June 1989

About this Issue

Note from the Editors

This issue features an article by John Rezelman about the once active dry-bean-farming-and-processing industry in this area.

John Rezelman was for many years manager of the Bath Farm Credit office and is familiar with nearly every farm in Steuben County and with many of the families who have farmed here and some who have raised beans in the past.

John is also a thorough gardener himself who not only plants his own garden every year and harvests it, but has a lawn full of dwarf and espalliered fruit trees. In the good-old-days when it was allowable he had chickens, sheep, a steer, and even a horse for his children on their large lot on Haverling street in the heart of Bath.

John has always been an outdoorsman, a hiker and cross-country skier. He laid out and built the Finger Lakes Trail from Bath to Mitchellsville between 1969 and 1972. John Rezelman has been active for a long time in the Bath Area Writer's Group and was one of the earliest members of the Red Jacket Writer's Club that meets monthly in Penn Yan.

The other front page story of this issue begins with an account by L. H. Brown from the July 12, 1893, Hammondsport Herald. Brown was editor of the paper from 1877 until 1915.

Richard Sherer, Steuben County historian and Town of Urbana historian, who is brimming with facts and lore of the whole Crooked Lake, Bath and Genesee Country area, copied by hand the account from a bound issue of the Hammondsport Herald. Dick is particularly fond of Lew Brown's editorial style and has read all of the old issues of Brown's paper and even copied out the stories he admires the most. Of course, Dick prizes this story because it is about one of his favorite lake spots, Snug Harbor, which is now the last remaining of the old lake-front hotels that used to ring Keuka Lake. Dick Sherer also supplied the picture of Zenas L. Parker.

He recalls three of the colorful personalities associated with Snug Harbor: first, Major John Stocum a Civil War veteran and later the undertaker at the Bath Soldier's Home; and then, two others, Chief Goodbody and the "Dude," in a legend Dick Sherer retells.

Also in this issue is another installment of the series about the mills along the outlet from Keuka Lake. These stories have been written by Frances Dumas and illustrated by Patricia Rios.

Mrs. Marie B. Cornell reports about two men who had a great influence on the schools in early Bath and Corning. The Crooked Lake Review welcomes letters from readers about interesting episodes in their childhood.

Another article on the Henry rifle by Robert Rockwell, III.

Two letters written home by a soldier in Virginia to his brother near Rochester. These letters were found in the drawer of a treadle sewing machine Lisa Treichler bought some years ago at an auction near Bluff Point, NY.

Caroline Kirkland's story of frontier life in Michigan, A New Home, continues as do our excerpts from Peter Henderson's Gardening for Profit.

Next Issue

The July issue will continue the regular features: Frances Dumas' series, The Mills Along the Outlet; Peter Henderson's 1883 Gardening for Profit; and Caroline Kirkland's 1839 A New Home, her account of moving to Michigan with her husband and family and starting the village of Pinckney

Also in the July issue will be another letter by Margarett Hallett Lang about her childhood experiences in her grandmother's home at Wayne, New York, at the turn of the century.

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