This entry was posted in Uncategorized and tagged Arkport, Canisteo Valley Historical Society, historic walk, historic walking tour, Steuben County Historical Society on Septemby kirkhouse. The free walk starts 4 PM at the village hall on Park Avenue. It’s been expanded and renovated repeatedly in the past 85 years, but it’s still a busy public school – a pretty good use of that money, back in the Great Depression!Īfter taking in some baby boom architecture, we plan to stop at “The Grove,” site of picnics, sports, Chautauquas, band concerts, and all the other joys of small-town life in the nineteenth century – and in the twenty-first, too. In keeping with the post-Civil War economic boom, this is a playful style – often asymmetrical, sometimes with different materials for different sections of the house, often with repeated features – such as windows – varying from floor to floor.įarther out on East Ave is Arkport Central School, built in 1937 with help from the state (financially encouraging centralization), and from the New Deal in Washington, designed to put people back to work on construction projects. Among other things we’ll get a look at the Hurlbut House, which is about 220 years old, making it one of the oldest houses… more, one of the oldest STRUCTURES… in Steuben County.Īlong with this we’ll see “Queen Anne” style houses along East Avenue, where the village started to extend about 1880. We’ll get a glimpse of this on Friday, September 16, when Steuben County Historical Society and Canisteo Valley Historical Society team up to lead a historic walking tour through the village. The state created the new Route 36, and while Arkport continued as a farming and retail center, it also became a bedroom community, fit for the baby boom. A hundred years later, rail traffic was less important because HIGHWAY travel, with individual motor vehicles, had taken over. Arkporters again had an easy outlet for their produce, not to mention passenger travel to Buffalo on one end, and New York City on the other. So things lay fallow (not to mention quiet) until the Erie Railroad came through in the 1850s. Arkport folks took advantage of a bad situation to move the river a quarter-mile westward – formerly a mighty highway, it had become only a source of floods. They’d sell their goods wherever the got a good enough price for them… then sell the “ark” for the lumber… and walk back home.ĭozens of arks would lie up, waiting for the spring freshets to raise the river, and speed the flow, so they could make their “returnless journey.” The Wadsworth brothers hauled their produce down from Geneseo to the “ark-port,” and so did just about everyone else in the region.Īll well and good until the Erie Canal opened in 1825, killing the need for river traffic and impoverishing the Southern Tier. In other words this is far as you can go upstream, and still be able to launch large “arks.” And large they were – hundred-foot monstrosities, built with the abundant local timber, laden with a year’s produce, and then poled or drifted as far down as Maryland. (Today’s Route 36 roughly follows that old trail.) A community was created here because it was on the land route, but ALSO because it was the head of navigation on the Canisteo River. Arkport’s “Old Main Street” was a well-traveled Native American footpath in the days before white people muscled in. Which helps explain why Arkport became a community, and how it got its name. In Steuben County it’s mostly in the northwest corner, then extends on into Allegany, Livingston, and beyond. “Muck” is the western New York name for a rich, silty soil that’s really good for raising crops.
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