A People's History of Ithaca
One day Ez would like to hang up the shovel, tell Satan(for those of you who haven't been following the continuing saga of Ez, Satan is his boss at the pocket sprocket shop) to shove it, retire to a little place in the country and devote himself to writing a history of Ithaca. The real deal. You know, not the sanitized, Currier & Ives version.
Right? Consider, for example, the image in the corner on the left which shows --well, what does it show? Rolling hills, farm land, some of it enclosed, a countryside that goes for miles, a wide rural road that leads into a neat, well laid out community, filled with lots of public buildings and large comforable homes. In the foreground, a well appointed carriage with an elegantly dressed burgher couple, then over in the foreground, a rather aristocratic looking gent on a horse out and about as if he was joining the hunt. Hi Ho! Chauncey! And a young denim-clad country bumpkin walking down the road towards the town as if on his way to the iconic one room school. "I used to walk ten miles to school. They were the good ole' days." Hey, you're probably all too young to have heard that refrain from a grandparent.
All in all, a rather quaint panorama of 19th century Ithaca, New York complete with all the iconology of small town America life. An idealization that we know had little resemblance to reality. What do you think Currier & Ives, Inc was all about anyway-- except a series of miniature advertisements for the Good Life, the American Way, how the America of yesteryear was popularized to people who wanted to hold on to their vision of what was in reality a rapidly changing landscape, a society in the throes of economic upheaval and social dislocation. Currier & Ives weren't interested in portraying the America of small, hard scrabble farms, of people working from dawn to dusk to earn just enough to get by --if folks were lucky and there wasn't a flood or drought that year. Towns and cities without sidewalks and limited sanitation, animal manure mixing with mud and runoff from tanners, smithies and small industry. Most people back then only lived into their 30's. But that's not what people wanted to hear or see.
And take note in the image of the fence. Yes, the fence. The universal symbol of ownership, yours and mine, good neighbors. The enclosure movement back in England had meant the end of the commons, the loss of shared pasture land for small agriculturalists, the parceling of land into large packages. The Commons means quite something different nowadays.
Most of us know what happened to the Tutelo and the Cauygas. Ithaca didn't have a 10,000 Villages on the Commons in those days so the indigeneous peoples of the area didn't get a fair trade couldn't hang around and make baskets for the local market. You can read about Simon DeWitt and Ithaca's first white settlers on historical markers aound town. And, we all know that Ithaca was a stop along the Underground Railroad. But that's the kind of history that you can get any tourist guide. But we're looking for another kind of history, aren't we?
When Ez takes his long awaited sabbatical, one of the first things he'd do is plumb the mystery of the Clinton House. Why should a hotel on the main stre
et of Ithaca, a cold dreary upstate Yankee town in the middle of nowhere, resemble Tara? Gee, Scarlet, we're home. Is Southern Colonial a visual analog for the Good Life? The scale, the solidity of the Clinton House bespeaks power,success, prestige, the heft of Capital. Consider that if you could afford to travel in that style back in those days, well, you definitely had money. We're not talking B&B here. Most likely you were in business, selling industrial equipment, trading rail road stocks, dabbling in lumber or shipping. You might have come to visit Mr. Cornell, the Boss Hogg of the time. After all, he built one of the first banks in Ithaca. A self-made millionaire with ties to the telegraph business and New York state politics. A wheeler and dealer. His son. Alonzo, went on to be governor of NY.
That's right. Ezra Cornell's little slab on the hill. Llenroc. Not too shabby, eh? Reminds this Ez of the typical Robber Baron hideaway, perhaps a little more modest than Vanderbilt rich but rich enough. Mr. Cornell worked hard, though, for his money. He just happened to make it before anyone else had a chance. But, by all lights, he was a paragon of industry. And a civic minded sort. How does it go? Cornell also built a college, according to the history books, where everybody was welcome, an incubator for self made men like himself. Except--- how many poor schoolboys who had to walk ten miles to school ever went to Cornell University?
Take a walk around Ithaca someday. If you want to know something about the social history of Ithaca, your effort will be repaid. Obviously there was enough lumber money or shipping dollars or what have you kind of dollars to go around beause Ithaca was home to a lot of other self- made millionaires or almost m
illionaires. Enterprising families as the local paid-to-write historian calls these pillars of the community. Check out the old Victorian or Tudor slabs lining Buffalo Street or Seneca. Who do you think built all those roomy, drafty piles that now house the campus fraternities around Cornell? And, who do you think lived in this little cottage, for instance? . We're talking burghermeister, lumber baron, merchant prince. How many bathrooms do you think that place has?
Ez is positive that there are tons of books waiting for him at the History Center that would fill in the blanks in his knowledge of Ithaca's past, tell him how the little people, the folks who weren't lucky enough to reside in those fairy tale homes, lived. Maybe they lived on the North side, nearer to the inlet, close to the business end of the lake, as was always the case with the drovers, the shipping clerks, the teamsters wherever you go in 19th Century America. Skid row. The other side of the tracks. Notice how geography always correlates with social status. Then there's Cornell's rock. The Magic Mountain.
Yep, one day yet Ez will write that People's History of Ithaca.
Comments invited at: ezrakidder@gmail.com - Peace, Ezra at 3:11 AM
