Allegany AreaHistorical Association

May 2017 Issue XXXVI Vol. 2w w w . allegany.o r g

PRESIDENT’S REPORT

AAHA lost another member with the death of Dr. Stephen W. Eaton in February at the age of 98. Steve was a biology professor at St. Bonaventure and a noted ornithologist. He was involved with the creation of Pfeiffer Nature Center in Portville, among his very many other activities and inter-ests. From 1995 to 1997, he and his wife Betty served as co-presidents of AAHA. He loved nature in all its myriad forms, did beekeeping, made maple syrup and wines – he was always interested in everything, and was a joy to talk with. Our condolences to Betty on his loss.

Long-time member Don Bergreen died in April. The Bergreen family was very well known in Al-legany. Don graduated from Allegany Central School in 1942 and went to Alfred Tech for one year, studying accelerated electronics, before he was drafted into the Army. Because of his radio exper-tise, he was with the First Engineer Combat Battalion. After service, he married Peg Hunter and he worked at and then owned Hunter Insurance Agency. He was a community leader and served in many capacities for various volunteer organizations in the Olean Area. In 2013 AAHA member Wes Martin did an oral history interview with Don which we published in our March 2014 issue. People like Don don’t come along very often – he will be missed.

We recently received our annual report on our fund at the Cattaraugus Region Community Foun-dation. I’m pleased to say that it has grown quite nicely. This fund serves as an endowment, if you will, for our association. We tapped into it last year when we took several trees down on the property. If you are thinking of making a donation to us, go online to the Foundation and follow the prompts for donating. We are the Allegany Area Historical Association Fund. We also recently received our final payment from the estate of Mary Elizabeth Smith which we have put into our Foundation account. Miss Smith was a member and a long time 2nd grade teacher in Olean. We received our first payment in 2014 and used that to install our alarm system.

We are always interested in old pictures of the Allegany area so if you have some you’d be will-ing to share with us, stop in some Wednesday from 1 to 4 during the summer months and we’d be delighted to have copies made, at our expense, to add to our files. We especially would like pictures of the outlying area, the farms and farmhouses of the area.

We received a treasure from Gerry Perry of Franklin, Tennessee – his baby book. We made a copy of all the pertinent parts and returned the book to Gerry. He was born in December of 1926 to Mr. and Mrs. Burdette Perry, and was delivered by Dr. Wintermantel, one of the many that he delivered. All the information will go into our genealogy files.

FRaNcIE POTTER, PRESIDENT

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a BRIEF HISORY OF aLLEGaNY

Many years ago in the 1960’s, the Olean Times Herald published on a periodic basis special editions fea-turing the history of the Alle-Gee-Wees area. Marian Taylor, an elementary teacher in the Allegany school system wrote an article on Allegany’s history for one of the editions. What follows is an abridged version. We hope you like it.

The Mound Builders were the original settlers in the Allegany area. The first white settlers in our area had a settlement at the foot of the present Cha-pel Hill Road called Burton. In 1851 Burton was renamed Allegany, an Indian word which means lovely or beautiful. The settlement on the Five Mile was the leading settlement and where the village is now was still wilderness.

Nicholas Devereux of Utica owned much of the land in and around Allegany, having bought it from the Holland Land Company. He planned a city, Allegany City, to be patterned after the great university towns of Europe. He was convinced Allegany would be an important point on the Erie Railroad. But in 1848 a new survey located the Erie a half mile north of the paper city and the project was abandoned.

However, a large number of workmen employed in railroad construction were Irish and many built homes here. After years of effort, four Franciscan missionaries were sent from Italy to minister to them. Mr.

Devereux offered the Franciscans $5,000 and 200 acres of land, and work was begun on a school in 1856. In 1860 St. Bonaven-ture College opened with 15 students.

The first school in the town of Allegany was begun in the win-ter of 1825 in the home of James Strong and taught by Leonard Cronkhite in the Chapel Hill settlement. Eventually there were 14 school districts in Allegany. The first school in the present village was opened about 1861and taught by a Franciscan nun. The Union Free School District was organized in 1884 and two buildings were erected on the present Fourth Street at the cor-ner of Fourth and Chestnut Street. In 1947 the school districts were consolidated under the name of Allegany Central School.

Missionaries came to the area about 1810. The Holland Land Company gave “gospel land”, which was 100 acres in each town given to the first regularly organized religious society that ap-plied for it. The first religious society in Allegany was organized at the home of Anson Chapin in the Five Mile in 1827. It was a Presbyterian society with the Rev. Silas Hubbard as its pastor.

The people of the area were well organized Abolitionists, and this was a key area on the Underground Railroad. During the Civil War, the men of Allegany responded to each appeal for men for the union Army with “an alacrity and patriotism not excelled in any county of the State of the Union.”

After World War I, when ex-servicemen organized group such as the American Legion, their special interest was playing base-

Ed Smith’s store on North Second Street, now the allegany Laundromat. Ladies (L to R) are Julia Wing Sherman and Georgia

Wing Smith

St Bonaventure college about 1910. The buildings in the center and on the left burned to the ground in 1930

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STREET NaMES

Before 1927, the streets in Allegany were named much differently than they are now. This is something a person has to take into account when looking at old maps of Allegany. You can orientate yourself visually but get lost because the street names are not familiar. In July of 1927, the Allegany Citizen reported that the village Board made the following chang-es:

Five Mile Road will be First Street; former First Street will be Second Street; Johnson Street will be Third Street; Day Street will be Fourth Street; Harmon Avenue & Bentley Street will be Fifth Street; Thomas Street will be Sixth Street; John Street will be Seventh Street; Mary Street will be Eighth Street. (Mary Street ran north and south off the south side of Union Street. There is no Eighth Street today.)

Main Street will be East and West Main Street, divided by Fifth Street. Fourth Street will be Oak Street; Union Street will be East and West Union Street; Dudley Street will be Elm Street; Phelps Street will be Pine Street; Maple Av-enue remains unchanged; School Alley will be Chestnut Street; Scofield Alley will be Spruce Street, and Harriet Street remains unchanged.

Apparently the change was uneventful, as later editions of the Allegany Citizen made no men-tion of any problems. The historical associa-tion has copies of an 1869 map of the village showing the old names. They sell for $2 each, plus shipping if necessary, for those who are interested.

ball. All towns, including Allegany, had a team which played in the county league. Horse racing was another popular pastime. The trotting horses bred by Erastus Willard were famous. Square dancing was also popular. A movie theater was located on the second floor of the Town Hall. Very old pictures show an opera house. A stadium was located on Fifth Street and the circus used to come there.

The Allegheny River was declared a public highway in 1870, largely because of all the lumber going down-stream. It is fed by the Five Mile, Nine Mile, Ten Mile and Two Mile Creeks. These are so named because each is that many river miles from Olean Point where the Olean Creek runs into the river.

The hills and valleys were covered with timber, mostly Pine and Hemlock. After the land had been cleared by the lumbermen, it was thought to be worthless and was sold for one dollar an acre, an opportunity that brought many Germans from Erie County. The land was ideal for grazing, and dairying became the leading industry, with many cheese factories being established.

About the time successful farming was established, the oil excitement reached Allegany. Oil was discovered in 1877 when the oldest producing well in New York State was started by the Franchot Brothers on the John Harbel farm on the Four Mile Road. Many other wells were lo-cated in Chipmonk, Rock City and Knapp Creek.

The village owes its growth to its position as an early lumber center, an agricultural trading center, to the open-

Last lumber rafting down the allegheny River from the George Nessel mill on the 4 Mile creek, april 15, 1890

ing of the oil and gas fields, and easy transpor-tation on the river and railroad. Automobiles brought better roads. The village survived the Depression of the 1930’s better than nearby cities because of its agricultural nature.

Allegany today looks to the future. In Janu-ary 1964 Grosstal Ski Center went into opera-tion. Our area, with its cold winters and warm summer days and cool nights, is developing as a recreation spot – the “playground of the East in the Enchanted Mountains.”

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We received a letter from Tony Rado that we know you will enjoy.

I enjoy reading memories from Allegany residents, so I thought I’d share one of my own. From about 1955 through 1958, when I was five to eight years old, we lived in the front apartment above what was then The Pantry, Francie Soplop’s diner and bakery. I think that address was 91 West Main. I was in about second or third grade when the following took place.

As hard as this may be to fathom in today’s world, I walked to and from school by myself at that time, under strict instruction from my mother as to route. I was to cross Main Street at the traffic light, which at that time was at Third and Main, proceed down Third Street to Chestnut, over to Fourth and to the school. I was to reverse the route coming home. Mom knew when school let out and about what time I should be getting home.

One day, on my way home, I encountered a dog on Third Street who barked at me in an aggressive manner, and I was afraid to pass him for fear he’d bite me. So I went back and over to Fourth Street and home that way. This earned me a rebuke for being late home. Unfortunately the dog was there each day for a few days, and I was late more than once. I got the standard warning from Mom that the next time I was late, I’d get a strapping. That meant being invited to lie over a kitchen chair and be hit with an old belt of my father’s (buckle removed) that Mom kept in the hutch cupboard specifically for the purpose.

Strappings were pants on, and they didn’t leave marks, so I guess the actual physical pain was far infe-rior to the anticipation, which was horrible. But afterwards, when I was done crying, Mom would reassure me that, while she always loved me, she just sometimes didn’t like the things I did. And she would add that the strapping hurt her more than it did me. I never really bought that part.

Anyway, I pretty much got the message about being home on time and things were pretty well for a while. The one day my friend Eddie Gabriel said there was a big carnival merry-go-round in front of the Model Market (a few yards west on the same side of Main we lived on). Eddie and his mother lived over his late father’s then closed store, between the Model Market and my home. Eddie said this might be the only chance we’d ever get to ride this merry-go-round, and we just had to do it or we would regret it for the rest of our lives.

So we left the school, went over Chestnut to Second, and crossed Main without benefit of a traffic light. There it was! The Stroehmans bread truck was parked in front of the Model Market and behind it was a tiny trailer with four very small horses on it that went around in a circle. Rides were free, and kids were lined up to get on. I knew then I was late, but Eddie said we had to go into the store and thank Charlie Ried for the ride. Eddie, at his young age, knew everybody in town, and he was kind of a politician. We went into the store, all the way back to the meat counter, but Charlie was nowhere to be seen, so on Eddie’s authority we marched right into the back room looking for him.

A brief digression here is necessary to explain that I had “school clothes” and “play clothes”. I was to change from the former to the latter immediately upon arriving home from school. This day, not having arrived home yet, I was still wearing my school clothes, which happened to include a brand-new, white, short-sleeved seersucker shirt.

Sticking out of the jamb of the doorway to the back room of the Model Market was a nail that had probably been there for many years. While it ignored Eddie completely, it jumped out and took what my mother would call “a great big three-cornered tear” out of the right sleeve of my brand-new, white, short-sleeved seersucker shirt. Somewhere down in my gut I knew I was in big trouble.

Well, we found Charlie, shook hands and thanked him for the ride and headed home, Eddie all happy

FOLLOW-UP

An AAHA member, Merle Kyser saw the article we had in the last newsletter about the teacher’s contract for one room schools. In the article we used a picture of the District #4 school on the Five Mile Road. He contacted us to see if it was the same school his mother, Grace Kibby, taught at in 1921. His sister, Shir-ley Russell, had told him the school had been taken down and moved somewhere in New York State, and wondered if it was the same school. Yes, it was as Grace had boarded with the Albert Chapin family while she taught, and the Chapin farm was just down the road from where the school was. The school was torn down in 1983 after a Long Island interior decorator had purchased it for use as a summer home. It was dismantled board by board, with everything numbered for reconstruction, and even the nails were saved. We sent a copy of the Olean Times Herald article about the school being torn down to Merle. Which all proves that it really is a small world.

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WE GET MaIL

It’s always good to hear from our members. Had a nice note from Joe Stayer in Olean. Bill Ryan of Rush,

New York also wrote to let us know how much he enjoyed the memoirs of Irene Schnell McRae’s early

years of teaching. He said she taught him Latin and English and helped him compose and deliver his Vale-

dictorian address at the Class of 1951 graduation.

and me just sick to my stomach. The only salvation I could think of was to ask Eddie to bypass his house and come home with me, in the hope of softening my mother’s anger. But he looked so happy I just couldn’t ask him, so when we got to his house I just said, “See you tomorrow, Eddie,” and I trudged on home alone.

Mom was mad all right, and that was before she noticed the big three-cornered tear in my brand-new, white, short-sleeved seersucker shirt. I got my strapping, and the problem of being late from school was solved. In addition, I acquired a lifetime aversion to being late for anything, important or otherwise. I guess it has served me well in my life and career.

Not long after the great merry-go-round caper, Eddie and his Mom moved to Olean, and I only saw him a couple times after that. After eighth grade, my family and I moved to Mayville in Chautauqua County, where I completed high school. I often thought of my friend Eddie and wondered how he was doing. Just a couple of years ago, I was looking on the internet and came across an Allegany Citizen article about Ed Gabriel coming home to Allegany and seeing some old friends. I learned that the reason the visit was newsworthy was that, somewhere along the way, my old buddy Eddie had become President Clinton’s Ambassador to Morocco. And you know what? I wasn’t a bit surprised.

Ed. Note – the Allegany Citizen stopped publishing in 1976 so the online article was probably in the Olean Times Herald.

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We received another delightful article from Gertrude Schnell, which I know you’ll enjoy.

MaN OR BEaST

When I was a young girl and visited my Grandmother Delia Rehler Schnell’s farm on the Birch Run Road, I soon learned that visits to the doctor or vet were few and far between. In times of stress, like when a cow was sick, or supper was ready and the milking wasn’t done, or an early frost was killing the buds on the apple trees, my Grandmother would run to the lower kitchen cupboard, pull out Uncle John’s Tonic and have several swigs.

Each month the McNess salesman appeared at the door. He came bringing brooms, spices and various other household items. My Grandmother always bought Vanilla, Spices, White Liniment for Man or Beast, Vitamin B Tonic among other staples. The one always bought was McNess Krestol Salve—a soothing first-aid ointment for superficial burns, scalds, or cuts. It was usually used generously on both man and beast. There were no band-aids at that time so a clean white cloth was wrapped around the cut, the ends split and tied. This ointment smelled terrible, but did the job.

One or two tablespoons of pure mineral oil were taken as an intestinal lubricant—and then only at bed-time. For respiratory problems, mustard plasters were made and put on the chest to loosen coughs and cure colds.

Another staple was the Raleight’s Ru-Mex-Ol Compound. Alcohol 10%, but the medicine was made from Poke Root, Yellow Dock Root, Sarsaparilla, Rhubarb Root, Potassium Iodine, Gentian Root, Dandelion Root, Salicylic Acid, Mandrake Root, Cascarin, and Sodium Benzoate. It was to be taken 1 or 2 tablespoons 3 times a day after meals. It wasn’t to be taken by persons with latent tuberculosis or goiter.

Man and beast survived and lived long lives.

MemorialsFor: Stephen EatonFrom: Francie Potter For: Duane ClarkFrom: Rosemary Ryan For: Barb PanusFrom: Francie Potter

The Allegany Drive-In Theatre provided memories for many area residents from the opening date on July 8, 1949 through the final season in 1995. The grounds could hold 850 cars!

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MYSTERY PHOTO

A while back, we received a small picture of a friar from David Hornburg. It had been taken in New York City and had been owned by Frank Dieteman of Allegany. I started looking at pictures of early friars at St. Bonaventure, and came to a tentative conclusion that it might be a picture of Fr. Pamfilo, O.F.M. who founded the college. I gave the picture to Dennis Frank, Archivist at St. Bonaventure, for their collection and asked him who he thought was in the picture. Some days he thought it was Fr. Pamfilo and other days he thought it wasn’t. He kept it on his desk and asked other people their opinion and it was finally universally decided that it was not Fr. Pamfilo – but then who was it?

He looked in many places and finally got to the Provincial Annals for the Franciscans and found an ALMOST exact copy of the picture – mystery solved. It is of Fr. Andrew Pfeiffer who was the pastor of St. Francis of Assisi Church in New York City from 1864 to 1868, which explains why a New York photographer took the picture. He was then at Bona’s from 1870 to 1872 which also explains why Frank Dieteman, Sr. had the picture – the time frame is right and Mr. Dieteman was German as was Fr. Pfeiffer. Thanks to Dennis Frank for solving our mystery – he now has a nice addition to the St. Bonaventure archives.

Allegany Area Historical AssociationP.O. BOX 162Allegany, NY 14706

NON-PROFITORGANIZATIONU.S. POSTAGE PAIDPERMIT NO. 32OLEAN, NY 14760

InsIde sPeCIAL Issue:

RETURN SERvIcE REqUESTED

Presidents Report

Strappings...

Uncle John’s Tonic

w w w . a l l e g a n y . o r g

NEXT MEETINGWe will meet on Sunday, May 21 at 2 p.m. at the Heritage Center, 25 North Second Street, Allegany to hear Maggie Frederickson talk about her new book, a biography of the inventor Birdsill Holly.

Mr. Holly was one of the most prolific inventors of the 19th century. His inventions of district steam heat, the rotary pump and the Holly System of Direct Pressure Water Supply for Cities, Towns and Villages were among his almost 100 patents. He is considered the inventor of the modern fire hydrant as we know it today. He was the first inventor to receive a patent for an idea. A fascinating and controversial character, he was a genius born ahead of his time. Holly was a visionary and his inventions saved countless lives and greatly benefitted mankind.

Maggie and her husband, Bruce, have been the Town Historians for Franklinville since 2000. There will copies of her book for sale at the meeting.

SUNDaY, MaY 21 – 2 P.M.HERITaGE cENTER

25 N. 2ND STREET, aLLEGaNY

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