Tag Archives: western New York

Natural Landmarks of (or Near) the Finger Lakes

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We live in a marvelous region, replete with sights and wonders. I suppose that just about every place is like that, if you dig deep enough. Another time, we’ll look at “man-made” landmarks in the region. But for this week, I wanted to enjoy compiling a list of NATURAL landmarks, in or around our Finger Lakes.

Each of our lakes is a natural landmark. But Keuka stands out. Because of its two northern branches, true – but even more so because of the arresting Bluff right between them. It dominates the main body of the Lake and both Branches, making a sight that dwells for decades in the memory. (It’s even MORE overwhelming if you’re actually IN the Lake, gazing up at it.)

NOT one of the Finger Lakes, but the last of the GREAT Lakes, is Lake Ontario. As a sight, well, it’s not MUCH of a sight. It’s the realization that this is an inland fresh-water sea, part of chain of such seas, joined by mighty rivers, in all spanning thousands of miles, that takes the breath away.

At Sodus on the southern shore of Ontario lies Chimney Bluff State Park, home to ever shifting geological formations, shaped and reshaped by wind, wave, and gravity.

Just a few rods south of the Conhocton River in Bath, a cliff and slope rise sharply for 500 feet. You can admire this from the village, for it looms like a wall as you drive south on Liberty Street (or just about any other street, for that matter).

But this view is especially remarkable because it works both ways. Head on up to Mossy Bank Park, drive or walk down to the Lookout, and the whole village, including Lake Salubria, spreads out below you like a playset. You can’t see Keuka Lake, but you can see the vale that wends toward it through the high hills. You can look westward along the course of I-99 toward Kanona. If the air is clear enough you can spot the wind turbines near Prattsburgh, and the set in Howard. If the season is right, monarch butterflies may rise up from the flat. If the stars are right, bald eagles may pass by.

The gorges of Stony Brook State Park and Watkins Glen State Park are natural landmarks, with the streams that rush through them continuing their millennia-long shaping and reshaping of their glens. The cleft of Letchworth Gorge is staggering to see, as is the Grand Canyon of Pennsylvania.

We’re blest with many waterfalls, each possessing its own beauty. Montour Falls and Taughannock Falls are two of the best, and it’s fun to stand in their spray on a summer’s day. And talking of falls, how could we omit Niagara? What must that have been like, for the first men and women to see it, ten-thousand years ago or more? First the roar… then the mist… and then a sight which they never could have imagined. And nobody else could either, so reports must have been scorned as travelers’ tales, until so many people had seen it that they had to be believed.

Being from Rhode Island, I long for salt marshes. None nearby, of course. But the Queen Catharine Marsh, between Watkins Glen and Montour Falls, is a huge beautiful flatland, girdled with a foot path created by the Finger Lakes Trail Conference. Harriers, redwings, waterfowl and wading birds abound. If you like marshes – don’t miss it!

A Visit to Clarence

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Ever been to Clarence? Neither had we.

*Clarence lies on State Route 5, the straight shot between Batavia and Buffalo. When we decided we wanted to spend a couple of days visiting New York’s second-largest city (see last week’s column!), we cast about for a place to stay, and Clarence fit the bill very nicely.

*Despite its proximity to Buffalo, Clarence is a rural town, with no incorporated villages. Driving along three-lane Route 5, much of your way on both sides is lined with old stone walls (or stone fences), often with meadow or woodlot behind them. It’s not just an affectation, either, for they line the country lanes too. Almost next to our motel was an old dairy barn, and working farms endure. A bike/hike trail runs south of the highway, then across and off to Akron.

*The settlement of Clarence Center is a very pleasant hamlet, and we enjoyed breakfast one morning on the porch of the Clarence Center Cafe. Even though the Cafe is on the corner of the main intersection, the meal was peaceful (perhaps because we had missed the school buses).

*The stretch along busy Route 5 is known as Clarence Hollow, and at the eastern end of the stretch you can see why, as the road dips down from the plateau. Clarence Hollow is largely linear, lying along both sides of the road. The high school is here, with its “modern” clock face in the tower. This where we ate dinner twice (at Gianni Mazia’s Pizza & Pasta), and breakfast twice (at Emily’s Family Diner), and enjoyed them all.

*While a business community along Route 5, and 13 miles from Delaware Park in Buffalo, by nature is going to get a good deal of transient traffic, we were delighted to see the dining rooms packed with local folks who were clearly steady, happy customers. While there were a Kwik Fill and a Sugar Creek, the “chain” establishments were otherwise missing, giving the place a “home” feel (much like Hammondsport).

*(If you need some chains, just slip down Route 5 to the north-south Transit Road, or Route 78. There you’ll find Panera, Applebees, Barnes & Noble, Dairy Queen, and plenty, plenty more. That’s also where the three-lane turns to four-lane.)

*Even our motel, the Clarence Inn, was “unchained”… my wife continuing her success at finding us interesting, pleasant, well-priced, vintage but up-to-date places to stay.

*The town hall campus, off Goodrich Road, includes a VERY nice modern public library, and a lovely arboretum where you can stroll or jog the paths, scaring the killdeer and enjoying the fountain’s spray on a hot summer afternoon.

*Despite being a rural town, Clarence has made its mark. Over the years five members of Congress have made Clarence their home. Joan Baez lived here, and so did Joyce Carol Oates. An early priest in a German-speaking parish went on to become a Catholic bishop, and then the first American bishop to be named a saint.

*Having previously lived in Vermont, Rhode Island, and Lehigh County, Pennsylvania, we were repeatedly struck by how flat the country is around Clarence. The dome of the sky took on a different character for us, with huge cloud banks stretching almost 180 degrees.

*Two more items to mention. First, for those (like me!) who go in for that sort of thing, Dave & Adam’s Card World is just down the road at Transit and Sheridan… a huge, clean well-lighted space purveying trading cards, comic books, sports memorabilia, and all sorts of pop culture treasures.

*Second, the Clarence Hollow Association has produced a brochure-sized visitors’ guide, and it is a model of its kind. It has the advantage of concentrating on the single-axis Route 5, but I just cannot say enough about how helpful this is, and how easy to use. (In my work I’ve seen a lot of visitor’s guides, and this one’s small but outstanding.) The map is perfect and unambiguous, the features laid out in numerical order, side streets and traffic lights clearly marked… bravo, Clarence Hollow Association!

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

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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

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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!?

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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.