North Hamlin—Le Roy—Warsaw—Wellsville—(Galeton, Pa.); State 19. Lake Ontario to Pennsylvania Line, 110.9 m.
Two-strip concrete or macadam.
The Baltimore & Ohio R.R. parallels route between Le Roy and Silver Springs; Erie R.R. between Warsaw and Belfast and between Belvidere and the Pennsylvania line.
Transecting western New York between Lake Ontario and the Pennsylvania line without touching a single city, State 19 is a completely rural route through a general farming, dairying, and fruit-growing region.
The road runs in part through the easternmost districts of the Holland Purchase (see Tour 11) and in part through the Morris Reserve, a tract including the rich bottom lands of the Genesee to which Robert Morris retained title. First ‘discovered’ by General Sullivan’s men during the campaign of 1779, the region was settled from New England, Pennsylvania, and eastern New York after the Revolution and after the Indian title had been vacated by the Big Tree Treaty (see Tour 8A).
Section a. NORTH HAMLIN to WARSAW; 46.7 m. State 19
South of NORTH HAMLIN, 0 m. (280 alt., 68 pop.), are orchards of gnarled apple, sour cherry, peach, and isolated plots of quince trees.
CLARKSON, 7.7 m. (427 alt., 300 pop.) (see Tour 26), is at the junction with US 104 (see Tour 26).
At BROCKPORT, 9.2 m. (539 alt., 3,584 pop.), junction with State 31 (see Tour 32), the road crosses the murky waters of the Barge Canal (see Tour 32).
Three corner gas stations, at 19.2 m., mark the junction with State 33 (see Tour 33).
About three miles west of BERGEN, 18.4 m. (600 alt., 656 pop.), are the BERGEN SWAMPS, 15 miles long, an irregular marl bed surrounded by a dense cedar thicket inhabited by blacksnakes, deer, and rare birds; to the botanists it is interesting for its white orchids, small white lady’s slipper, black chokeberry, fringed polygala, true and false miterwort, goldthread, bog violet, starflower, swamp valerian, twinflower, Labrador tea, dwarf cornel, bog cranberry, pitcherplant, and other rare plants.
On FORT HILL (L), 23.5 m., a point of land at the junction of Fordham’s Brook and Allen’s Creek, was a fortified Indian stronghold; archeologists have found skeletons, pottery, beads, stone axes, and arrowheads; one of the pipes found here ‘consists of a face having slitlike eyes and mouth, a long rectangular nose so modeled that it appears to look out from a hood with a triangular opening.’
LE ROY, 26.6 m. (869 alt., 4,386 pop.) (see Tour 11), is at the junction with State 5 (see Tour 11).
Along the road, young, immature orchards rise beside the scarred stumps of older orchards that have been cut down. At 32.1 m. is the junction with US 20 (see Tour 8).
A single crude timber derrick near the road north of PAVILION, 34.6 m. (941 alt., 425 pop.), is all that remains of the development following the natural gas boom that started here in 1879.
The products of surrounding farms are processed in the canning and poultry feed plants of WYOMING, 40 m. (987 alt., 376 pop.), strung out beside the bit of green in the village square. Since they use inexpensive natural gas drawn from near-by shallow pockets, the street lamps of Wyoming are allowed to burn night and day in order to save the wages of a lamplighter.
The former MIDDLEBURY ACADEMY (open by appointment), Main St., a two-story brick building with a portico, erected in 1817, is now the studio of Bryant Fleming, architect, who has collected art objects from the far corners of the world. The academy, which functioned for 70 years before being replaced by a modern school, was noted as a preparatory school for Presbyterian divinity students.
WARSAW, 46.7 m. (1,000 alt., 3,541 pop.), is at the junction with US 20A (see Tour 8A).
Section b. WARSAW to PENNSYLVANIA LINE; 64.2 m. State 19
South of Fillmore the route threads along the flatlands of the Genesee Valley, bounded by low hills. Sullivan’s men carried back to New England glowing accounts of luxuriant flats covered with grass ‘tall enough to easily obscure and hide from observation not only the horse, but his rider’; where the land had been cultivated by the Indians ‘the soil laughed with a bountiful harvest of corn, beans, squashes and gourds, when only slightly tickled with their primitive farming implements.’ As soon as the peace was signed and title to the land cleared, the settlers’ large covered wagons began rumbling in.
Valley towns reached the height of their prosperity during the construction of the Genesee Valley Canal, begun in 1836 and not completed until 1862; its four-foot ribbon of water was to join the Allegheny River at Olean with the Erie Canal at Rochester and thus channel the commerce of the entire Mississippi basin through New York State. But the canal never fulfilled its promises; in 1877, after the project had eaten up six and three-quarter millions of dollars, the legislature directed that the canal be abandoned.
South of WARSAW, 0 m., is a dairying and potato-growing region.
Farmers of the region about GAINESVILLE, 8 m. (1,616 alt., 283 pop.), during the 1938 season delivered 90,000 pecks of potatoes, all bagged and ready for sale, to a single grocery store chain. David Starr Jordan (1851–1931), biologist and president of Leland Stanford University, was born on a farm a quarter of a mile east of the village; Belva Ann Lockwood (1830–1917), lawyer, suffragist, and first woman candidate for President, was head of the Gainesville Female Academy in 1858; and Isabella McDonald Alden (1841–1930), author of moral tales for young people, wrote many of her stories in this vicinity.
At 12.9 m. is the junction with State 39 (see Tour 34), which unites briefly with State 19.
This is one of the largest maple sugar areas in the State; much of the product is marketed as ‘Vermont’ maple syrup. The season is in March and early April, when frosty nights alternate with warm, sunny days. Mornings the sap drips from the spouts into galvanized buckets hanging four feet up on the tree trunks; afternoons the run slackens and the farmers, wearing heavy sweaters and caps with earlaps lowered, gather the sap in larger pails on sleds or stone-boats and haul it to storage tanks beside the sugar house, where the sap is evaporated and sugared off. The carefully regulated heating in sheet-iron or copper pans over the blazing wood fires is a vast improvement over the Indian method of gathering the sap in bark containers and dropping hot stones in it to sugar it off. Like more modern and more technical chemical industries, this one has its by-products: maple sugar, maple cream, maple candy; from the skimmings and the scorched syrup good vinegar is made; and the second grade syrup is sold to tobacco companies for sweetening tobacco.
HUME, 20.3 m. (1,281 alt., 300 pop.), marks the northern limit of the former Caneadea Reservation of the Seneca Indians, one of the 11 set aside in the Big Tree Treaty of 1797; at the time it was as primitive a wilderness as western New York could offer. The Indians sold the land to a group of land speculators in 1826 and settled on the present State reservations.
Canal and railroad construction in the 1840’s and 1850’s attracted large numbers of Irish to this region, who remained as tillers of the soil.
HOUGHTON, 26.6 m. (1,200 alt., 300 pop.), dates from Genesee Valley Canal days, when, known as Jockey Street, it was a resort for gamblers and jockeys, with horse racing as the chief attraction.
HOUGHTON COLLEGE, its 15-acre campus with red brick Georgian Colonial buildings overlooking the village and the river, was established in 1883 by the Wesleyan Methodist Church largely through the efforts of the Reverend Willard J. Houghton, who aimed to found a school in which the development of Christian character would be emphasized; the college was chartered in 1923. Coeducational, it offers courses leading to A.B. and B.S. degrees; the School of Theology gives advanced courses in religious thought and history.
At CANEADEA (Ind., where the heavens rest on the earth), 29.5 m. (1,250 alt., 200 pop.), villagers hang their milk containers on the telegraph pole in front of the post office for the dairy farmer to fill and for them to pick up at their leisure. The place occupies the site of a Seneca village.
In the vicinity of WELLSVILLE, 54 m. (1,517 alt., 5,674 pop.), at the junction with State 17 (see Tour 3), are the oil wells of the New York section of the Bradford field (see Tour 3).
SHONGO, 62.4 m. (1,614 alt., 150 pop.), occupies the site of the summer village of the fierce Seneca Chief Shongo, who raided many American settlements during the Revolution.
At 64.2 m. the route crosses the PENNSYLVANIA LINE, 32.5 miles north of Galeton, Pennsylvania.