Rochester—Batavia—Buffalo; State 33. 71.2 m.
Two-strip concrete.
State 33, the most direct route between Rochester and Buffalo, goes through a flat countryside of grain fields, fruit orchards, and pastures.
This section of the State was part of the Holland Land Purchase. In the 1840’s an old woman of 75 who had been one of the pioneer settlers north of Batavia, thus described her first home: it was a shanty ‘about ten feet square, flat roofed, covered with split ash shingles; the floor was made of the halves of split basswood; no chimneys; a blanket answered the purpose of a door for a while, until my husband got time to make a door of split plank. We needed no window; the light came in where the smoke went out . . . For chairs, we had benches made by splitting logs, and setting the sections upon legs . . . We bought a cotton bag, and stuffing it with cattail, it was far better than no bed . . . We were soon on our way, house, or shanty keeping . . . .
‘Our first resource for bread, after exhausting the little stock we brought in, was to buy strings of corn of the Indians, burn out a hollow place in a stump, suspend a pounder by a spring pole, and thus make of the corn a coarse meal. One stump, pounder and spring pole, would answer for several families.’
But life was not all hard work and coarse bread: ‘Some of our parties were got up by first designating the log house of some settler, and each one contributing to the entertainment; one would carry some flour, another some sugar, another some eggs, another some butter, and so on . . . Frolics in the evening would uniformly attend husking bees, raisings, quiltings and pumpkin pearings. All were social, friendly, obliging—there was little of aristocracy in those primitive days.’ An indispensable part of every frolic was Russel Noble, the left-handed fiddler, of whom it was said—the remark casting an aspersion upon his music as well as his morals—that ‘he used to have no more regard for time than he had for eternity.’
Southwest from ROCHESTER, 0 m. (500 alt., 324, 694 pop.) (see Rochester), State 33 cuts across pancake-flat farmlands. The DOLOMITE PRODUCTS QUARRY (L), 4.2 m., is a huge hole in the ground out of which 350,000 tons of dolomite, a stone used in road building, are extracted annually.
NORTH CHILI, 10.8 m. (581 alt., 350 pop.), is the home of the CHESBROUGH SEMINARY (R), a free Methodist coeducational boarding school founded in 1867. The campus covers 10 acres on the 200-acre dairy farm, owned and operated by the institution.
In CHURCHVILLE, 15 m. (615 alt., 597 pop.), is the BIRTHPLACE OF FRANCES E. WILLARD (1838–98), 24 S. Main St., a small frame house now an addition to a store. Miss Willard lived most of her life in Illinois and the statue of her in the Capitol at Washington was erected by the citizens of that State. In 1894 she deserted her career as a college professor and dean to devote the rest of her life to the cause of temperance, basing her case on the moral need to protect the home and Christian life. During the ‘Great Temperance Roundup’ of 1883 she visited every State in the Union seeking converts to the cause; when she arrived in a village a boy ran around the streets ringing a dinner bell and shouting: ‘Lecture at the depot!’ Miss Willard set in motion the Home Protection Movement, was secretary and then president of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, served on the executive committee of the Prohibition Party, and founded the World’s Christian Temperance Union.
BATAVIA, 32.5 m. (890 alt., 17,222 pop.) (see Tour 11), is at the junction with State 5 (see Tour 11).
Since CORFU, 44.9 m. (860 alt., 460 pop.), was incorporated in 1868, its principal industry has been the cultivation of flowers for the Rochester and Buffalo markets, with as many as 26 greenhouses operating at one time.
At 62.1 m. is the junction with State 78 (see Tour 36).
BUFFALO, 71.2 m. (600 alt., 575,150 pop.) (see Buffalo), is at the junction with State 5 (see Tour 11), US 62 (see Tour 37), and State 16 (see Tour 38).