Bikes, Boats and Automobiles: Cycling the Erie Canal 2024 (Part 2)

Day 4 of the Cycle the Erie Canal trip started in Seneca Falls, NY, the central NY town that our rolling camping trip had wound up in the previous evening. Seneca Falls is actually a bit off the main drag of the Erie Canal, but is a popular detour given it affords an opportunity to venture down to Lake Cayuga and also to see the epicenter of the 19th century social reform movements that have given the region its rightful and enduring place in American social and political history.

For those readers who missed last week’s part one of this Erie Canal cycling travelogue, you can catch up with the story here.  If you’re already caught up, read on.

The Finger Lakes Region, Social Reform and Relentless Rock and Roll

At the end of the last chapter, I left us at the town of Clyde with its generous church ladies and reputed history of having popularized the Mason jar. In fact, that day continued on down to Seneca Falls, a place that I knew all about well before I actually visited it in New York’s Finger Lakes region. That’s because Seneca Falls was home to the first Women’s Right’s Convention (July 19 -20, 1848), which happened just about a week shy of 176 years before I passed through the town.

As was mentioned in Part 1 (that part about the Mormons), this region of Central New York is known for being the birthplace of a huge number of social reform movements.  This took the shape of religions (e.g., the Mormons/Latter-Day Saints), quasi-religions (the 19th American Spiritualist Movement as kicked off by the Fox Sisters in Rochester, NY), African-American/Anti-Slavery activism (I am careful to not say “Abolitionism” since this is something that in fact existed in America as early as the late 17th century among Quakers), and the Women’s Suffrage Movement in the U.S.. All of this mid-19th Century social activism – in its proper historical context part of the Second Great Awakening of Protestant religious revival —  led to the region being referred to as the “burned over district”.  The term meant that the region’s so many social reform movements had essentially intellectually “burned over” (in the sense of a forest fire) the population and that the region was thought not to be able to sustain any further social or religions movements. Much of this history is memorialized throughout the region to this very day. Seneca Falls is home to the Women’s Rights National Historic Park which incorporates Elizabeth Cady Stanton‘s home.

Antebellum social reform movements aside, the fact is that this region knows its history and one can’t throw a rock in this part of New York without breaking the window of a museum (something I wouldn’t advise doing). Every town has its historical society which finds something or another to celebrate. Usually there is a connection one way or the other to the Erie Canal, thereby making a connection between the region’s rich social history and its equally vibrant industrial and technological history.  Most historians note (for what it’s worth) that the social and cultural history of the region is entirely entwined with the region’s technological and economic history.  These things are inseparable.

Moving on with day-to-day concerns, day 4 of the tour started with the tour’s first overnight rain. I’ll pause here to offer a self-congratulation that my $50 Coleman tent never let me down in over 8 nights of outdoor camping. I might complain about 8 nights of sleeping on the ground and 8 days of having to erect a stupid tent after lengthy bike rides, but at least I never got wet.  As we’ll see in a moment, that was quite an accomplishment given some of the weather encountered.

Rain brings to mind other fluids. “Vegan coffee” was a head-scratcher most mornings. My explanation was that we could rest assured that this wasn’t Indonesian kopi luwak coffee (aka “civet coffee”…go ahead, check the link). One more worry to check off the list of potential concerns.

Since cyclists depend upon hydration, every camp and am/pm rest stop featured one of these contraptions that provided drinking water (generally from a fire hydrant or indoor plumbing hookup). Sometimes the water ran through a cooler of ice prior to exiting at these coiled yellow hoses.  Neat.

 

Day 4 out of Seneca Falls was a Car SAG day for me and that day I was stationed in the morning just outside of Weedsport, NY at the intersection of NY highways 31 and 34, close to Thruway exit 40.

This sort of crazy expanse of pavement and crossing roads was unfortunately necessary to navigate even on a trip where 85% of the biking took place on closed bike trails.

 

 

From my flagger perspective, most of the time looked like this as 18-wheelers headed to and from the Interstate just up the road. Still, all things considered, this was relatively easy intersection to navigate and control since there were traffic signals (which do nothing to blunt the effects of yield approaches and right-on-red turners). Generally I found that the worst intersections were those where there was nothing but a crosswalk (without lights) where the bike trail crossed a 4 lane highway. Those were the ones where it took two flaggers to watch for openings in the traffic and then to actually go out in the road with our red flags of invincibility. Despite some close calls – several times caused by drivers who took delight in slowing to a near stop as we entered the crosswalk with our flags and then flooring it right past us…just because – this mostly worked out well. At least I’m here to tell the story.

A few intersections had actual police to control traffic, these were welcome but rare.

After a few hours of standing on the road in Weedsport, most of our riders had cleared that intersection and it was time to start the slow and winding drive on to the afternoon’s camp.  Typically these drives consisted of exploring the countryside more or less adjacent to the bike trail, but of course not “on” the bike trail since I was in a car and usually the trail was a good distance from a drivable road. So I just wound my way around the trail, listening for text messages from the SAG coordinator who would alert me (and my fellow drivers) to places where we might need to attend to a disabled cyclist.

It was during that drive on Day 4 that I realized that I was in Weedsport and that name rang a bell.  Yep. Weedsport Motor Speedway, a famous dirt racing track and current home of the Super Dirt Car series.  They have a museum as well, the Dirt Hall of Fame, which was unfortunately closed when I drove by. Dirt car racing is what Weedsport Motor Speedway is mostly known for.

But it could also be for the rock concerts.  According to Wikipedia, the race track – as the Cayuga County Fairgrounds – has hosted concerts by everyone from Aerosmith and Heart to Ozzy Osbourne and Mötley Crüe. The Speedway’s website reminds the reader of the 1980s advertising catchphrase “You Know It’s Summer When They’re Rockin’ in Weedsport!”.  Can’t you just hear that being said by one of those declarative, growly, baritone announcers?

Sure you can, right here.

“Relentless Rock and Roll!”  Yeah!

I’m also not sure what they mean by “the usual outlets”.  Maybe that’s Mike Damone?

I actually really like Heart (Huey Lewis, not so much). And OK, it’s summer as I write this so that may be why I’m particularly nostalgic for what we could have gone to see almost  exactly 33 years ago.  So how ’bout one more?

If these clips leave you jonesing for more rock and roll in the dirt nostalgia, there is an interesting documentary on the track’s musical and business history available online.

If I Ran the Zoo (I’d Do Lots of Things, But I’d Also Let Cyclists Sleep There Every Night)

Sadly, there haven’t been hair bands at Weedsport for many years, but maybe we got the next best thing…tornadoes in Syracuse.

This sort of weather event is what we get here in the Northeast when the remnants of Gulf hurricanes make their way inland and eventually north, after coming ashore in Texas or Louisiana.  In this case, this was Hurricane Beryl that pummeled Houston with wind and rain, killing 22 people in Texas, on July 8.

Several times I’ve referred to the Cycle the Erie Canal event as traveling camping trip. As such, the trip includes hundreds of tents, set up outdoors every evening in a gigantic field.  Thus equipped, the expedition can put up with rain. Tornadoes are a whole other thing. In this case, as 500 plus cell phones blared that emergency warning (something that always freaks me out the same way that air raid sirens did when I was a kid during the tail end of the Duck and Cover years) and Syracuse police cars began driving through the camp with loud speakers telling everyone to “take cover”, we all evacuated to what conveniently existed as our evening dinner location…the Syracuse Zoo.

Aside from the fact that the air conditioning and cellular service in the Zoo building was totally overwhelmed by a sudden influx of cyclists, everything ended up working out just fine.  The lines were long at the cash bar, but fortunately the 4 tornadoes that did officially touch down in New York that evening ended up well west of where we were. Soon enough, campers returned to the reassembled tent city and the traveling camping trip settled in for another night.

Deco, Decorative, Dorothy, and a Chrysler Crossfire

The next morning’s ride (Day 5, riding day!) took me past the absolutely fabulous Niagara Mohawk building. This art deco landmark has been fully restored through funds made available by a federal tax credit program, and looks (and is lit) much as it did when it opened in 1932. It continues to be used as power company offices.  This building argued for a longer tour of downtown Syracuse, and perhaps a visit to the Erie Canal Museum. That museum is homebase for Derek and Steph, the historians on this tour.

The day continued with more canal riding. Here part of the group is stopped at Fayetteville, NY. Fayetteville is home to several more museums that I need to go back and visit. One in particular is the Stickley Museum as Fayetteville is the home of Stickley Furniture. Founded by Gustav Stickley in 1900, the Stickley Furniture Company did much to inspire the Arts and Crafts design movement here in the U.S.. It’s a much longer story than we can go into here on CC, but the”reformed” design of the American Arts and Crafts movement – and the British decorative design movements that preceded their counterparts here in the States by several decades – were as much a reaction to the tensions designers felt around industrialism as were many of the social reform movements that also developed in this region of Central New York. The simple lines and natural themes expressed in Stickley’s furniture and the Arts and Crafts bungalows that often housed this furniture, can be clearly seen to be in tension with and in reaction to advancing modern – described as unharmonious and chaotic – technologies. And of course, the Erie Canal (by this time entering it’s third chapter of expansion) was both an agent for and harbinger of that industrial change.

Stickley noted the influence that Glaswegian Arts and Crafts designers – such as his contemporary Charles Rennie Mackintosh and his highly stylized takes on natural forms and objects – had on his work.

Speaking of influences, another more or less contemporary of Stickley’s was Wizard of Oz author L. Frank Baum. Baum also has a museum in Fayetteville owing to the fact that Baum’s wife – Maud Gage Baum – was from Fayetteville. Maud Gage was the daughter of notable suffragette Matilda Joslyn Gage, who along with Elizabeth Cady Stanton (see above) and Susan B. Anthony (Rochester’s own!) was at the forefront of the Women’s Suffrage Movement. In fact current historical research argues that Matilda’s interest in witches and witch trials (as examples of early American society’s effort to squelch the voices of strong and outspoken women) ultimately influenced her son-in-law Frank’s story about a “determined girl who leads self-doubting men down a golden road“.

It is a fact that Maud was the economic backbone of the Baum family, basically keeping their heads above water as Frank pursued one career-related misadventure after another. Ultimately, Frank went bankrupt about 8 years before his death in 1919.  One of his last legal acts was to transfer all of his assets aside from his “typewriter and clothes” to his wife’s name. It was Maud (Matilda’s daughter) who ultimately succeeded in managing her husband’s intellectual property. There’s a good chance that without Maud, we today might know little about the Wizard of Oz.

Maud attended the August 15, 1939 premiere of the MGM Judy Garland movie that is known world wide, and lived until 1953.

Just a bit East of Fayetteville, I nearly took out a poor fellow in a recumbent bike (there were several recumbent bikes on this tour) as I cut him off to get over to photograph a Crossfire freshly in mind from Joseph Dennis’s post about Crossfires and facial hair.

This Crossfire, seemed to be in excellent condition and I actually encountered the owner who walked up to his car as I was photographing it.  I complemented him on owning a somewhat unusual car and asked him if he liked it. His response was “Well, I’ve had it for almost 20 years, so I guess so.”

Not exactly a ringing endorsement, but I’ll take it.

I smiled and congratulated him for a Curbside Classic well done.

And didn’t once mention the highly stylized natural forms — in this case the underside of a blue whale’s mouth — on his car’s hood.

Canasota — More History Than You Can Shake A Stick At

I have actually never known what that phrase meant, but it was something that my Western-Maryland-born grandmother used to say all of the time. Particularly in her later years she was often found shaking sticks at things…and sometimes discharging firearms at those things that were not dissuaded by sticks. I figure that she must have known something about the demonstrative power of sticks.  So there you have it.

Lunch-time found me in Canasota, NY. Naturally, I spent over an hour in the Canasota Historical Society. There I learned that Canasota is home to a bunch of transportation industries such as the Oneida Products Corporation that made school buses and the Rex Watson corporation that made other buses and trucks before failing and being merged into Oneida Products. That whole story – as well as a very deep dive into the history of school buses — can be found here.

In classic small museum fashion, many exhibits were photographs mounted on posterboard and a tumble of other artifacts with minimal labeling.  Mind you, I don’t note this disparagingly as I in fact am a proponent of museums focusing on the artifacts and minimizing the gigantic amount of multimedia that is currently the fashion in big-name museums that can afford to have multimedia to placate those visitors whose attention spans are too short to spend quality time with actual artifacts. Or to get to the end of a sentence.

Canasota’s Canal Town Museum was chock full of the material culture that this town has sent out across the globe over the past several hundred years.  Some of it, such as the optical device invented to monitor the machining of holes in steel, was a bit esoteric (albeit wonderfully-named). But if one spent time examining the artifacts, fascinating connections could be made.  For example, “Marvin & Casler” of “Boring Head” fame actually came to much greater recognition for a couple of other inventions…the Mutoscope and the Biograph.  The Mutoscope is one of those penny arcade machines you’ve probably seen where you drop in a coin and get to watch a short, flip-card based, motion picture. Before wide scale distribution of projected films, the Mutoscope was a big deal. The later (we’re still talking before the turn of the 20th century) Biograph was a film projector but it ultimately did not compete well with Edison’s motion picture projector which was itself a device created from an amalgam of existing patents. Some of those purloined patents were established by the Canasota-based inventors of the Biograph.

All of this is explained on detailed placards that one could actually read.

Of course the history was also replicated on road/street side historical markers throughout town.

And here’s where you could pick up what could actually be the lede point about American Mutoscope and Biograph company, which is that its greatest success came after the company switched from making the hardware associated with motion pictures and switched instead to essentially the software, that is, motion pictures themselves. The American Biograph company produced (other than the Boring Head) D.W. Griffith.  That’s right the (albeit controversial) progenitor of the art of film editing who personally patterned what we now know as motion picture “directors” had his first professional film-making jobs with American Biograph.

This 1912 Griffith film is quite typical of the dozens of shorts that Griffith produced for Biograph starting in 1908 (before he left Biograph in 1915 to produce the newly-conceived “feature” films such as The Birth of a Nation).  I particularly like The Girl and Her Trust for the lovely (and surprisingly modern-looking) Dorothy Bernard as well as the plot’s adherence to what turns out to be Griffith’s constant themes of malfeasance caused by “tramps” and a curious fascination with picnics, bottled soft drinks and sandwiches. Here Bernard’s affections are contested for by a railroad station baggage handler who tries to win her over with the gift of a drinking straw…before an adventure ensues where she’s rescued from tramps by her co-worker, the handsome station agent. And then they share a sandwich as the image fades to black with the American Biograph logo. The End.

There’s much to be written about the prevalence of “tramps” in American consciousness in the late 19th and early 20th century; and as you might imagine (this should come easily by now), some of this can be associated with economic history and the dislocation of workers due to the financial panics of the 1870s. A stock market crash in 1873 (caused by railroad company speculation) ended up shuttering over 18,000 businesses in the U.S. and the closing of nearly half of the (very very many) railroad companies in existence at that time. As this “first great depression” (it lasted from 1873 to 1879) worked its way through the nation’s economic system throughout the 1870s, tens of thousands of workers were displaced, some hitting the roads and transportation byways (e.g., the path of the Erie Canal) as itinerant workers, aka, tramps.

Like all history, the connection’s there, you just have to look for it. Often one of the best places to look for history is in material and popular culture.

I do wish though that I had a convenient explanation for the bit about D.W. Griffith and the sandwiches.

Yes, Canasota is full of history.  And yes, it also has good pizza and sandwiches.

He Guesses That The Horse Didn’t Bring That Trailer

Speaking of the 19th century and food, that brings us to another feature of this region of New York…the many Amish and Mennonite residents in the area. As a cyclist, one is alerted to the presence of Amish fellow travelers by the appearance of horse poop on the paved roads. Another, more pleasant indicator were the various roadside stops set up by Amish and Mennonite families selling ice cream and baked goods to travelers.

Selling homemade ice cream next to a road traversed by 500 cyclists on a 90 degree day is a license to print money. The ice cream was very good. They apparently sold all that they could make that day by around noon.

Maybe, like me, you are wondering how this Amish family managed to get that trailer to where they were selling if they don’t drive motor vehicles. I did find out later on that day when I was talking to a group of Mennonite children who had set up a lemonade stand (very very good lemonade) further up the trail. I was asking them about the difference between Amish and Mennonite families. The kids immediately piped up with the fact that their families could drive whereas Amish families did not drive. This prompted me to ask then how the Amish I had encountered a few miles back managed to get a 4-wheel Uhaul trailer full of ice cream gear to their selling location, I said that “I doubt that that horse I saw pulled the trailer”.  This totally cracked up the kids who proceeded to repeat among themselves “He said that he didn’t think that the horse brought that trailer!!”.  They ultimately explained “Oh, they got some friend to drive them. They get folks to drive them everywhere!”.

Well alrighty then.

Nice looking buggies though. Surely there are Amish folks who appreciate the various different styles and models of buggies just like we here appreciate cars.

Except they don’t read about them on a computer or smartphone.  Unless they have someone else read it to them.

Actually, that’s a thing.

That’s a good-looking horse who might get a shot at Corralside Classics should that site ever be launched.

The trail from Syracuse to Rome, NY was some of the prettiest and most peaceful riding on the whole trip.

All Roads (at least this one) Lead to Rome — And Curbside Classics

As (my) luck would have it, the entry into Rome offered nice set of CC’s parked at one of those “someday, they’ll sell…” used car lots. Naturally, I hopped off to photograph and had to fend off several fellow riders who wondered if I was in mechanical distress.  No, I explained, I just have to stop and take pictures of these rusty cars.

I’m sure that was a curious explanation to my inquisitors, but well ok, the Cycle the Erie Canal tour clearly takes in all types and interests.

The tires on this Corvair were mostly deflated, but it was generally complete and free of the encroaching weeds that had consumed quite a few of the other cars on the lot.

Nice patina, as they say.

In the “encroaching weeds” category was this second generation Nissan Z car.  A 280ZX if I’m not mistaken.

This one also had all of its glass intact, but the interior seemed filled with a bunch of parts (not necessarily from this car) and the cancer spots on the hood had advanced past the “patina” stage.

There were actually several Nissans parked here (with the emphasis on “parked”…like for a long long time). This late 1980s 300ZX looked like it had a shot of being put on the road again if someone could retrieve it before it sinks even further into the gravel.

Let’s see, American, Japanese, how about some German? Yup, there were a couple of Mercedes here.  It’s been said on these pages before, but I’ll say it again. It’s really hard to fully sand off all of the luxury and presence provided by these full-size Mercedes from the 1970s.

Even missing its wheel covers and with heavily oxidized paint, this early 1970s 450SE looks solid and maybe just in need of a wash, some air in the tires and (a lot of) gas and it could be rolling again. It was mostly straight and had all of the outside trim that I could rapidly account for.

It also clearly hasn’t been registered since 2007, so I’m going to guess that unless the trunk is full of gold it’s not going anywhere.  Ever.

Rome was another canal town that was doing its level best to capitalize on the arrival of the Cycle the Erie Canal tour. For our evening in Rome – camping on the grounds of the Fort Stanwix National Monument – the city shut down about six blocks of its Main street and held a street fair with live bands, food trucks, and local vendors. We were too tired to do much Rome sightseeing, but in the “bookmark this for when I come back” category, I did discover the H.P. Sears Service Station Museum.

I’m not sure if there’s much to see inside the tiny service station building, although surely if I came back when it was open and staffed I’d have found at least 30 minutes of conversation with whoever was working there.

As it was, I spent some time photographing old gas pumps and this very well restored old air pump. It will take further research to come to an understanding of exactly what is meant by “filtered and weighed” air.

Which brings us to the end of day 5 and the second part of this epic cycle tour (and CC post).  Three more days and one more post to go!

Link to Part 1