Pultneyville—Naples—Hornell—(Knoxville, Pa.); State 21.
Pultneyville to Pennsylvania Line, 117.5 m.
Two-lane concrete or macadam.
The New York Central R.R. parallels route between Shortsville and Canandaigua; Delaware, Lackawanna & Western between North Cohocton and Wayland; the Erie between Hornell and Canisteo.
State 21 goes through fruit orchards, vineyards, and potato fields, and passes monuments of two nineteenth-century movements characteristic of central New York: Mormonism and the Underground Railroad.
Section a. PULTNEYVILLE to WAYLAND; 67.1 m. State 21
North of Canandaigua Lake is a fruit-growing region: west of the lake are the Bristol Hills, the most rugged part of central New York, with a sparse population of hill folk; and south of the lake is an important grape and wine district.
PULTNEYVILLE, 0 m. (274 alt., 257 pop.), an L-shaped, single-street village with a beach on Lake Ontario, was a hotbed of abolitionism and a terminus of the Underground Railroad; here the runaway slaves were smuggled under hatches across Lake Ontario to Canada and freedom. The local tradition is that while waiting for a boat the Negroes were concealed in large woodpiles on the docks from which the boats loaded their fuel; hence the expression ‘a nigger in the woodpile.’
South of Pultneyville tall horse chestnut trees border the highway; of all trees native to New York State these have the most beautiful blossoms, white and upright like candles on a Christmas tree; but unfortunately the blossoms last only for about a week in the middle of May.
WILLIAMSON, 4.2 m. (452 alt., 1,000 pop.), is at the junction with US 104 (see Tour 26).
PALMYRA, 17.8 m. (470 alt., 2,706 pop.), is at the junction with State 31 (see Tour 32).
At 20.5 m. is the junction with a macadam road.
Right on this road 2 m. to the JOSEPH SMITH FARM (R and L), owned by the Mormon Church. The front portion of the frame clapboard farmhouse was occupied by the Smith family; the four rear rooms are a later addition. In the southeast bedroom Smith is said to have had the vision which led to the founding of Mormonism. In the house are a table and a chair made by Brigham Young and a number of antiques of the period of Smith’s residence.
Joseph Smith (1805–44), born in Vermont, lived on this farm or in the vicinity from his tenth to his twenty-first year; he is described as a blue-eyed blonde with small hands and large feet, ‘quiet, low-speaking, unlaughing.’ The frontier climate was supercharged with religion: Methodists and Baptists held revivals, individuals enjoyed revelations and visitations, and new sects were organized around dominant personalities. In 1823 the Angel Moroni, son of Mormon, appeared to Joseph Smith in a vision and revealed to him where the gold plates of Mormon were buried, together with a key for translation. In 1830 the Book of Mormon was published; Smith had dictated the text to Oliver Cowdery, a Palmyra schoolteacher, in a style similar to that of the King James version of the Bible. The book, a translation of the plates, purported to be an account of the prehistoric inhabitants of America and of the establishment of primitive Christianity among them, which Smith was to re-establish in America. In the same year he organized the first Church of the Latter Day Saints at Fayette; and the first missionaries went out in the field soon thereafter. The existence of a sacred scripture and Smith’s teaching that believers were endowed with the same powers of the Holy Ghost as the primitive Christians served as rallying points. By the end of 1831 the faith had representatives in 20 States and Canada. In that year the Mormons moved to Kirtland, Ohio.
HILL CUMORAH (L), 22.9 m., a glacial drumlin, is the Mormon Mount Sinai, where Joseph Smith unearthed the gold plates that were the source of the Book of Mormon. ‘Convenient to Manchester,’ Joseph Smith wrote, ‘stands a hill of considerable size, the most elevated of any in the neighborhood. On the west side of this hill, not far from the top, under a stone of considerable size, lay the plates, deposited in a stone box.’ He saw them the first time in September 1823 and visited the place on each anniversary, until on September 22, 1827, he took them out of their hiding place. From 1827 to 1829 he translated them and then returned them to the angelic messenger.
On the summit, towering to a height of 40 feet, is the MORMON MONUMENT, dedicated in 1935 in the presence of thousands of members of the Church of Latter Day Saints. At night the shaft is illuminated by floodlights concentrated on the majestic figure of the Angel Moroni. Each of the four sides of the pedestal bears a bronze plaque representing, on the west, Joseph Smith receiving the tablets; on the south, the ‘Three Witnesses,’ who asserted they had seen Moroni and the gold plates and had heard the voice of God; on the east, the ‘Eight Witnesses,’ who asserted that they had seen and ‘hefted’ the gold plates; on the north, the exhortation of the Angel Moroni.
The MORONI HEADQUARTERS BUILDING, at the foot of the hill, dedicated in 1936, is built of split glacial stones gathered from near-by fields; the style is Mayan, the light stone trim bearing Mayan symbols, to represent the prehistoric American race believed by the Mormons to be described in the Book of Mormon. The building contains an information booth and living quarters for the attendants of the shrine.
MANCHESTER, 24.8 m. (590 alt., 1,329 pop.), is at the junction with State 2 (See Tour 30).
South of CANANDAIGUA, 32.3 m. (766 alt., 8,291 pop.) (see Tour 8), at the junction with US 20 (see Tour 8), State 21 passes a short distance west of Canandaigua Lake, hidden among the hills. To the west, and extending to Honeoye Lake, is the rough country of the Bristol Hills, a region of thick forest growths, narrow valleys, and small farms clinging to steep hillsides. The region and its inhabitants have been romanticized by Carl Carmer in Listen for a Lonesome Drum.
Jesuit missionaries wrote about burning springs with flames on the surface of the water, which they found in the Bristol Hills and which the Seneca Indians worshipped. The explanation is natural gas, which now lights the streets of many villages in the region.
The BALM OF GILEAD TREE (L), 53.5 m., a variety of poplar, was photographed in 1893, and the picture was exhibited at the World’s Columbian Exposition of that year as the largest tree in New York State. When it was last measured it had a spread of more than 100 feet and the trunk was 29 feet in circumference and 125 feet high.
NAPLES, 55.2 m. (800 alt., 1,144 pop.), is the center of an important grape-growing and wine-making region. Grape culture was introduced in 1852 and the wine industry began about 1856, attracting Germans from the Rhine Valley, followed by Swiss and French; their descendants and more recent German and Swiss immigrants are employed in the wineries.
In 1882 the late D. Dana Luther of Naples discovered in Grimes Glen, in the village, the ‘Naples tree’ (Archeosigillaria primerum), which was evidence that trees grew on the earth during the Devonian period; theretofore scientists had believed that Devonian vegetation was limited to a species of fern. The restored fossil, 33 feet high, is in the State Museum, Albany.
WAYLAND, 67.1 m. (1,372 alt., 1,790 pop.), is at the northern junction with US 15 (see Tour 31).
Section b. WAYLAND to PENNSYLVANIA LINE; 50.4 m. State 21
South of WAYLAND, 0 m., at 1.4 m. State 21 branches right from US 15 (see Tour 31).
HORNELL, 21.6 m. (1,160 alt., 15,494 pop.), was ‘made’ by the Erie Railroad. In September 1850, a pigmy locomotive called the ‘Orange No. 4’ drew the first train into Hornellsville, a village of 100 scattered houses, two churches, and two schools; today the railroad shops employ 1,400 and city factories manufacture tile, brick, fence wire, silk goods, gloves, shoes, leather, carriages and wagons, electrical machinery, and farm tools. Potatoes and fruit from the surrounding territory are shipped by railroad and truck. In 1930, during a drought, the city fined persons convicted of wasting water; the flood of July 1935 caused property damage estimated at $4,000,000.
The first clearing on the site of Hornell was made by Benjamin Crosby in 1790. The city was named for George Hornell, an Indian trader who purchased the site in 1793, built the first gristmill and the first tavern, and became the leading citizen of the upper Canisteo Valley.
The ELIM BIBLE SCHOOL, W. Main St., occupying a 27-acre campus, has 60 to 70 tuition-paying students; it was organized in the 1920’s by the Reverend Ivan G. Spencer to supplement the meager religious training provided in public schools. Outsiders come to watch the camp meetings held on the campus. The worshippers, sitting around a circle, listen to the music of a three-piece orchestra, maintaining an unbroken posture for hours at a stretch with no outward sign of physical discomfort; here and there one rises, raises his eyes heavenward, and chants hymn fragments; then, eyes partly closed, mumbling as in a trance, several throw their arms above their heads, cry out, and roll on the ground in the hysteria of emotion; all become convulsed with joy, and even the onlookers take the contagion and smile at one another with unaccustomed cordiality.
Right from Hornell on State 17F to ALFRED STATION, 7.1 m.; right from Alfred Station on State 244 to ALFRED, 1.4 m. (1,760 alt., 639 pop.), seat of ALFRED UNIVERSITY, the campus occupying an eastern hillside. The institution was founded as a ‘select school’ in 1836, became the Alfred Academy in 1843, and received a university charter in 1857. The two leading divisions of the university are the New York State School of Agriculture (1908) and State College of Ceramics, established in 1900 as the State School of Clay Modeling and Ceramics. The institution is coeducational, with a total student body of about 800. The STEINHEIM MUSEUM (open Sun. and Thurs. 2:30–5), built in the style of a German castle, is the second oldest college museum in the country. Exhibits include rare shells, mounted birds and animals, Indian artifacts and pioneer agricultural implements, early American pottery, Steigel and Sandwich glass, and samples of the finest workmanship in the ceramic arts.
State 17F continues south to ANDOVER, 16.1 m. (1,664 alt., 1,241 pop.), at the junction with State 17 (see Tour 3).
Wedged in the opening between 700-foot hills at the junction of the Canisteo River and Bennett Creek, CANISTEO, 27.2 m. (1,130 alt., 2,548 pop.), is a residential center for workers in Hornell and a shopping center for the farmers of the fertile valley bottoms.
In 1690 a French and Indian punitive expedition reached this spot and found Kanisteo Castle, a lawless refuge for Indians from various tribes, renegade Frenchmen, ‘rascally Dutchmen,’ Yankees that had fled the gallows in Connecticut, runaway slaves from Maryland, and footpads and highwaymen from the other coast colonies. The place was captured but continued its disorderly ways until finally in the 1760’s Sir William Johnson sent an armed force against it and the inhabitants fled. In 1788 Solomon Bennett, Uriah Stephens, and other survivors of the Wyoming Massacre in Pennsylvania happened upon the valley and settled here.
JASPER, 39.6 m. (1,578 alt., 250 pop.), is at the junction with State 17 (see Tour 3), with which State 21 runs in common for 0.9 miles.
At 50.4 m. the route crosses the PENNSYLVANIA LINE, 4.5 miles north of Knoxville, Pennsylvania.