Railroad Stations: Union Station, Railroad Ave. between 3rd and Clinton Sts., for Erie and Pennsylvania R.Rs.; Lake St. S. of Washington Ave. for Delaware, Lackawanna & Western R.R.
Bus Stations: 269–71 State St. for Greyhound Lines, Dickinson Motor Coach Lines, and Edwards Lakes to Sea Stages; 506 Academy Pl. for White Star Coach Lines.
Taxis: 35¢ within city limits.
Busses: Fare 10¢; 3 tokens 25¢.
Accommodations: 4 hotels; tourist homes.
Information Service: Chamber of Commerce, E. Church and State Sts.; Elmira Auto Club, 230 Lake St.
Radio Station: WENY (1200 kc.).
Motion Picture Houses: Five.
Baseball: Dunn Stadium, foot of Phoenix Ave., home grounds of the Elmira Pioneers of the Eastern League.
Swimming: Municipal pool, Brand Park, Maple Ave. and Catherine St.; children free 9–2, after 2 p.m. 5¢; adults 25¢ including locker.
Golf: Chemung Golf Course, Mark Twain Park, Sullivan and Prechtel Sts., 9 holes, greens fee 50¢.
Tennis: Municipal courts, Horner and Falck Sts.; Westside courts, Hoffman and W. Church Sts.; free.
Annual Events: Hobby Show, Girls’ Hobby Fair, May; Flower Show, June; National Glider Meet, two weeks ending about July 4, field determined by wind direction, headquarters at Harris Field.
ELMIRA (860 alt., 45,046 pop.), on both sides of the Chemung (Ind., big horn) River, occupies a broad, flat valley fringed by wooded hills. The north bank of the river is bordered by business structures; the principal business section extends along Water Street, which is too narrow for the congested pedestrian and automobile traffic of Saturday nights. Most of the buildings are three-story brick; a few select shops cater to the wealthy residents of Strathmont Park in western Elmira. In the older residential district, west of Main Street, stand the turreted mansions of the last century. The factories hug the railroad tracks and are surrounded by the humdrum dwellings of the workers.
About 10 per cent of the total population are foreign-born; about two per cent are Negroes. The relatively large Jewish group plays an important part in social, cultural, and educational activities.
The first white men to enter the region were the soldiers of the Sullivan-Clinton Expedition of 1779. At the mouth of Newtown Creek, beside the Chemung River, was the Seneca Indian village of Kanaweola, destroyed during the Battle of Newtown. Most of the early settlers were emigrants from Wyoming and Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. In 1789 a famine struck the valley as a result of a frost that killed all the wheat. The only deaths that occurred resulted not from starvation but from overeating when food was finally obtained. By 1793 the community had developed sufficiently to support a Masonic lodge, one of the earliest in western New York. The Chemung Canal, connecting Seneca Lake with the Chemung River in 1832, stimulated the lumbering industry; and large amounts of timber moved through the village.
The present name was adopted in 1828. According to local tradition, Nathan Teall, one of the early settlers, had a daughter named Elmira, for whom her mother often called in a shrill, far-reaching voice. When it was decided to adopt a new name, several people suggested the one they had heard so often when Elmira was a child.
The Erie Railroad reached Elmira in 1849 and opened new fields for business activity. Woolen and lumber mills grew rapidly. In 1854 the Junction Canal was built to connect the Chemung Canal with the North Branch of the Susquehanna River in Pennsylvania. The metal industries had their inception in 1860 with the incorporation of the Elmira Rolling Mills. By the time a second and third mill were completed, 20 furnaces, eight engines, five trains of rolls, two roll lathes, and one Burden squeezer turned out 22,000 tons of iron annually.
During the Civil War, when the Union Army barracks in Elmira required large amounts of supplies, the Woolen Manufacturing Company turned out 16,000 yards of cloth for uniforms. In 1864, the year the town received a city charter, one of the barracks was turned into a prison camp. On July 6, 1864, the first detachment of prisoners arrived, and local merchants made profitable contracts for food.
During the nineteenth century the dairying industry in the vicinity grew in importance, and butter and cheese were shipped in large quantities from Elmira. In 1882 Abner Wright of Wellsburg, a neighboring village, first shipped raw milk to the New York City market in felt-jacketed milk cans surrounded by ice. In 1893 he and his associates organized the Chemung Valley Condensing Company and gave new impetus to the local dairy industry.
Superior transportation facilities have made Elmira a manufacturing center. The largest industry is the Precision Tool Company, a subsidiary of the Remington Rand Corporation, which was established in Elmira in 1935 and employs about 2,000 workers in the manufacture of office equipment and business machines. Other industrial products are fabricated structural steel, fire-fighting apparatus and chemicals, Bendix drives, glass bottles, silk goods, knit goods, and wood pipe and trim. In 1936 about 10,000 persons (10 per cent women) were employed in 79 manufacturing establishments.
POINTS OF INTEREST
The CHEMUNG COUNTY COURTHOUSE, Lake St. at E. Gray St., is composed of four units. The design of the older porticoed buildings reflect the Greek Revival style of the first half of the nineteenth century and are representative of Elmira’s pre-Civil War boom. In the early days the courthouse, serving as community center, was also the scene of the first religious and Masonic meetings.
The ARNOT ART GALLERY (open 2–5 Mon.–Fri.; 2–5, 7–9 Sat.; 2:30–5:30 Sun.), 235 Lake St., occupies the Greek Revival mansion built by Mathias Arnot, one of the family of Arnots who were financial and political powers in Elmira during the last century. He bequeathed this red brick porticoed residence, as well as $10,000 for remodeling it, $200,000 for an endowment fund, and his art collection, to the community for a public art museum, which was opened in 1913. The permanent collection includes works of the Flemish, Dutch, German, and French schools. About 10 exhibits are held every year. Lectures on the exhibits are part of the curriculum of the city schools.
The STEELE MEMORIAL LIBRARY (open 9–9 weekdays; 2–6 Sun. except July and Aug.), corner of Lake and E. Church Sts., a Carnegie library, is a two-story red brick building trimmed with limestone. It also houses the Chemung County Historical Society. The name is in tribute to Joel Dorman Steele (1836–86), one of the most popular textbook authors of his time, and for many years principal of the Elmira Free Academy.
PARK CHURCH, SW. corner of W. Church and Main Sts., is built of greenish stone with red stone trim in a modified Romanesque style. It was erected during the pastorate of the Reverend Thomas Kennicut Beecher (1824–1900), brother of Harriet Beecher Stowe and Henry Ward Beecher, who is especially remembered for his pioneering efforts to make his church a center for social activities. A bronze statue of Beecher stands just east of the church.
In the second-floor lobby of the MARK TWAIN HOTEL, corner of N. Main and Gray Sts., are murals depicting Mississippi River steamboat scenes suggested by The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and a life-size portrait of Mark Twain. There are additional murals in the taproom.
GRACE EPISCOPAL CHURCH, SE. corner of W. Church and Davis Sts., is known for its beautiful interior. The pulpit was carved by Whipple in his studio at Exeter, England; the Calvary group of carvings was made in Oberammergau by leading actors in the Passion Play; and the sanctuary lamp is a reproduction of the lamp in St. Mark’s Cathedral in Venice.
ELMIRA COLLEGE, College Ave. at Park Place, one of the earliest colleges for women, was founded in 1855, at a time when higher education for women was considered ridiculous. The college was financed by Simeon Benjamin, a wealthy resident of Elmira. At the first commencement in 1859 there were 17 graduates; today the alumnae body numbers more than 4,000, and the annual enrollment is about 375. The curriculum includes all liberal arts studies and courses in domestic science and nursing. COWLES HALL, College Ave. at Park Place, the original college building, named for Dr. Augustus Cowles, first president of the college, has a large central octagonal rotunda with several radiating extensions. It contains the administrative offices, the book store, the recreation room, several recitation rooms, and the chapel. According to local legend, a subcellar (not open) was a depot on the Underground Railroad.
WOODLAWN CEMETERY, north end of David St., contains the GRAVE OF SAMUEL LANGHORNE CLEMENS (Mark Twain) (1835–1910), American humorist and satirist. In 1870 he married Olivia Langdon, daughter of a wealthy Elmira businessman, and thereafter spent many summers in Elmira. He is buried in the Langdon plot. In the same plot is the GRAVE OF OSSIP GABRILOWITSCH (1878–1936), Mark Twain’s son-in-law. He studied piano in St. Petersburg, Russia, his native city, and at the age of 16 won the coveted Rubinstein prize. In 1900 a concert tour brought him to New York. He achieved his greatest honors as conductor of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra. He met Clara Clemens while she was a pupil of Leschetizky, and they were married in 1909.
WOODLAWN NATIONAL CEMETERY, adjacent to Woodlawn Cemetery, contains the graves of 2,963 Confederate soldiers who died in the Elmira prison camp. The prison was hastily constructed, unsanitary, and crowded; most of the Southerners, brought here in 1864, died within the year. The Confederate graves, occupying the central portion of the six-acre plot, are surrounded by the graves of 322 Union soldiers. The cemetery office has a record of the burials.
The ELMIRA REFORMATORY (open 3 p.m. Wed., 1 p.m. Sat., hours of military dress parade), corner of Davis St. and Bancroft Road, is a massive brick structure painted gray, its grim buttressed side walls and towers typical of nineteenth-century prison architecture. In it are confined men between the ages of 16 and 30 convicted of a first-offense felony. Zebulon R. Brockway (1827–1920), superintendent from 1876 to 1901, evolved here the sytem of indeterminate sentence, under which the inmates, by accumulating credits, advanced through successive stages of increasing privileges until they received their parole. Brockway also developed industrial training, gymnastics, military drill, and a scholastic curriculum, all of which combined to make the Elmira system the pioneer pattern for modern penological methods.
The AMERICAN LAFRANCE–FOAMITE PLANT (open by permission), 100 E. LaFrance St., employing about 550 men, manufactures fire-fighting apparatus. The original firm was the Button Fire Engine Company, which began production in 1834 and rendered bucket brigades obsolete. Gasoline engines, power take-offs, and pumps, as well as trucks, are made in the Elmira plant. The firm also manufactures Foamite, a chemical for extinguishing fires.
The MARK TWAIN STUDY is on Quarry Farm, off East Hill Road, about half a mile beyond the city limits. Mark Twain himself described the structure as ‘octagonal, with a peaked roof, each face filled with a spacious window, and it sits perched in complete isolation on the very top of an elevation that commands leagues of valley and city and retreating ranges of distant blue hills.’ The place was built for him by Mrs. Theodore W. Crane, his sister-in-law, in 1874. That summer, and many of the succeeding summers until 1903, Mark Twain did much of his writing in this retreat, including portions of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Prince and the Pauper, A Tramp Abroad, Life on the Mississippi, and A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur’s Court. In town he indulged his fondness for billiards.
POINTS OF INTEREST IN ENVIRONS
Newtown Battlefield Reservation, 4 m. (see Tour 3). Finger Lakes, 30 m. (see Tours 27, 28, 30).
