September 1990

About this Issue

Note from the Editors

For this back-to-school time of year, this September issue begins with Richard Sherer's article on the early schools in Pleasant Valley and Hammondsport. Dick Sherer is the Steuben County historian, and the Urbana Town historian, as well.

Shirley McNulty describes the practical boarding arrangement that made it possible for her and other girls to go to high school in Penn Yan when they would not have been able to travel to school everyday from their homes. Mrs. McNulty graduated from Penn Yan Academy when she was 16, and from Keuka College when she was 19. She taught school for more than 30 years, 23 of them in the Junior High School at Painted Post.

OWarren Hunting Smith writes about the churches the Rose family sponsored in the Finger Lakes country, at Geneva on Seneca Lake, at Allen's Hill near Honoeye Lake, and at Branchport on the west branch of Keuka Lake. Mr. Smith furnished the picture of Trinity Church. Mr.Kirk Burtch of Branchport supplied the picture of St. Luke's Church. [Illustrations to be added.]

Another installment from Edwin N. Harris' Harpending's Corners brings Ed's recollections of his first teachers and his early days at District No. 6 School in the town of Tyrone.

More from Samuel Hammond's book Margins and Rambles of a Journalist (1855). This is the same Samuel Hammond that Dick Sherer writes about in his page one article "Early Schools in Pleasant Valley and Hammondsport." The text for Hammond's book was provided by Dick Sherer and Paul Wood.

another chapter from A New Home. This one is about the English settlers that Mrs. Kirkland knew in Michigan. Caroline Kirkland could write so entertainingly of her observations about the people she saw, and in this chapter she puts them altogether in a love story—well, almost a love story. She was always candid, yet kind; intensely sympathetic, but cheerful and humorous; sensible and practical, yet warmly romantic. She must have been an intelligent, confident, and happy woman.

Did Mrs. Kirkland know, when she used the name, Cathcart, for a family in this story, that David Cathcart, Lord Alloway, was one of the heirs of the Pulteney Estate in 1820? She could have known this because she lived in Geneva from 1828 to 1835.

CLR Blog | Site Map | Contact CLR