412 
American Agriculturist, April 26 ,1924 
In the Land of the Finger Lakes 
A Region So Different From My Own Cow Country 
F OR two weeks past I have been doing 
Farm Institute work here in west-central 
New York (this is written during the 
late winter) and as always I am impressed 
with the fact that the typical agriculture of this 
region is something radically different from the 
system followed in the intensive dairy regions of 
New York’s Cow Land. I have spent these last 
days in riding over Seneca and \ ates counties 
and in talking with the farm people and I am 
going to set down the impressions of a dairyman 
who views this country with lively interest be¬ 
cause it is so different from his own. 
Seneca County is purely beautiful for situation. 
It is long and narrow with its length frt>m north 
to south and it is more than half an island because 
its east and west boundaries are formed by the 
largest and most lovely of the Finger Lakes 
Cayuga on the east and Seneca on the west. 
Some of the southern and also the northern por¬ 
tion is pleasantly rolling and the slope down to the 
shore line of the lakes is 
By JARED VAN WAGENEN, JR. 
site of the city of Chicago. Western New \ork 
was then the largest body of fertile, level, stone- 
free soil yet developed in America. Even before 
the days of the canal—ever since the close of the 
Revolution in fact—the pioneers from over¬ 
crowded New England and old eastern New York 
had been eagerly pressing forward into this agri¬ 
cultural El Dorado. Then it was everywhere 
known as the “Genesee Country” because that 
happier phrase “The Finger Lake Country’ had 
not yet been coined. It is interesting to note 
that the great westward-leading trail along which 
this traffic surged became in course of time the 
“Genesee Road” and the significance of the name 
still survives in that the one main street of L tica 
is Genesee while further west in Syracuse one of 
the two or three most important east and west 
thoroughfares is still known by that romantic 
name. 
class orchard proposition does not endure with¬ 
holding usual care. So, too, the dairyman has his 
herd and he can’t stop producing even if he would 
but the annual crop farmer can lay off the land 
for a time with very little ceremony and, so far as 
the land itself is concerned, with benefit rather 
than permanent injury. 
I find that with the years my mental attitude 
toward the abandoned farm or the disused field is 
undergoing a radical change. When I was con¬ 
siderably younger, and 1 hope rather more foolish 
than now, I was fond of exhorting the boy to 
“stay on the farm” without stopping to ask if the 
farm was really worth staying on and I thought 
that every acre that reverted to forest was 
absolutely a sign of national degeneracy. I now 
find that I have come to believe the abandonment 
of our rough, hilly, infertile lands to be a sign of 
definite social progress and economic gain and 
I view the temporary disuse of even good land as 
the means by which our much talked of but ap 
in places fairly steep but 
the county as a whole is 
wonderfully level—quite 
too level for good drain¬ 
age. Add to this the 
fact that in these level 
areas the soil is typically 
a tight clay and the prob¬ 
lem becomes serious 
enough. No county in 
the state has more tile 
drains and in none is 
drainage more essential. 
Seneca is a county of 
splendid, palmy agricul¬ 
tural history, and tradi¬ 
tion. For a century it 
has been a great granary 
—a land of wheat and 
barley and hay but with¬ 
out so much of fruit or 
special crops and on the 
whole with very little 
dairy. Indeed, one man 
tells me that there are 
sections where a man 
loses cast if he milks a cow. 
New York State has many “garden spots” but few that equal the Finger Lake country. This photographic view 
(looking north) shows Keuka or Crooked Lake, which lies almost entirely in Yates County. ‘ In shape it sug¬ 
gests a capital Y and the section of land running down some nine miles between the two arms of the Y, is very 
largely given over to grapes.” 
... Parts of the county 
bear unmistakable evidence of a by-gone golden 
age. 
For example, the main state road leading south 
from Seneca Falls has some stately old _ farm 
houses, many 01 them very large, built of brick or 
stone and set well back from the road in the midst 
of ample lawns and old plantings of trees—im¬ 
pressive old houses that, speak of a liber¬ 
ally remunerative agriculture and a cultured 
and dignified farm life. The more niggardly 
soil of the Hill Country never permitted 
many examples of rural architecture like these. 
I doubt if present economic conditions here 
will make possible the rearing of any more such 
farm homes. 
The truth is that western New York had a long- 
sunburst of prosperity following the.completion 
of the Erie Canal. DeWitt Clinton’s famous ditch 
was begun in 1817 and was officially opened for 
traffic from end to end one raw, cold day in 
October, 1825. From the very beginning it was 
so prosperous and the traffic so great that only 
ten years later its enlargement and reconstruction 
was" started and carried through and until well 
after the Civil War it remained a great and 
crowded artery of commerce. For full fifty years 
it had a proud and palmy history but to-day even 
in its new and greatly enlarged form, with thou¬ 
sand ton barges and freedom from tolls, it seems 
hard for it to maintain an existence. Certain it 
is that it survives at all only by virtue of most 
liberal .state encouragement and maintenance 
that will not let it die. 
But in that great day almost a century ago the 
Corn Belt was only a vague, far off region of fable 
and the first cabin had not yet been built on the 
Thus literally has it come to pass that 
1 Down the path he followed went 
The traffic of a continent 
parently rather slowly 
realized agricultural—in¬ 
dustrial readjustment 
must come about—all of 
which has a strange 
sound coming from one 
who is rather fond of 
urging the advantages of 
country living. 
I think there is very 
little likelihood that the 
better lands such as those 
in Seneca County of 
which I write will be 
permanently abandoned. 
They are only being dis¬ 
used and rested for a 
brief time. If they were 
in the cow country some 
fellow 7 would surely want 
to pasture them and 
closely grazing land is in 
no way soil conservation. 
It is continued soil de¬ 
pletion, only not quite so 
fast perhaps as cropping. 
But these lands are carry¬ 
ing a fair growdh of weeds and grass which is 
a 
Western New 7 York w 7 as already getting fairly 
full of people when the canal was opened and it 
w 7 as such an immeasurable advance over the old 
w 7 agon transportation that comparatively it 
brought Albany and far-off New York and the 
seaboard to their very door. For many years the 
agricultural supremacy of Western New \ork 
was unchallenged and not until the middle of the 
century behind us did the specter at length pass to 
the Corn Belt. Prof. I. P. Roberts w r as a Seneca 
County man born and bred and like all good men 
he w-as a booster for his native heath. Once 
again across the years I hear his whimsical boast 
“ Western New York is theGardenof theW orldand 
it always w ill be” O—but I believe he w 7 as right. 
It is my observation, confirmed by other men, 
that Seneca County in places at least is slipping. 
There are as the result of these last lean years— 
perhaps also as the result of too much dependence 
on a great past—too many ramshackle farms and 
too many unused fields. By this I do not mean 
such fields as are fortunately returning to forest 
in the rough, poor regions of' the Catskills or the 
Southern Tier. I mean fields of excellent poten¬ 
tial possibilities—fields that have produced many 
a good crop of w inter w heat in by-gone years and 
w ill doubtless raise many more in years to come. 
I explain this fact in tw 7 o w 7 ays. For one thing 
there have been too many years of wheat and hay 
and too few 7 animals. Then, too, it is easy to ar¬ 
rest production on an annual crop farm. The 
orchardist must stay on his job and prune and 
spray or his investment is gone. A modern, high 
returning to the soil again. Any marked im¬ 
provement in agricultural conditions will very 
promptly put the plow 7 into them again and they 
will be "all the better because of their rest and 
the opportunity to accumulate a little humus. 
Directly w 7 est of Seneca County lies “Little 
Yates” but intercommunication is not easy, for 
Seneca Lake separates the two and it is no insig¬ 
nificant barrier. Seneca is the largest and deepest 
and coldest of the Finger Lakes. It is forty miles 
long, about four miles broad at the widest point 
and in places reaches a depth of more than 650 
feet. If it should suddenly go dry some night, its 
bed w 7 ould appear as a really yawning chasm ex¬ 
tending more than 150 feet below 7 the level of the 
sea. These winter days it reflects the changing 
hues of the skies above it and if it freezes over at 
all, such a phenomenon has occured only once or 
tw r ice within the memory of men. 
Yates, along with its neighbor Schuyler, are 
the two smallest counties in the State west oi 
Schenectady. Yates may be rather limited in 
geographical extent but it offers very 7 wide vane } 
in its agriculture and in its soil types. Much ol 
the county is fine—some of it perhaps as good as 
the best, but over in the southw 7 est is a towmship or 
two which in soil character belongs to the Southern j 
Tier. v , dj 
I suppose that the one crop that makes lams 
-M. — — - - 1 , 
noteworthy is the grape industry. 1 his 
all 
noiewormy is me grape muusuj. j -. 1 
county has some 5,000 acres of vineyard w j lic . 
means that in certain favorable areas grape tre - 
Uses are altogether the most prominent thingI 1 
the agricultural landscape, although of course ‘ 
big county 7 of Chautauqua has an even larg 
( Continued ' on -page kl5) 
