Tag Archives: Urbana

Bicentennials! Looking Back — to 1822!

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Every year is significant, but now and then we hit one that rings a little bit more loudly than others. Such is 1822, a year in which two Steuben County towns were legally created, along with a Steuben church that’s still going strong. So what was going on… in AND out of Steuben… in that long-ago year?
In 1822, Steuben County had 40,000 people, and stretched all the way to Seneca Lake. Urbana became a legal town, and so did Cameron. In Bath, five men walked into the courthouse and legally incorporated what’s now Centenary Methodist Church, which was the second church in Bath; Presbyterians had started nine years earlier, but neither group had a building yet.
Slavery was still legal in New York, and would be for five more years. There were probably about 30 slaves left in the Steuben, and the national body of the Methodist Episcopal church had just recently voted to allow pastors to own them.
John Magee was our sheriff. DeWitt Clinton was our governor, and the Erie Canal was not yet finished, but the parts that WERE finished were already wrecking Bath’s economy, based on traffic downriver into Pennsylvania and Maryland. Our U.S. Senators were Rufus King and future president Martin Van Buren. William B. Rochester was our Representative. He was the son of Nathaniel Rochester, for whom the city is named. Sixteen years later William would die in one of the first great tragedies of the age of steam, when steam packet Pulaski exploded off North Carolina.
James Monroe was our president; he had crossed the Delaware with Washington. George Washington had died in 1799, but Presidents 2, 3, and 4 (Adams, Jefferson, and Madison) were still living, so except for Washington EVERY single U.S. president, from John Adams to Joe Biden, has overlapped the life of this church and these towns. We had 24 states, but not Texas, the southwest, or any of the Pacific coast. Napoleon had died the previous year.
Harriet Tubman was born in 1822. So were Ulysses S. Grant and Louis Pasteur. Queen Victoria was three years old. Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln were 13. After 190 years, the Catholic church allowed Galileo’s book to be published, finally conceding that the earth goes around the sun, instead of the other way around. In South Carolina, Denmark Vesey was executed when he tried to seize ships and sail hundreds of slaves to (relative) freedom in the West Indies.
The Second Great Awakening was beginning, a decades-long, country-wide revival that also brought forth adventism, dispensationalism, and Mormonism. The Methodist Episcopal Church was booming, and founded Augusta College in Kentucky. Liberia was founded, and Charles Babbage designed his difference engine, the first programmable computer. There were no steam railroads in the U.S., and telegraphs had not yet been invented. William Herschel died in 1822; forty-one years earlier, he had become the first earth being to discover a planet. No one knew about the asteroid belt, or the planet Neptune. All in all, 1822 was a pretty busy year!

2022 — a Double Handful of Anniversaries

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Anniversaries! Why do they matter?
Well, actually, they don’t, when you come right down to it. A hundred years isn’t any more important than eighty years… or for that matter, than thirty-nine years and six months.
Still, human beings constantly thirst for patterns, which can help keep us alive. And we’re tuned to the cyclical pilgrimage of the years, with ever-returning spring and her sisters greeting us in the same pattern, all through our lives.
Anniversaries matter to us. They can be an occasion to remember, observe, and (depending on the type of event), celebrate. And 2022 offers repeated possibilities.
First of all, the TOWN OF URBANA has its bicentennial this year. It was created in 1822 from territory belonging to Bath, and incorporated as its own municipality.
Look at a map, and Urbana is the fist that grips the upright of Keuka Lake’s slingshot. Some of the very earliest grapes in the Finger Lakes region were cultivated in Urbana, and Pleasant Valley Wine Company, formed before the Civil War, is still in business today. Urbana’s lakeside slopes make good ground for vineyards.
Though the Town’s mostly rural, there are unincorporated settlements such as Rheims, Pleasant Valley, Urbana, and North Urbana (which is southwest of Urbana – go figure). The Fish Hatchery and the Davenport Hospital are in Urbana, but the best known part of Urbana is probably the Village of Hammondsport, which was indeed a port back in canal-and-railroad days. It’s also, of course, the home of Urbana’s most famous son, the aviation giant Glenn Curtiss, who lies buried just a few miles from where he was born, and just a few rods from where his first flights electrified the nation.
Also incorporated in 1822 was the Town of Cameron, far from the Lake and high on the Appalachian Plateau. Cameron is the birthplace of General William Woods Averell, whose Civil War career was followed by a life of diplomacy, invention and enterprise – he invented an early form of asphalt for roads. Cameron and West Cameron (but not Cameron Mills) are unincorporated settlements. The land was originally separated from Addison.
Centenary Methodist Church in Bath is enjoying its bicentennial this year, though Methodists had been meeting informally before that. It took them a few years to get their building up, but once they did they shared it with any congregation, such as the Baptists and the African Methodist Episcopal Zion, in need of a home. They are now on their third edifice, and are currently hosting the Seventh Day Adventists.
This year Avoca Baptist Church enjoys its 175th anniversary. There’s also a sad 175th to acknowledge. On November 30 of 1847 Marcus and Narcissa Prentiss were killed in Oregon Territory. Later on we’ll look at the ins and outs, and rights and wrongs, of that affair (watch this space!). But for now we’ll just note that Narcissa Prentiss was a Prattsburgher, an alumna of Franklin Academy, while her husband Marcus had practiced medicine in Prattsburgh and Wheeler, before they went to Oregon Territory as missionaries.
Hornell Intermediate School was opened in 1922 as Hornell High School. It was perhaps the first of our truly modern schools, and it’s the oldest school in Steuben County that started as a public school, and is still used as a public school.
This is the centennial year for the Village of Riverside, incorporated within the Town of Corning in 1922. Earlier called Centerville, the new Village gave itself a new name. Unfortunately at some times Riverside could have been called River-In or River-Under. The Village was badly flooded in 1935, 1946, and 1972.
Which reminds us that this year marks the fiftieth anniversary of Aniello’s Pizzeria in Corning, on June 22, 1972 – and then of the Hurricane Agnes flood on June 23. It’s certainly not an occasion to celebrate – it killed 19 people in Steuben alone – but it must be remembered. And we’ll do so soon, in more detail, in another edition of this blog.

Happy Bicentennial to Urbana!

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This year marks a big anniversary for the Town of Urbana – now 200 years old.
The Town was legally created from Bath in 1822, the same year that Cameron was similarly created to the SOUTH of Bath. Bath’s Methodist church was also founded in that momentous year.
The most obvious feature of Urbana is Keuka Lake. Look at a map, and think of Keuka Lake as a slingshot or catapult. Urbana is the hand that grasps the shaft.
The incorporated Village of Hammondsport, at the head of the Lake, is Urbana’s largest community. It’s also the birthplace of Glenn Curtiss, the place where he manufactured motorcycles, airplanes, and engines from 1901 to 1918, building a commercial-industrial-technological giant.
Urbana includes an UNincorporated community of the same name, plus Pleasant Valley, Rheims, and Mount Washington. The Finger Lakes Trail wends through Urbana, as does the Keuka Inlet. Ira Davenport Hospital and the New York State Fish Hatchery are both in Urbana, though many people assume they’re in Bath. Native footpaths, the highways of a continent with no draft or riding animals, laid out the routes now followed by Fish Hatchery Road, Pleasant Valley Road, West Lake Road, and East Lake Road. Back around 1900, a bike path connected Hammondsport with Bath, as did the Bath & Hammondsport Railroad.
Hammondsport is often called the Jewel of the Finger Lakes, but just about every square foot of it was under water in 1935, when flooding took 44 lives, and devastated thousands of structures, throughout the region. Hammondsport and Urbana also suffered from the 1972 flood, but not as badly as they had done 37 years earlier.
Steuben County was bigger back in 1822, stretching all the way to Seneca Lake, and farther north along Keuka’s East Branch. Today’s Town of North Dansville was donated to the new Livingston County in 1822, but Yates County would not be born for another year, while Schuyler’s birth lay more than three decades in the future. Chemung County wouldn’t appear until 1836. The 1820 census showed 22,000 people in Steuben. Slavery was still legal in New York.
James Monroe was president, and John Marshall chief justice; they had both crossed the Delaware with Washington, 46 years earlier. DeWitt Clinton, of Erie Canal fame, was our governor, but his “big ditch” was yet unfinished. Traffic from the Southern Tier still ran mostly down the Susquehanna to Chesapeake Bay. There were 24 states, and America ended at the Rocky Mountains. Texas, the Southwest, much of the Rockies, and most of the Pacific coast belonged to Mexico.
Freed slaves from America established Monrovia in 1822, giving birth to the nation of Liberia, but Denmark Vesey was hanged in South Carolina. Charles Babbage created his difference engine, forerunner of the computer. Civil War figures Harriet Tubman, Ulysses S. Grant, Edward Everett Hale, and Mathew Brady were born in 1822, and so was landscaping pioneer Frederick Law Olmstead. Gregor Mendel and Louis Pasteur, future scientific luminaries, were born. The poet Percy Shelly died, and the astronomer William Herschel – the first earth being ever to discover a planet.
In 1822 Urbana already had its hills, its slopes, its fields and vales and forests. It already had its lakeshore, but what it DIDN’T have was Hammondsport, Lazarus Hammond not yet having bought the place. All there was was a tired collection of structures called Pegtown. But better times were coming!