Читать книгу "Over There" and Over Here - Richard MacAlpine - Страница 4

This was the first year since 1835 that there were no steamboats on Keuka Lake. The three large boats working the lake (Penn Yan, City of Elmira, City of Rochester) all had gasoline engines.

There was a major outbreak of infantile paralysis (polio) across western New York. Although there were no cases in Yates, nearby counties reported cases. In September, the Democrat reported: “While we have no intention of creating a feeling of uneasiness, it is suggested that children visiting the Yates County Fair next week be kept away from the merry-go-round and other amusement features brought here from outside. These attractions may have been in some infected territory.”

Merrill Beach sold his Rolling Palace to Penn Yan Boats in 1921. It burned down two years later.

The Yates County History Center has in its collection the artifacts that were donated to the Library at the end of 1916 by the W.H. Long Post of the G.A.R.

Moving pictures were shown regularly in both the Cornwell Opera House on Main Street and the Sampson Theater on Jacob Street (East Elm.) In December, the Sampson Theater showed D.W. Griffith’s epic two-hour silent drama The Birth of a Nation, until Gone With the Wind in 1939, the highest grossing film in film history.

There was some impact locally of the war in Europe. Agricultural prices were the highest since the Civil War and there was a severe shortage of coal going into the winter of 1916-17. There was fear that the price of gasoline might reach 40¢ a gallon. (It was at 20¢ a gallon.)

Charles Sprague, who murdered his neighbor on Bluff Point in 1911 ran out of appeals and became the last person electrocuted in Auburn Prison.

“Booze raids” by local and state law enforcement were common. Yates County had been completely dry (by local option) since 1909.

Author Leon Lewis’ horse barn, the talk of the town when it was built just after the Civil War, was moved from behind his home on Liberty Street in Penn Yan, across Keuka Street and became the convent for St. Michael’s church.

Yates County’s Frank Schofield, then a Captain in the Navy, was taken off sea duty, assigned to the Chief of Naval Operations in Washington and put in charge of a planning team to develop tactics to be used against German U-Boats in the Atlantic.