Tag Archives: Steuben County Historical Society

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.

Join Us for a Walking Tour of Painted Post!

Once upon a time, there was a painted post.

*This was a shaped and embellished tree trunk, standing in a Native American town where the rivers (Conhocton, Canisteo, Tuscarora) came together to form the Chemung. European folks called it the Town by the Painted Post, and the surrounding space they called the Painted Post Country.

*When Steuben County was erected in 1796, Painted Post was one of six “supertowns” that were each eventually subdivided into half a dozen smaller towns. When that process was pretty much done, the Town of Painted Post changed its name to the Town of Corning, after the major landowner.

*The old name passed into history, until a Village was incorporated within the Town of Erwin (part of the original supertown, and also named for a major landowner). The Painted Post name came officially back onto the map, and there it has stayed ever since.

*The rivers were highways back in the early days, and also power sources, as the nearby “gang mills” demonstrated. Painted Post’s position where eastbound/southbound traffic came together… or where westbound/northbound traffic divided… made it a perfect point to stop, to rest, to do business.

*Unfortunately, of course, it was also a perfect spot for flooding. And flood it did, repeatedly, until one flood did away with what remained of the original “painted post.”

*To commemorate that landmark, villagers commissioned one of their neighbors to create a sheet-metal Indian in two-dimensional silhouette… they paid him one cow. This figure watched over the community for decades until a newer version was created. In the late 19th century came a fully-rounded cast-metal statue that actually looked like an Indian, or at least like what someone in a factory THOUGHT an Indian looked like.

*After that statue blew down and got damaged during a 1948 wind storm, a local art teacher created the statue that we know today. Like its predecessor, the new statue stood right smack in the middle of Monument Square, tangling traffic on Water and Hamilton Streets.

*That space (and much of the rest of the village) had flooded in 1901, and catastrophically in 1935, 1946, and 1972. After that last flood the river was moved, and so was the statue, finally out of traffic to the northwest corner of the Square, by the urban-renewal Village Square Shopping Center, replacing a couple of blocks lost to Hurricane Agnes.

*ALL THREE of the 19th-century Indians are in the Painted Post-Erwin Museum at the Depot, which doubled as a makeshift morgue in 1972, accomodating the remains of 14 of the 19 Steuben County residents lost in that terrible night.

*When the Erie Canal opened in 1833, the river routes became quaint memories, making Painted Post a sleepy little place. But that changed in 1851 when the Erie RAILROAD came through, connecting Lake Erie with New York City. A few years later Painted Post also became the start/end point for the Erie’s Rochester Branch. Routes 15 and 17… now succeeded by Routes 415, I-86, and I-99… continue Painted Post’s history as a major transportation hub.

*“I have fallen in love with American names,” wrote Stephen Vincent Benet. “Senlis, Pisa, and Blindman’s Oast, it is a magic ghost you guard. But I am sick for a newer ghost: Harrisburg, Spartanburg, Painted Post.”

*We love Painted Post too, and at 4 PM on Friday, June 15, I’ll be leading a historic walking tour of the Village, starting in the Museum at the Depot (where we’ll see those three early Indian figures), winding down to Water Street and Monument Square before making our way back to West High Street Cemetery, where we’lll hear from our own “Cemetery Lady,” Helen Kelly Brink. This free Steuben County Historical Society walk was postponed from June 1, when we had torrential downpours. We hope to see you June 15 – weather permitting!

“America’s Wish Book: The Story of Sears, Roebuck”

A week or so back we posted a photo of a Western Auto store on our Steuben County Historical Society Facebook page, and that led to a LOT of comments with reminiscences… many of them from people remembering ther first Western Flyer bicycle!

*That particular store was on Liberty Street in Bath. But there were other Western Autos in Bath over time, plus more in Hornell and Addison, not to mention Wellsville, Elkland, and many others.

*I myself put in ten years at Western Auto, mostly in Rhode Island but incuding a few months in Virginia. As the name suggests, it was HUGE in auto parts, definitely including tires. Our store in Rhode Island, in a village about the size of Cohocton, sold thousands of tires every year. But “your home town department store” also sold paints, furniture, electronics, appliances, sporting goods, toys, housewares, and more. I estimated that I personally sold enough firearms and ammunition to outfit a regiment of infantry.

*Western Auto’s “associate store” arrangements let local owners use the name and buy the products while retaining their own ownership and control, thus vastly augmenting their own hardware, auto parts, or sporting goods store.

*This was only one of a number of chain stores of fond memories. Ames, Jamesway, and Woolworth’s are in memory still green. Slide back a little farther and you’ll find W. T. Grant’s… J. J. Newbery’s… Ben Franklin. Slide back even more and you’ll encounter such local chains as Cohn’s Clothing and Peck’s Hardware.

*Then of course there are supermarket chains (A&P, Acme, Grand Union) and drug store chains (Peterson’s, Eckerd, Rexall).

*The great granddaddy of them all, I suppose, is Sears, Roebuck. Sears grew up with the post office, especially once the Grange had bullied the government into creating Rural Free Delivery. Sears promoted by mail, took orders by mail, got paid by mail, and made deliveries by mail.

*This of course led to creation of the gigantic Sears catalog, which covered everything from the tiniest widget to an entire house. There’s a Sears house still occupied in Pleasant Valley. A house was once delivered to the Branchport area by trolley.

*Mothers were known to tear out the pages dedicated to “foundation garments” before releasing the catalog to the family’s young people. Last year’s catalog, like last year’s almanac, often wound up in the outhouse, where those out-of-date pages proved still to be of use.

*As folks relied more on cars and less on mail, Sears developed more brick-and-mortar presence, either as catalog centers or as full-blown stores. The catalog center in Bath is closing out just now.

*Which makes a sad if fitting backdrop for our next Steuben County Historical Society Winter Lecture, “America’s Wish Book: The Story of Sears, Roebuck,” by Pam Farr of Big Flats Historical Society. The free presentation will be at 4 PM Friday, April 6, at Centenary Methodist Church in Bath. We hope to see you there, and we hope you’ll bring your memories!

Isabel Drake’s Remarkable Photos Show the World of 1900

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A hundred years back and more, there lived in Corning a remarkable family – mother, father, and three daughters – that left its mark on history, without doing anything actually historical. On the other hand, they had a whale of a lot of fun.

*The reason we know them particularly is that Isabel Walker Drake (the mother) was a pioneer in the new age of photography that had been made possible by George Eastman, up in Rochester. She used high-quality equipment (as she could afford to do), including a panorama camera with a pivoting lens. She had a clear eye and a steady hand, and she knew when to grab an interesting shot. Her photos will be the subject of a free Steuben County Historical Society presentation by Charles R. Mitchell (Friday Dec. 1, 4 PM in Bath Fire Hall).

*In addition to her artistry, Mrs. Drake mastered the technical side of photography, developing her own negatives and printing her own photos. Whenever she had a question, she just got on the phone and called Mr. Eastman.

*Mrs. Walker’s father had been a member of Congress, her brother-in-law was an owner of Corning Building Company, and her husband James was an owner of First National Bank on Market Street, so she probably had easy entry into George Eastman’s circle.

*The big brick house at 171 Cedar Street, now part of the arts organization of the same name, was their “starter home.” They later built a much bigger and finer place, next to the T. G. Hawkes mansion, up in the Corning Free Academy neighborhood.

*Just so you get the picture, that home (now gone) had its own schoolroom, stage, and pipe organ (which was later donated to Pulteney Presbyterian Church). Musicales and extravaganzas were part of life in the Drake home. The girls were educated at home, tutored by Professor Borstelmann, who operated the Corning Conservatory of Music. The Langdons of Elmira were among their friends.

*When they weren’t at home they were often out at Drake’s Point on the west side of Keuka Lake. One of the cottages there at the Point is now Lakeside Restaurant. The family arrived by riding the train to Hammondsport, then taking their naphtha launch from there.

*Madge, Dort, and Martha attended Ogontz Academy in Philadelphia… the only school in America with required military drill for girls. Photos show them fishing, sledding, playing baseball, skating, snowshoeing, sparring with boxing gloves, messing about in boats. On at least one occasion they brought a pony up onto the porch (and mother photographed it).

*Mrs. Drake photographed Glenn Curtiss flying the “June Bug,” and Geronimo touring the 1901 Pan-Am. She photographed trips to summer on Block Island, and to visit gold mines out west (including maneuvers by “Buffalo Soldiers”).

*It couldn’t last. They appear to have always spent more than they made, and the panic of 1913 wiped them out. Cousin Sid Cole was killed in World War I. The home and the summer home were lost, the girls went to work, and Mrs. Drake’s five boxes of albums with outstanding photos were rescued decades later by an alert antique hunter who snatched them up for a song, had some of them published in “American Heritage,” and donated them to Corning-Painted Post Historical Society.

*Mary Anne Sprague, who knew the Drake family, said, “They had fun. And they WERE fun.” And so they were. Their photos show it. And they also show our world, as it was so long ago, when no one dreamed of World Wars, and the 1900s still sparkled.

The Amish and Mennonite Story

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Since 1990 or so, many of us have been aware of Amish and Old Order Mennonites moving into the area. The general name for Amish and Mennonite groups, and others, such as Church of the Brethren, is Anabaptists. These include “modern” people with business dress, advanced degrees, and jobs in finance, commerce, the professions, or high technology.

*Then there are groups often referred to as “Old Order” — the Amish, and those Mennonite groups that, like the Amish, maintain plain dress and abstain from most modern technology.

*All Anabaptists trace back to the turmoil of the Reformation… traditional date 500 years in November. Believing that Biblical baptism was the declaration of a mature commitment, they rejected the infant baptism that they had all received at birth, and baptized each other anew, sometimes right in the town fountain — Anabaptist means rebaptizer. They walked away from the churches practicing infant baptism (which was just about all of them), and started their own.

*Taking the teaching of Jesus both literally and seriously, they refused to swear oaths. They insisted that government had no legitimate power of compulsion in religious matters. They also refused to take up the sword, and adopted a non-resistant lifestyle, saying it was better to suffer wrong than to give it. The classic example was Dirk Willems, fleeing for his life across the ice when his nearest pursuer fell through. Dirk Willems returned, pulled the man from the ice, was captured, and was burned at the stake for the crime of being an Anabaptist.

*However, this non-resistance is not simply a passive thing; it is equally an active approach to life. In 1948 Eastern Mennonite College became one of the first two southern colleges to integrate racially. An even more modern example would be the West Nickel Mines school shooting in Pennsylvania in 2006, when a gunman barged into an Amish school where he killed five girls and wounded five more before killing himself. Members of the Amish community immediately… that day… went to the gunman’s family to extend their love and concern for THAT family’s suffering. Thirty Amish attended the gunman’s funeral. The Amish set up a charitable fund to assist the family of the killer.

*This has limits, when it goes beyond an offense to Anabaptists. When Dr. Myron Augsburger was growing up on a farm, their “English” neighbor was fiercely angry that people were stealing crops from the Augsburgers, but Mr. Augsburger refused to take any action — non-resistance. One day when the Augsbugers were off the neighbor spotted the thieves out in the field, fired a shotgun blast over their heads, or ordered them all to sit down, holding them prisoner until the Augsburgers returned. Mr. Augsburger told the neighbor to put up his gun and let them come out.

*It turned out, though, that one of the thieves was the sheriff. Starting that moment Mr. Augusburger dedicated himself, successfully, to having that sheriff thrown out of office at the next election — not because he had stolen from the Augsburgers, but because he had betrayed the trust of the entire community, and was not fit to hold public office, especially as a law enforcer.

*At 4 PM Friday, September 8, I’ll be doing a non-intrusive presentation on the history of Amish and Mennonites for Steuben County Historical Society. The presentation at Bath fire hall is free and open to the public. We hope to see you there.

Come See Canisteo!

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We very reasonably begin the Steuben County story with Charles Williamson establishing Bath in 1793. But of course people had been living here for thousands of years, and in particular European-descended people were already living here before Williamson arrived. Europeans had been living in Canisteo for five years before anybody around here ever heard of Williamson.

*The main Iroquois cities were up at the north end of the lakes, but there was a substantial Seneca town here well before Europeans stared muscling in. There’s a long-standing story that Marquis de Denonville marched down from Montreal and burned the town in 1690. Actually in that year he would have been marching from France, so it’s more likely to have been during a major expedition that he led in 1687, BUT despite the antiquity of the story, many scholars are pretty sure that he never got anywhere near this far.

*There’s another story that “Kanestio Castle” was a fortified town populated by local Indians, refugee Indians, white renegades, and escaped slaves, and was broken up in the 1700s. It’s quite possible that something along that line did in fact happen.

*By 1796 Canisteo was well-populated enough that it became one of the six original towns of Steuben County. I call these “supertowns” – Canisteo gave rise to another half-dozen current towns, plus Hornell and part of Allegany County.

*From an early date Canisteo was was an important point for road and river travel. Stages and mail came overland, while arks and rafts were poled downstream to Chesapeake Bay, carrying the produce of the region. Taking advantage of the same natural paths, the Erie Railroad came through in 1850. The nearby unincorporated hamlet of Hornellsville (today’s City of Hornell) started to boom with Erie work, and neighboring Canisteo grew along with it.

*In later years the New York & Pennsylvania railroad reached Canisteo, as did an electric trolley line linking to Hornell, and also circulating through each community. The Village incorporated, and became the market and business town for the surrounding countryside.

*The rail lines guided pioneer aviators, who made Canisteo a stop on long-distance flights. Cal Rogers cane through when he made America’s first coast-to-coast flight (1911, seven weeks elapsed but only 84 hours in the air). Canisteo at one point in the 1800s even had its own professional minor league baseball team.

*In 1933 Canisteans laid out the living sign on a hillside – 260 pines spelling out “Canisteo.” It was reported in Ripley’s Believe It or Not!, and listed on the National Register of Historic Places. It was recreated last year… eight decades takes its toll.

*The 1935 flood inundated the whole downtown area knee-deep, and also killed off the New York & Pennsylvania, which was already on its last legs. Two years later, with New Deal help, the community built a fine modern school that’s still in use. A fleet oiler, USS Canisteo, served in the US Navy from 1945 to 1989.

*We’ll be exploring the village in a historic walk (free and open to the public) at 4 PM Friday, May 6, sponsored by Steuben County Historical Society. We’ll meet at Kanestio Historical Society (23 Main Street). We hope you can join us!

Join Us For a Walk and Some Stories — in Bath

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So how about Bath? Arch Merrill, half a century ago, called it “the grande dame of the Southern Tier.” Older folks remember it as the region’s market town, lit up like a Christmas tree on Friday and Saturday nights as farm families came in from miles around. Charles Williamson planned it as the great metropolis of western New York, and accordingly laid it out with the green squares and broad straight boulevards that it still enjoys.

*Bath is the seat of Steuben, home to the clerk, the courthouse, the surrogate, the county office building, the prison, the county historical society – not to mention the county fairgrounds. It’s the place where people go to get help.. from the ARC, the V.A., the Davenport Hospital, and (from 1863 to 1958) the Davenport Home (or orphanage) for Girls.

*At 4 PM on Friday (June 2) I’m leading a free historic walk through the village, sponsored by Steuben County Historical Society. We’re going to start at Historical Society headquarters, the 1831 Magee House (old Bath library, next to the new Bath library). It’s going to be kind of a mixed bag, taking in architecture, church history, transportation history, community history, and tales of days gone by.

*Take Pulteney Square, for instance. This is said to be where Charles Williamson and his party first started clearing trees in 1793, making space for the new home that he had already named Bath. Until 1910 the Land Office faced the Square, still selling off those 1.2 million acres that Williamson represented. Desperate farmers sent angry delegates where after the Erie Canal opened and collapsed their land values. They demanded, and finally received, revaluations on their mortgages.

*William Jennings Bryan thundered forth here in the 1900 presidential campaign, condemning imperialism and calling for a government that worked on behalf of its people.

*The courthouse faces the Square from the east side. This is where draft contingents gathered every month during World War II, to be sworn in and then marched (very badly, I suppose) to the depot and off to their fates, while the Old-Timers Band (augmented by a few callow youths awaiting their own call-ups) serenaded them.

*John Magee erected the large brick building facing the Square from the west as home for the Bank of Steuben, the first bank in this county. He built it at the same time as he built the Magee House, and later generations would know it as the Masonic temple.

*Facing the Square from the south is the magnificent First Presbyterian Church, with its rose window, its monumental stonework, and the carillon that from time to time fills the Square with music.

*Running straight north from the Square is Liberty Street, long the business and shopping district of Bath and indeed, as we said earlier, of the whole countryside. Alexander Graham Bell knew this street, while Glenn Curtiss and Charles Champlin knew it intimately. Civil War general William Woods Averell made his home on Liberty Street. James Wetmore, who grew up in Bath and became Acting Supervising Architect of the Treasury Department, made sure that Liberty Street got a fine new post office in 1928. He came to lay the cornerstone himself, and treasured that trowel forever after.

*Liberty Street is where you went to the movies (at the Babcock); where you bought shoes (from Orr’s or Castle’s); where you sent or received funds at Western Union; where you got your prescriptions (at Dildine’s, among others); where you did your Christmas shopping (at Grant’s), got an ice cream (the Olympia), grabbed some lunch, or even had Thanksgiving dinner (at the Chat). You could even go bowling on Liberty Street.

*You can do Town or Village business on Liberty Street, or get help from the Village police. Up at the north end, you can go to church (Methodist or Episcopal). Take a few more steps, and until fairly recently you could go to school. A few steps more, down East Washington, and you could go to the fair… since before the Civil War.

*All in all, Bath is worth a visit! Come join us, hear some stories, and share a few of your own.

Hooray For Helen!

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Last weekend the Central Steuben Chamber of Commerce gave its annual Community Spirit award to Helen Kelly Brink. I’ve know Helen for quite a while, but I’ve been working with her two days a week for the past six and a-half years. We use desks right next to each other, though I will confess that a year or so back, Helen rearranged the office so that a four-drawer file cabinet blocked both my desk AND me. I don’t think there was any message or agenda in that, and I have to say that it was actually kind of peaceful back there. But in the end we agreed that it really wasn’t the best arrangement.

And that’s good, because even though I enjoy my work at the historical society every day, working with Helen definitely makes the day extra bright. Besides volunteering twice a week at Magee House, Helen has served multiple terms on the board, including several terms as president.

Helen has fans literally worldwide, thanks to her role on the Steuben County Tiffany Trail, giving tours at the First Presbyterian Church in Bath. You can get the tour yourself on a drop-in basis, Wednesdays during the summer. If you haven’t done so yet, I definitely recommend it.

Four times a year, Helen edits and lays out our quarterly magazine, the Steuben Echoes. She has just finished expanding and Joe Paddock’s History of Steuben County Historical Society, and bringing up to the current date.

IN ADDITION to that, she has written nine books and four pamphlets. I couldn’t get copies of two of them, but the others add up to some 3000 pages of print. Her publications are…

*I Thought It My Duty to Go the My Country’s Call: The Civil War Letters of John McIntosh Kelly & Maryett Babcock Kelly

*A Driving Tour to Historic Places & Areas of Interest Around the Village of Bath

*A Walking Tour Through Bath’s Downtown Historic District

*A Driving Tour to Mossy Bank and Lookout Including Historic Places & Areas of Interest

*A Driving Tour to the Veterans’ Administration Medical Center at Bath

*From the Pages of Our Church’s History: the First Presbyterian Church of Bath

*Our Miss Hille

*The Classons-Claysons of Cohocton, N.Y.

*The Saratoga, Schenectady, & Steuben County Descendants of John Calkins, Jr.

*Some of the Descendants of Asa Phillips

*The Jonathan Oxx Family of Steuben County

*The Descendants of William McClary

…and, maybe most notably, Steuben County Cemeteries: Good, Bad, and Gone! For this project, she and her little dog Cricket spent four summers driving 4000 miles within Steuben County, visiting virtually every one of 400 or so cemeteries. I think there were fewer than half a dozen that she didn’t get to, just because they were in inaccessible terrain. Bill Moore crawled into one spot for her to verify the cemetery’s existence, and in another case a state trooper stopped her as she was about to climb a steep hill, and went up to the top in her place.

AND… once the book was published, and more information started coming in, she brought out a revised, expanded, and updated edition. Helen was well established as “the cemetery lady.”

And as the Cemetery Lady she plans, maps, organizes, and leads the annual Columbus Day Leaf-Peeping Cemetery Tour. Some might find it hard to believe, but this event is wait-listed every year. It’s often suggested that we put on a second bus, but we’ve always pointed out that the best part of the tour is the stories that Helen tells ON the bus, traveling from cemetery to cemetery, and as we point out, we can’t duplicate Helen. Or in other words — nobody can match Helen Kelly Brink.

Steuben County Historical Society Assumes Assets of Call Homestead Museum

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Judge Bradstreet of Steuben County Court has ruled that the assets of Call Homestead Museum/Hartsville Historical Society be transferred to the Steuben County Historical Society.

Richard Call originally established the museum on his family homestead at Post Road and Purdy Creek Road. After his death 16 years ago the place was operated by a board. But operating a farm museum in Hartsville was always going to be a challenge.

The action to dissolve the Call Museum non-profit was originally instigated by that institution’s bank, then after study supported by the Department of Education and finally by the Attorney General’s office, which actually brought the action.

The state approached Steuben County Historical Society “out of the blue” to see whether they would agree to receive the assets of Call Museum, and the SCHS board agreed. I am the director of SCHS.

Besides two officials of Steuben County Historical Society, a member of the Call Museum board and the two official Hartsville Town Historians also attended the hearing.

The assets include artifacts, archival materials, real property, and some funds — we can’t speak in detail because it hasn’t been proper for us to go in and inspect or “inventory” until judicial action.

We at SCHS anticipate distributing some of the artifacts and such to Allegany County or to the local communities where they relate more directly. We would take in some materials, and would look at disposing of the real property and other assets with a view to strengthening Steuben County Historical Society. We would use some of these resources to provide services in that southwestern part of the county, and to maintain the name of Mr. Call.

To forestall any confusion this is NOT Town of Hartsville Museum, recently opened in the old Slate Creek School.

We at SCHS were not seeking or expecting this offer/request from the state. Now that it is coming to pass we want to strengthen SCHS and also increase our support for “saving the stories and telling the tales” in Hartsville-Greenwood-West Union, besides letting Allegany County have those materials that relate to them.

We’re also committed to maintain the name and the legacy of Richard Call, who first saw Steuben County through the windows of an orphan train. In Hartsville he found a home and a family and a community, and his generosity will continue to bear fruit through the years to come.

Come and See — Canisteo!

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We very reasonably begin the Steuben County story with Charles Williamson establishing Bath in 1793. But of course people had been living here for thousands of years, and in particular European-descended people were already living here before Williamson arrived. Europeans had been living in Canisteo for five years before anybody around here ever heard of Williamson.

*The main Iroquois cities were up at the north end of the lakes, but there was a substantial Seneca town here well before Europeans stared muscling in. There’s a long-standing story that Marquis de Denonville marched down from Montreal and burned the town in 1690. Actually in that year he would have been marching from France, so it’s more likely to have been during a major expedition that he led in 1687, BUT despite the antiquity of the story, many scholars are pretty sure that he never got anywhere near this far.

*There’s another story that “Kanestio Castle” was a fortified town populated by local Indians, refugee Indians, white renegades, and escaped slaves, and was broken up in the 1700s. It’s quite possible that something along that line did in fact happen.

*By 1796 Canisteo was well-populated enough that it became one of the six original towns of Steuben County. I call these “supertowns” – Canisteo gave rise to another half-dozen current towns, plus Hornell and part of Allegany County.

*From an early date Canisteo was was an important point for road and river travel. Stages and mail came overland, while arks and rafts were poled downstream to Chesapeake Bay, carrying the produce of the region. Taking advantage of the same natural paths, the Erie Railroad came through in 1850. The nearby unincorporated hamlet of Hornellsville (today’s City of Hornell) started to boom with Erie work, and neighboring Canisteo grew along with it.

*In later years the New York-Pennsylvania railroad reached Canisteo, as did an electric trolley line linking to Hornell, and also circulating through each community. The Village incorporated, and became the market and business town for the surrounding countryside.

*The rail lines guided pioneer aviators, who made Canisteo a stop on long-distance flights. Cal Rogers cane through when he made America’s first coast-to-coast flight (1911, seven weeks elapsed but only 84 hours in the air). Canisteo at one point in the 1800s even had its own professional minor league baseball team.

*In 1933 Canisteans laid out the living sign on a hillside – 260 pines spelling out “Canisteo.” It was reported in Ripley’s Believe It or Not!, and listed on the National Register of Historic Places. It’s being recreated now (80 years takes its toll), and only the “O” is in place.

*The 1935 flood inundated the whole downtown area knee-deep, and also killed off the New York-Pennsylvania, which was already on its last legs. Two years later, with New Deal help, the community built a fine modern school that’s still in use. A fleet oiler, USS Canisteo, served in the US Navy from 1945 to 1989.

*We’ll be exploring the village in a historic walk (free and open to the public) at 4 PM Friday, May 6, sponsored by Steuben County Historical Society. We’ll meet at Kanestio Historical Society (23 Main Street), and if weather precludes a walk we’ll get a tour of K.H.S. and its museum. We hope you can join us!