Chautauqua Lake Region

By Kathleen Crocker and Jane Currie

The period from the late 1800s through the mid-1900s is fondly remembered as the heyday of the Chautauqua Lake region in southwestern New York State.

It was a wondrous era, when railroads, steamboats, and trolleys transported local residents as well as wealthy and socially prominent families from Buffalo, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Detroit, Cincinnati, and St. Louis to their summertime destinations around Chautauqua Lake.Showcased in Chautauqua Lake Region are not only adjacent lakeside communities, industries, and occupations of the residents but also the exceptional natural beauty of the lake itself, its importance to early navigation, its recreational attributes, and its overall allure as a tourist mecca. This "pocket museum" focuses on the myriad attractions that once dotted the lake's forty-two-mile shoreline: hotels, parks, camps, picnic groves, rowing clubs, boat liveries, fish hatcheries, icehouses, railroad and trolley depots, and steamboat landings.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Arcadia Publishing
• Release date: May 22, 2002
• ISBN: 9781439611494

Kathleen Crocker

Curious about the role played by their own ancestors in Chautauqua's history, Kathleen Crocker and Jane Currie have pooled their talents to create Chautauqua Institution, 1874-1974. As manager of the Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle for ten years, Crocker has lectured locally, eager to share her knowledge of Chautauqua's past. Currie, a professional photographer, has with discernment chronicled the Chautauqua community for nearly three decades. Their mutual passion for the area provides both the armchair traveler and the seasoned Chautauquan a fresh glimpse into this American utopia.

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Currie.)

One

OVER THE PORTAGE TRAIL

The Chautauqua Lake region played a significant role in American history. It was of special interest to France and its holdings in the New World. According to early records, French engineer Chaussegros DeLery was one of the earliest white men in the Chautauqua region, sent in 1739 to discover the shortest route between Lake Erie and the headwaters of the Ohio River. He crossed a line of low irregular hills known as the Chautauqua ridge, which forms a watershed, separating waters that flow into Lake Erie from those that flow into the Gulf of Mexico.

On one side of the ridge, water flows northward via creeks and streams into Lake Erie and then proceeds to the Niagara River to Lake Ontario to the St. Lawrence River and empties into the Atlantic Ocean. Conversely, the waters on the opposite side of the ridge flow southward into Chautauqua Lake and successively empty into these rivers: the Chadakoin, the Conewango, the Allegheny, the Ohio, and the Mississippi. This discovery proved extremely advantageous to the French in their disputed land claims with the English.

Because of its strategic geographic location as an essential navigation link between the Great Lakes and the Gulf of Mexico, Chautauqua Lake was of vital importance both to explorers and to early settlers. According to the first written county records penned by French explorers and missionaries, bands of roving Indians on hunting and fishing forays were the first people to traverse the nine-mile stretch between Lake Erie and Chautauqua Lake.

Although La Salle is credited with discovering Chautauqua Lake in the early 1600s, French explorer Pierre Joseph Celoron de Blainville landed at the mouth of Chautauqua Creek near Barcelona on Lake Erie in 1749. County historian Obed Edson (1832–1882) described Celoron’s expedition as a fleet of bark canoes, manned by half-naked Indians, Canadians in hunter’s garb, and French soldiers in the uniform of their country [who] paddled over the waters of the upper lake. Celoron and his party, seeking a communication and military route to reinforce the French claim on territories west of the Allegheny Mountains, made a tremendous impact on the area’s future. Their military activities against the British, documented by Celoron’s own maps and manuscripts later purchased from France by the United States government, were just the beginning of a series of incidents that eventually led to the French and Indian War. Celoron’s encampments included not only the village on the west side of the lake later named in his honor but also explorations around present-day Long Point and Greenhurst.

Four years later, Marquis Duquesne, the governor-general of Canada—or New France, as it was then called—was desirous of establishing a series of forts uniting those in his country with those along the Mississippi River down to Louisiana. With the discovery of the comparatively short route between the two sites, Fort Duquesne in present-day Pittsburgh became a reality in 1754.

Trailblazing through vast virgin wilderness and a precipitous gorge in the Chautauqua region, Celoron and his party followed an abandoned Indian path and successfully built the Portage Trail between Barcelona on Lake Erie and Mayville at the head of Chautauqua Lake. Recognized as the first work performed by civilized hands within the limits of Chautauqua County, this endeavor enabled the French to launch canoes on Chautauqua Lake and journey to Louisiana as they had hoped.

Having attained their mission, the French vacated this region, and the old Portage Road became a highway for Chautauquans, serving as a main artery to and from the county seat in Mayville. In 1823, Capt. Gilbert Ballard, owner of the Old Stage Coach Tavern in Jamestown, initiated his stagecoach line. It traveled along the east side of Chautauqua Lake between Jamestown and Mayville and conveyed up to 12 passengers, their luggage in the rear boot, and the first mail service between the two villages. Outmoded coaches, wagons, and carriages were replaced by trolleys and railroads that could handle increasing numbers of passengers and freight.

The Holland Land Company, absentee landlords representing six Dutch banking houses, acquired property from Robert Morris after the Seneca Indians gave up their land claims to him in the Big Tree Treaty of 1797. The company bought more than three million acres of land in western New York and opened its first sales office in Batavia in 1801. Chautauqua County purchased a little over 1,000 square miles from the Holland Land Company, which then opened another office in Mayville. Hired as the earliest agents were Paul Busti, Joseph Ellicott, and William Peacock, who managed the county’s business affairs.

Inns and taverns were established to accommodate travelers along the Portage Trail. One of the most famous was immortalized by Judge Albion W. Tourgee in his 1887 historical novel of the same name, Button’s Inn. It was located upon that cross-artery of traffic which led back from the harbor [near Barcelona] toward the settlement around the lake beyond the divide known . . . as Jadauqua and . . . as Chautauqua. Built by Moses Chapman in 1823, the inn and its 100-acre lot was purchased the next year by the Button family. Tourgee tells his readers that the inn was intended at first to serve both as a fort and a residence, its upper story overlapping the lower as to prevent assault, and that it later was a favorable resting-place, not only for those who climbed the ridge upon their way to and from settlements [but also for many] wayfarers. Reputed to have been haunted, this stagecoach stop featured a barroom and a ballroom, where visitors could square dance and enjoy Virginia reels. It was razed and, later, a marker was placed near the original site, a tribute to the inn’s historic importance. (Courtesy Patterson Library, Westfield, N.Y.)

In an elaborate 1924 ceremony, the Patterson Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) placed this inscribed boulder on the site where the old Indian trail and the French Portage Road intersected. Carrying their canoes, provisions, and bartering goods, the

The civic-minded members of the DAR might be interested to know that avid conservationists are currently waging a campaign against the New York State Department of Transportation to preserve the 125-year-old trees along this historic highway. Today, the thoroughfare itself still serves those traveling between Mayville and Westfield and, although it is located nearby, the modern road deviates from the path of the original trail. (Courtesy Patterson Library, Westfield, N.Y.)

French rebuilt the primitive trail, an essential commercial link between Lake Erie and the Gulf of Mexico. (Courtesy Patterson Library, Westfield, N.Y.)

By 1852, Chautauqua County had four wooden, or plank, roads with periodic tollgates, built over the wilderness trails by the Holland Land Company. The Westfield-Hartfield Plank Road, still in existence, branched off to Mayville to provide an essential highway between Lake Erie and Chautauqua Lake. These turnpike roads lasted only a decade before they were replaced by dirt roads, with the tollgates removed. Photographer Bertrand Taylor recorded hired laborers laying brick to modernize the Portage Road in 1915, prior to the age of paved highways. (Courtesy Devon Taylor.)

Built c. 1909, the three-story brick Portage Inn was another hostelry catering to travelers on the road between Barcelona and Mayville. With the Chautauqua Traction stop eventually at its front door and conveniently located near the busy Westfield railroad depot, the hotel was well known to commercial travelers between New York City and Chicago and especially popular with travelers from Buffalo and Cleveland, who made repeated visits because of its location, reasonable rates, cleanliness, and bounteous meals. (Courtesy Kathleen Crocker.)

The lobby of the Portage Inn was handsomely furnished. Note the lounge chairs, marble floor, and corner reception desk, where the owner’s son, James Sullivan, was often on duty during his father’s proprietorship, from 1919 to 1938.