope you’ll join us to hear about this regional treasure.

Join Us for a Historic Walking Tour on Corning Northside

Ever hear of Knoxville? It’s what we call the Corning Northside. It used to be a separate incorporated village, and it was bigger than the village of Corning (what we now call Southside), which was mainly farmfields with a few scattered houses. An 1890 merger created the City of Corning, after which BOTH sides started to boom.
*In 1873 (pre-merger), Northside development was centered on the strip between Dodge Street and Sly Street. After the merger, Knoxville had 30% growth in two years. In 1891 year, 114 new dwellings were erected, plus a brick business block on Bridge Street and three stores at Bridge & Pulteney. McBurney plots east of Sly were developed beginning 1903, while the Fuller plots west of Dodge developed after 1913.
*Going back to 1796, land agent Charles Williamson built an inn on what we call West Pulteney Street, and installed Benjamin Patterson as the innkeeper. That was the road to the west in those days, and the Chemung River flowed just a few rods away. From this, the city grew.
*Patterson Inn, at Heritage Village of the Finger Lakes, is where we’ll start a free historic walking tour at 4 PM on Friday, August 2. (If it’s bad weather, we’ll have a tour of Heritage Village.) From there we’ll see a number of things, including:
*The former Merrill Silk mill. Merrill operated in Steuben County at least from 1891 to 1925. There were also silk mills in Hornell (the center of the industry, and of Merrill), Canisteo, Wayland, Cohocton, and Bath… the latter capitalized by community subscription.
*Hugh Gregg School, which goes back to about 1950 – PRECEDING the new buildings constructed in the late ‘fifties, in the run-up to, or aftermath of, consolidation during the Baby Boom.
*St. Vincent’s Church and School. A graduation celebration was taking place here in June of 1972, and about a hundred people got stranded by Hurricane Agnes and spent the night on the roof of the school. The school later closed, and the building was used by Christian Learning Center, now Corning Christian Academy. The church itself was already scheduled for closing when a stringer broke in the roof, so it was officially closed 11 months ago, leaving one Catholic worship center in Corning, and one in Painted Post.
*The Hazel Street area, where many houses are built to similar plan, or to mirror plans.
*Grace Methodist Church, which formed in 1897 and dedicated a frame building in 1898. The church enthusiastically welcomed a large Ku Klux Klan delegation in 1924 – 30 men, masked and robed, were welcomed with applause and the church quickly filled up as word spread through the neighborhood – they had to borrow folding chairs from the funeral home. The church at the time was already working on a major building program which had begun in 1922 but got stalled after the crash of 1929. They had to meet in the basement until work could be finished in 1938.
*The current location of Northside Liquor Company, formerly Corning Fire Department Station 2, home to Crystal City Hook and Ladder Company # 2.
*Several fine homes on Ontario Street.
*Once we approach Bridge and Pulteney we encounter late 19th- and 20th-century commercial block architecture. This includes the “Joe Sofia” building. In 1923, Joseph Sofia was a shoemaker on Market Street, renting a home on Front. By 1950 Joseph Sofia and Ralph Scott had Sophia Grocery on this spot… note change in spelling.
*Our route will also give us a peek at the much more-modern Corning Glass Works/Corning Incorporated facilities. And on Bridge we’ll see the M. L. Allen block, built around 1910. Mr. Maynard, who had a furniture and trucking business, was on the Board of Public Works in 1916. The furniture store closed in 1984 after 92 years and three generations in the same family.
*The Hotel Stanton on Bridge first appears in the 1923 directory. In 1950 it offered “Rooms with bath $2.00 to $5.00 double, running water, legal beverages and meals. Phone 35.” Next door was Randy’s Stanton Diner (phone 2380), a manufactured diner now sadly gone.
*We will also notice wall art at Brick House Brewery; Marconi Post 47, Italian American War Veterans of the United States; Kapral Motors, with its elaborate ornamental facade; the Corning Leader building; North Baptist Church, built 1906… besides giving a nod to Hokey Pokey!
*And of course we won’t forget the horrible tragedy of 1972, when lives were lost and every foot of our route was under water. We hope you’ll join us.

A Walk in Wayland

Wayland’s a nice village. Steuben County being as big as it is, if you live in Corning or Addison, you may never have gotten there. But I have, frequently, and I like it.

*Wayland’s a village in the larger town of the same name. It’s in potato country, and it’s almost the last thing in Steuben before you cross into Livingston County and North Dansville. Like 13 of the 14 incorporated cities and villages in Steuben County, it was on the Erie Railroad. That transportation link helped make the communty, along with the fact that Route 15 rides straight through, on its way from Rochester down to Virginia.

*A little later, though, the DL&W Railroad would lay its route to the south of the village, and even later yet Interstate Route 390 would be run within a stone’s throw of that rail line. The Erie line, and Route 15, each became less significant. The village, now set back a mile or two from the main routes, was no linger as vibrant as it had been – the fate of almost all the old market towns that served surrounding farm lands.

*Right by the 390 exit, and the old DL&W depot, is Gunlocke, which for generations has been a mainstay of Wayland’s fortunes, making high-quality chairs and other furniture.

*In the village itself I’m leading a historic walk on June 7, meeting in the historical society museum (100 South Main Street) at 4 PM. One of the spots we’ll be taking in is Bennett’s, founded almost a century ago, the oldest Buick dealership in the world, and still a very busy business. The Bennett brothers started the operation after they got back from World War I.

*Also a sign of those fast-paced postwar days is the 1922 American Legion on North Main. Originally an organization for Great War veterans, the Wayland post celebrated modern times by including a movie theater when they built the place.

*Several churches along the walk give us a picture of the community’s religious and ethnic history. Two church edifices on Route 15 – United Methodist and Lighthouse Wesleyan – actually started out as homes for German-speaking congregations. The Seventh-Day Adventists have a more modern home on Third Street. Their denomination grew out of religious upheaval in upstate and western New York, back in the 1840s. Sacred Heart is the home for area Catholics, again largely German in the early days.

*Not far from the church is the old village hospital, to which victimes were rushed after a 1943 train wreck near Gunlocke killed 29 people.

*Besides the Legion, North Main is also home to interesting commercial blocks, while 19th-century homes are sprinkled throughout the village. A much more modern place is the Gunlocke home (now a funeral home), and the 1973 Gunlocke library. The library’s modern design is elegantly executed in wood, stone, and glass, but the wood and stone also lend it dignity and link it to the past. Of course, the wood links it to the Gunlocke company, too.

*Wayland is home to Wayland-Cohocton High School, and Way-Co’s most famous alumnus is perhaps Bill T. Jones ’70. He was three years old when he came to Wayland in a family of migrant farm workers. After going on to SUNY Binghamton Mr. Jones went into dance, for which he received a MacArthur “Genius” Grant. Since then he’s also received Kennedy Center Honors, numerous honorary degrees, and membership in the Steuben County Hall of Fame. I recently found a photo of sophomore “Billy” Jones as Marcellus in “The Music Man,” going into his star turn to teach River Citizens how to dance the Shipoopi.

*Anyhow, we’d be happy to have you join us on our free historic walk. As I said, we’re meeting at Wayland Historical Society Museum, and if the weather’s bad, the walking tour will become a museum tour. So you win either way.

Free Love and Silverware — the Onedia Community

Many of us remember the 1960s and 70s, with the explosive proliferation of communes and intentional communities, many set in or around California. Most were short-lived, and some were flat-out toxic. But they were counter-culture, and to many observers they were downright un-American.

*In reality, though, they were as American as apple pie. We often miss the fact that the English colonies in America started out as experimental utopian societies: the Pilgrims with their communism and commitment to the simple life; Massachusetts and the other Puritan colonies, with their austerity and a commitment to self-examination and self-criticism that would make Chairman Mao cheer; Rhode Island, with its liberty of conscience and its commitment to anarchy; the Pennsylvania Quakers, with their direct messages from God; the pacifist anabaptist sects, with their semi-closed communities; Georgia, where the rulers imported misfits and criminals so as to reprogram them after isolating them in the wilderness.

*Our pioneers were the lunatic fringe, and when they sailed away, folks back in Europe were delighted to wave goodbye.

*We got another burst of utopian communities in the middle of the 19th century, as the world was turning toward the modern age, away from lifestyles that had endured for a thousand years. Mormons engendered suspicion with their own closed communities. Celibate Shaker communes spread from Maine to Kentucky. Nathaniel Hawthorne lived in a utopian community, and so did Louisa May Alcott. So did John Roebling, who designed the Brooklyn Bridge. John Brown tried to start a bi-racial community near Lake Placid.

*While dozens of such communities speckled the American landscape, they lay especially thick in a band then ran from Boston to Buffalo. One of the most successful, and longest enduring, was the Oneida Community.

*The hundreds of members practiced hard work, economic communalism, religious perfectionism, gender equality, and complex marriage… all the members were considered married to all the other members. Needless to say, they were highly controversial.

*John Humphrey Noyes founded the Community (at Oneida, NY) in 1848 – a year that saw revolutions all over Europe and in South America, publication of the “Communist Manifesto,” the first women’s rights convention at Seneca Falls, a cholera epidemic that killed 5000 New Yorkers… a tumultuous moment. Noyes coined the term “free love.”

*For the next several decades local diaries and letters are sprinkled with scandalized reports that so-and-so, or such-and-such a family, had decamped (often secretly) and joined “the Oneidas.”

*Members subjected themselves to community criticism and evaluation, as well as self-criticism. Sex was not a free-for-all… it had to be consensual (and registered), and birth control was practiced. Pregnancy had to be planned and approved, though of course “accidents” happened. Child-rearing was communal. It’s probably too much to say that women were completely equal, but they were a whale of a lot closer to it than women in the outside world. Short hair and trouser suits were the norm.

*Older members of the Community introduced younger members to sex, which near the end of the Community’s history led to threats of statutory rape charges, though in fact they probably wouldn’t have applied under New York law at the time.

*Future presidential assassin Charles Guiteau lived in the community for about five years, but members (not unreasonably) considered him insane and held him at arm’s length. He left the community, and sued Noyes, some six years before killing Garfield.

*An elderly Noyes left the country under a legal cloud in 1878, urging the end of complex marriage. Members agreed the following year and in 1881 voted to close the Community, creating in its place a joint-stock corporation that endures to this day, making the famed Oneida silverware.

*The Oneida Community Mansion House is now a museum and a National Hostoric Landmark. This Friday (Dec. 7, at 4 PM) Dr. Tim McLean, a museum docent and a professor emeritus at Herkimer Community College, will tell us the Community’s story at a Steuben County Historical Society Lecture in Bath Fire Hall – free and open to all. Hope to see you there!

“Back to the Baby Boom”

On one day in 1946, there were 32 infants in the maternity ward at Corning Hospital… part of the first cohort of Baby Boomers. What was our region like in the days of the Baby Boom?

*The period of the 1950s saw monumental changes in our area. More changes would come following the 1972 flood, and still more as Corning Incorporated changed the focus of its local activities. But in many ways, the area we know was largely formed in this period, by such significant events as these.

*Corning introduced zoning of January 1, 1950. Painted Post Indian statue installed, 1950. The current statue in Painted Post is the fourth in a series — the first two were flat sheet metal. A fully-rounded statue was blown down and broken during a 1948 windstorm, and the current statue installed two years later. All three earlier Indians are at the Erwin Depot Museum.

*Corning Glass Center/Corning Museum of Glass opened, 1951. It’s been through several major revampings and expansions (not to mention a major flood), but the Museum of Glass came in with the new decade.

*Erie Railroad tracks moved north Corning, 1952. Until than, multiple tracks ran right through the city. People in Corning lived with the noise, the smoke, the danger, and the snarled traffic until the lines were moved to what’s essentially their current routes. The yards were moved down to Gang Mills at the same time.

*In 1953, polo was epidemic in Steuben County.

*Erie Avenue becane Denison Parkway in 1954. With the tracks all torn up and removed, the street was renamed to fit with its new identity as a business district. Governor Tom Dewey came for the dedication.

*Corning-Painted Post School District was approved in1954. The proposal sparked fierce controversy, but the area was still served by 62 districts, most operating a single one-room school… and scarcely half the one-room students went on to high school. Even the referendum sparked bitterness. Because of a quirk in the law, folks in the Southside District 9 were not allowed to vote. Folks in the rural towns were angry that there was only one polling place, and they had to come into the city in order to vote. Then it snowed. But the proposal passed, new modern facilities started going up, and the last set of one-room schools finally closed in 1957.

*Watkins Glen International opened its dedicated track in 1956. After an accidental death on a crowded sidewalk, the auto races moved for several years to rural roads in the Town of Dix. In 1956 the new closed course was opened, with enthusiastic drivers voluntarily taking their chances on a surface that was not yet cured.

*At this time there were 300 dairies in the Town of Bath, half-a-dozen of them within the Village limits.

*Watson Homestead opened in 1957. A year before his death in 1956 Thomas Watson established a Declaration of Trust for the old family farm (his birthplace) and started working with an architect. In 1957 the retreat and conference center opened its doors for the first time.

*In 1958 the Courier and Advocate newspapers merged in Bath and became a general newspaper, ending over a hundred years of partisan newspapers operated on behalf of political parties.

*Corning Community College opened in 1958. The old School 3 on Chemung Street was home to 118 students and ten faculty (six of them full-time). Also in 1958, the Davenport Home for Girls closed.

*At about the same time, Steuben County Fair switched from a September date to an August date.

*Southern Tier Library System opened in 1959.

*The sixties, of course, continued the theme of great change.

*Ira Davenport Memorial Hospital opened in 1960, helped along by assets transferred from the defunct Davenport Home.

*Reportedly the Gardiner Road School in Bath closed in 1961. That’s the latest date I’ve seen for a one-room school operating.

*A 1962 meeting at Keuka College formed the Finger Lakes Trail Conference, and began building what is today a thousand-mile trail system. That same year, Glenn Curtiss Museum opened up in the old Hammondsport Academy building.

*The Southern Tier expressway was coming into existence by fits and starts. The Erie Railroad merged with the Delaware, Lackawanna and Western Railroad in 1960, and passenger traffic for Steuben County ended in the 1960s.

*In 1963 a multi-day forest fire raged above Bath between Cameron Road and Babcock Hollow Road. In the following year the Village began the process of buying land and creating Mossy Bank Park.

*BOCES came into existance in 1965, and in 1968 we switched from a Board of Supervisors to a County Legislature.

*Much of that didn’t matter much if you were a kid. Life revolved around school – very likely shiney and new – Scouts, Little League, TV, drive-ins, toys, games, music on the radio – it was, in many ways, a very child-centered age. All in all, there were worse ways to grow up. We’ll be talking about those days in our September presentation, “Back to the Bay Boom,” 4 PM Friday, September 7, at Bath Fire Hall. It’s free and open to the public – we hope you’ll join us!

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