Chapter 15 — The Times They Are A-changing—Once Again

Davenport in the Modern Era

The Town of Davenport at the beginning of the twenty-first century bears little resemblance to the town of our grandfathers.  The dominion of agriculture is long past.   The daily railcars of milk heading to New York City—and even the railroads themselves—have vanished.  The winter’s quiet is no longer broken by sleigh bells and by horses trudging over unplowed dirt roads.  Highways and even most farm roads are paved and normally clear of snow.  Forests have replaced the hardscrabble farms that once covered the hills.  An occasional riding horse may indeed be seen in the Charlotte Valley’s fields, but almost all working farm horses disappeared more than a half century ago, and even tractors today are seldom sighted.  Autos, vans, SUVs and pickup trucks, on the other hand, are everywhere—either in driveways or on used car lots.

In most ways the changes in Davenport reflect those in Delaware County as a whole:

 

Agriculture has become large-scale, and industries have moved near population centers.  The automobile contributed to the decline and disappearance of small trade centers.  Today people drive long distances to work, play and buy necessities, all activities that took place at or close to home one hundred years ago.  Modern life has erased the self-sufficiency that was a hallmark of rural communities until World War II.  Today many Delaware County residents telecommute.  Artists and writers, inspired by the natural beauty of the region, create in-home studios.  Family farms often supplement income with other home industries or jobs off the farm.  Throughout the area creative and resourceful people are doing very special jobs to meet the needs of the sprawling rural communities throughout Delaware County.  Government, manufacturing, retail and services are now the largest employers in the county.  (Delaware County Agriculture and Farmland Protection Board, 2000, 10.)

Changes in the last fifty to one hundred years have been perhaps even more dramatic than during the 1800s when Davenport transformed itself from raw woodland into a prosperous community of farms and small lumber mills, tanneries and shops of every hue.  This chapter will cover some of the more recent changes, especially those since World War II, as well as the town’s official celebration of almost two hundred years of change during the nation’s Bicentennial commemoration in 1976.

Some things change but little.  Many kinds of change—economic, social, political, technological, and environmental—have affected Davenport in the past and will do so in the future.  But some changes may not be as profound as might appear to the casual observer.  Let us first consider the things about Davenport that have not differed greatly over the years.

First, Davenport’s beauty and desirability as a place to live remain intact.  If anything, these qualities are more appreciated (and probably create more real estate value) today than in the past.  True, the land has changed.  It is more heavily wooded, the streams and creeks run cleaner than at times in the past, but by and large these developments are seen to enhance attractiveness.  Meanwhile, much of the valleys remain cleared, even when no longer in active farms, providing the mix of fields and forest so necessary for “quiet charm.”

 

 

Second, the town remains largely rural, a place of small hamlets and isolated dwellings.  Even reforested hillsides are being reclaimed by vacationers and retirees.  Furthermore, much of the feel and quality of small town, rural life remains.  People wave and say hello to one another.  The breakfast and luncheon diners at Vern’s and the Davenport Center Diner nod and exchange greetings. 

Yes, there have been important changes. The town’s two convenience stores, representative of the town’s few remaining retail businesses, have nothing like the same feeling of cluttered murkiness as did the former emporiums of Ralph Taber and Cyrus Whitlock (Davenport village), Lyle Henderson (East Meredith), Ira (Ike) Goodrich and Finley MacDonald (Davenport Center), and Earl Simmons (West Davenport).  Community life no longer centers on the one-room school, the village church (although those remaining continue to be important institutions), the occasional square dance[1], or in later years, the Grange. 

But other institutions have in many ways taken their place.  Chief among these have been the local fire departments and ladies’ auxiliaries, especially at fund-raising time.  Of equal importance has been the Charlotte Valley Central School.  The adult audience attending plays, concerts, and school fairs at the CVCS is more widely scattered and less intimately acquainted with one another than for earlier functions at Schoolhouse 1 or 7, but the pride and good humor are just as great and, with greater numbers, the applause is louder.  The last summer softball league dates to the 1980s.  For many years these games were important to community enjoyment and cohesiveness, but today’s CVCS “Wildcats” baseball, soccer and (especially) basketball games provide cheering opportunities throughout more of the year and to a larger audience.  They are well attended and the fans just as enthusiastic as in bygone eras.

There has also been continuity even in the economic pursuits of many residents.  Certainly, though often unrecognizable to our grandfathers, Davenport still values its remaining dairy farms and its scattered lumbering operations.  (More on these below.)  Maple syrup making, though sadly diminished from its heyday in the 1920s, lingers on.  At Pumpkin Hollow Maple Syrup, Ronald Beers and Philip and Maryanne Ashe are busy each spring with their high-tech evaporator, and in nearby Harpersfield (where the original Harpers were once attracted to its abundant maple trees) the Shaver Hill Maple Farm produces nationally recognized products.

In 1907 Ervin Davis, a gentle, multi-talented photographer and gentleman found several times in these pages, built his own Victorian home, complete with “gingerbread,” and produced furniture, still cherished today, in Davenport Center’s Davis Manufactory.  Today (that is, in the early 2000s), another Davis, Sandra, produces wood carvings of bears and other large forms down the road from where Ervin once made fine cabinets.  In East Meredith, Will Flower once alternated between making cabinets or, when the need arose, caskets.  Today in the same village, two stained glass artists, sisters Chris Consler and Connie Wood, work across from Hanford Mills and near the old Will Flower’s operation.  They work with “cold, warm, and hot” stained glass, specializing in window and door installations as well as lamps.  Not far away up Taylor Road, can be found the glass blowing operation of Ted and Tracy Halstead. 

Claude Taylor, a skilled journeyman and photographer whose photos appear throughout the present volume, also worked with wood and once crafted a library table of special quality.  Today, another talented cameraman, Jack Cole, prize-winning portrait photographer, operates Up Country Photo on Route 23 just east of Oneonta Volkswagen.

 

 

Other creative talents abound.  Joan Powell Taubel has made paintings of sixteen Davenport barns, now hung in the Davenport Historical Center and known as the Daniel Patrick Moynihan Collection.  (Copies in the form of postcards and notepaper have been widely sold by the Davenport Historical Society.)  Janet Koji is a noted water color artist in Davenport Center.  Mary Garrison gained statewide artistic recognition in the 1940s-1970s.  Victoria Barnes Porteus and Lynda Peet (the same Lynda Peet who wrote the Baldwin Hall history quoted at length in Chapter 13) provide an outlet for many of these and other local crafts in Davenport village’s “cut-above” gift shop, the Douglass House.

Davenport’s Bicentennial Celebration.  The 1976 celebration of the Nation’s 200 years of history gave Davenport an opportunity to show how much of the past was still remembered and cherished but also how much had changed.  The two-day celebration included a 40-unit parade involving 350 participants, a locally produced musical, and speeches by politicians.  There were many booths and exhibits, prize awards, and a beauty contest.  An “Early American Dinner” preceded the telling of the history of Davenport in music, and a “covered dish” luncheon following the next day’s ecumenical service.  Saturday afternoon saw, after the parade, the dedication of a new gymnasium at the Charlotte Valley Central School, and on Sunday, following the service in Fergusonville’s 1836 church, there was an open house at the Fergusonville Academy.  In most ways the June 18-19 affair was a nostalgic trip to the past.  Even the musical was titled “Days to Remember.”  The first part covered the years before the Civil War and the second act, the later 1800s.  (See sidebar.)  Period costumes abounded, in the parade, in the musical review, and among spectators at the fair.

 

 

The 1976 Bicentennial was a throwback to those earlier times when within-town socializing was a way of life for most residents.  It brings to mind particularly the fairs of the 1800s, the tent revival meetings, and the Old Home Days of the 1920s.  There were nevertheless some distinctly modern touches that illustrate how much Davenport has changed over the years.

First, there have been few if any such town-wide events in the past that involved so many diverse organizers throughout the community.  Fairs, revivals, and Old Home Days tended to be either largely commercial or largely church-organized happenings.  The 1976 celebration in contrast involved at least a dozen different committees and hundreds of participants.[2]  Second, an affair of this magnitude would have been hard to arrange on such short notice without the modern inventions of the telephone and the automobile.  The first full committee meeting for the June event was not held until the previous January. 

Days to Remember

A musical celebration of life along the Charlotte River in the Last Century

ACT I

BEFORE THE CIVIL WAR

Next, the dedication of the new gymnasium itself highlighted two modern touches not previously recorded in Davenport.  The new structure, which was to be known henceforward as the “O’Connor Gym,” was largely made possible by an unprecedented act of philanthropy by one of the town’s own.  This was Charles O’Connor, son of the 1890 newspaper editor, Edward O’Connor and his active church-supporting and thespian wife, Anna Taylor.  This development of a homegrown, or at least locally directed, philanthropic tradition is noteworthy enough that it will be examined again later in this chapter.

What might be the start of another modern tradition accompanied the O’Connor Gym’s dedication.  The dedicating dignitary was the Honorable Ambassador Daniel Patrick Moynihan, arguably Davenport’s most nationally famous resident of all time.  Ambassador Moynihan, furthermore, had announced only a week earlier that he would be running for the Democratic nomination to be New York’s U.S. Senator.  He was of course successful in the State convention, the primary, and the fall election, serving a quarter of a century as one of the United States Senate’s most distinguished members.

(Senator Moynihan, who died in March 2003 at the age of 76, and his wife, Elizabeth, had both worked in their younger years for New York’s Governor Averell Harriman.   They had followed the political circuit from one end of New York State to the other and had decided that, if ever the opportunity arose they would settle in the lovely hills of Davenport.)

 

 

The CVCS as a case study of changing times.  Finally, the location of the Bicentennial program at and around the Charlotte Valley Central School offers another example of how much Davenport has changed over time.  Recall first that the school grounds once witnessed Indians tapping maple trees near the “canoe place” where the early Palatines interrupted their journey from the Mohawk Valley and thence down the Susquehanna. We have already traced, in Chapter 8, the long progression from the many scattered one-room schools to the town’s first high school, a part of the Union Free School, where the Davenport Fire Department now stands.  The village’s first known school building, built in 1818, was not far away.  The first school became a barn after a new, two story schoolhouse was built in 1835 on land overlooking Mill Road and now occupied by the cemetery.  The new District #7 school was located behind the later Clarendon Hotel, still later (when the CVCS was built) Leslie Sanford Sr.’s garage and gas station, then a Laundromat and more recently the Davenport village Quickway.  This building was later moved to its present location on Main Street and became the later IOOF Hall.  (See the photograph in Chapter 8.)  The 1818 school building still stands behind the Quickway.

Continuous changes—each accompanied by some degree of controversy up to and including the narrow vote over a Union Free School at the time of World War I.  Another protracted battle erupted on the eve of the next World War when a rash of school consolidations occurred around the country, ushering in the new era of central schools.  This era was accelerated by the federal public works activities of the Great Depression (a form of government largess unheard of in earlier times), but it was made possible and feasible by several other truly modern inventions.  These included electricity and modern communication methods on the one hand and the introduction of the school bus, road sander, and snowplow on the other.  Urging on the central school movement, too, were the evolving educational needs of a technological society, needs difficult to satisfy in the one-room schools of our grandfathers.

The school controversies of the 1930s ended in 1938, and the Charlotte Valley’s new Central School has grown and prospered, becoming an ever more central part of community life.  It has adopted the hallmarks of modern education such as drivers’ education, home management, a range of sports and extra-curricular activities, a modern science facility, and most recently, classroom computers linked to the Internet.[3]  In December 2002 a new classroom wing was inaugurated, providing improved facilities for special education students and for joint study programs for fifth and sixth grade students.

 

 

In a concerted effort to enlarge the horizons of its students, the CVCS implemented its own Foreign Exchange Program.  Despite the lack of a local organization to support the exchanges, the program has been successful in attracting students from such countries as Denmark, Germany and Brazil.  CVCS students studying abroad have included Scott Hartley (1967) and Neil Hartley (1975), both of South Worcester, and from East Meredith, Mary Elizabeth Howarth (1971; killed while abroad in an airplane accident).  Three CVCS students in the class of 1966 studied in Colombia and Peru under the International Fellowship Exchange Program.  These were Jacqueline McBride (East Meredith), Lesley Mason (Jefferson), and Timothy McMullen (Davenport).

There is one final indication of the profound changes since the days of Davenport’s farmer and craftsmen forbears.  In contrast to the limited schooling of Davenport’s early days (see Chapter 8), most of the area’s youths now attend school regularly through twelfth grade and then graduate from high school.  (On the other hand, the recent advent of standardized testing as a prerequisite to graduation has led to a higher dropout rate than in the past.  The school must also devote considerable resources to “special needs” students, another modern development.) 

A majority of the graduates go on to either a four or two-year college.  In 1999, for example, two-thirds of the 25 graduates planned to go to college.  In the previous year’s class of 37 graduates, the prospective college-goers came to three out of four.  Eighteen of the 28 who in 1998 planned for college chose one of the many branches of the SUNY system (8 such branches were represented among the CVCS class of ’98).[4]  The State University of New York (SUNY) system of two and four-year colleges was itself a major innovation of the previous decades.

 

 

What wonders modern times hath wrought.  Major technological changes of the modern era have been touched upon in previous chapters.  Chief among those most important for Davenport has been electric power, the telephone, and the road networks.  These in turn have permitted minor revolutions such as school centralization, the ability to respond quickly to fires and other emergencies, and the transformation (of which more below) in the town’s traditional core industries, dairy farming and lumbering.  More recently have come the omnipresent television receivers, CD and DVD recordings, and the still expanding home and commercial use of computers.  (Witness the CD-ROM included with this volume.)

 

 

On a more mundane level, the younger residents of Davenport may not fully appreciate the profound changes that have taken place in the homes of their parents.  Except for the houses along Main Street in Davenport village and those with springs on higher ground, few homes had running water until the advent of electricity.  Kerosene mantle lamps could serve quite well for lighting, but before electric motors only a noisy gasoline or occasional steam engine could pump water from well to house.  Electricity now powers silent and inexpensive water pumps, provides touch-of-the-switch lighting, some space heating, and has made possible a mind-boggling range of kitchen gadgets.  While wood fuel still heats a few homes there is hardly a cook who does not today prepare meals on an electric or bottled gas stove or in a microwave oven.

One of the most ubiquitous and possibly unappreciated changes has come in what is often referred to as “indoor plumbing.”   Early settlers arriving in the virgin Charlotte Valley could carry with them no more than basic necessities.  They were of course acquainted with outhouses and even the rudimentary indoor toilet accommodations of the time.  But in their new environment, hard pressed to erect a shelter for themselves before the onset of cold weather, they could do little more than throw up a movable shed roof above a hole in the ground.  Nor did they bring toilet tissues with them in those early days, relying instead upon a judicious selection of leaves and, when they later became available, corn husks.

Later as saw mills began to function, the plank-built outhouse became standard and indeed remained so for a century or more until the event of running water.  A trip to the distant outhouse in cold weather could be hazardous to bare feet and, once inside, to bare bottoms.  The journey was not undertaken lightly, and one or more chamber pots, discretely placed inside the house, became important accessories.

  The situation began to improve in Davenport village in 1884 when Uncle Billy McDonald established the Davenport Water Company (Chapter 8), but it was not for another dozen years that the first bona fide flush toilet was installed in the second floor living quarters of Baldwin’s Hall.  We have heard above how this new facility became an instant sensation and was soon the focus of considerable attention, at least among certain young ladies, during dances on the floor above.  For most of the rest of the town outside of this hamlet, indoor facilities had to wait another thirty years until the coming of electric power lines.

This is by no means to say that the traditional outhouse or privy was not widely appreciated on its own terms.  It even had true admirers among its users, as can be judged by the poem following.

 

Sonnet for a Two-Holer

 

For solitude, or semi-solitude,

If both accommodations are in use,

Come here, in vacant or in pensive mood.

But stay not overlong, since by abuse

The best of Nature’s gifts may grow     corrupt.

 

Your visit ended you will not omit

The tribute of white lime, first gently cupped,

Then sprinkled o’er the underlying pit.

 

 

On turning down the hill, with tranquil       mind,

You are requested in particular

To slide the mark, which on the side you’ll find,

To the position perpendicular.

 

Then others with confidence draw near

To share the priceless boon vouchsafed you here.

                             --Edgar Turlington, summer visitor to Sexsmith Lake

                                in the pre-electricity days of the early 1940s.

 

Bathing was another matter.  Customs here were rather different from those of later years.  After the old cast-iron, wood burning kitchen range came into use, families would keep a kettle on the back of the stove at all times.  This, or water from a small reservoir in the stove itself, would provide warm water for dishes, washing, and baths.  On Saturday night a large tub, usually of galvanized tin, would be placed on the kitchen floor in front of the open oven door.  Daughters would bathe first followed by the mother.  Sons came next and finally the father.  Soap for many years was homemade and suitably strong.  The order of bathing had to do with the contribution of soil each made to the bath water.  Clean clothes followed each bath—to be worn until the following Saturday.

Summer brought a reprieve.  Bathing could now take place in the river, creek or farm pond, as often as desired. 

All of these several activities were a long step from today’s daily showers, soakings in Jacuzzis, and multiple brands of toilet tissues.

Modernizing trash.   And what about household trash?  In the old days, say before World War II, there was far less of it.  Paper and cardboard were burned in the backyard incinerator barrel, kitchen scraps went to the chickens or pig, and tin cans and glass were deposited in a refuse pile in the nearby woods.  Dozen of these backyard dump heaps still dot the Davenport farm landscape, their tin cans largely disintegrated but old bottles continuing to gleam among the rotted leaves.

With population growth, the advent of the consumer economy, restrictions on trash burning, and especially with the coming of throwaway plastic and aluminum packaging, the old methods became obsolete.  Davenport inaugurated its first town dump in the late 1930s off Charlotte Creek Road just west of Pine Lake.  The dump was a great convenience for many, especially those living on small lots, but it became a breeding ground for rats despite efforts in later years to keep it covered with soil.  The neighbors complained and in any case, after about four decades, the site became full.  Ben Beams, Town Supervisor (1974-1981) at the time, estimated a new sanitary landfill would cost the town a quarter of a million dollars.[5]

Meanwhile the state’s Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) had begun to frown on local landfills and was pushing for a county-wide system under which each town would be responsible for its own transfer station and for moving its refuse to a county disposal facility.  Ben Beams remembers it as an extraordinarily contentious time. (See sidebar.)  “Each town had to get their own transfer station started, but everybody—all the towns—had trouble with the people arguing against it… We tried to explain it at board meeting after board meeting—had the engineers down and talked to it—but [Davenport] just didn’t want to go along with it…” 

Finally the county resolved its internal disputes and purchased a site just east of Walton for refuse disposal—supposedly one of the better sites in the state because of soil conditions.  The facility has since expanded and has introduced recycling and recycling equipment.  The Davenport transfer station has grown with the town’s population rebirth, especially with Route 23 commercial expansion outside of Oneonta.  A heavy increase in volume, mostly caused by new commercial activity in town, had little effect on the station’s sixteen weekly hours of operations as late as 1985: 8-4 on Tuesdays and Saturdays, about the same as at the Town’s old landfill.  This had expanded by only one more day and four more hours of operation by 2002/03.

Population growth, decline and re-growth.  Davenport’s population has reflected many of the longer-run changes in the town, and the census numbers of recent years are especially instructive for the present chapter.  The following table shows the population ups and downs over 200 years.  Partial adjustments have been made in the table for Davenport’s changing political boundaries over time.[6]

The table shows that Davenport reached a peak population about 1860, shortly before the Civil War.  (The New York State Census of 1865, not shown, showed a slight drop from 1860.)  As the fortunes of farming declined over the next seventy years, population fell continuously.  At its 1930 low point, the town’s inhabitants came to about half of the 1860 peak.

What is equally striking is the change since 1930.  By 1990 Davenport’s population total had climbed back up to exceed its 1860 peak, and by 2000 it had more than doubled from its lowest point. The year 2000 population was the greatest the town had ever seen.  What a roller coaster it has been—sixty years to grow from almost nothing to a town of well over two thousand, a further seventy years in which to lose half its residents, and then over the next seventy years more than doubling back up to its highest total ever.

How could such dramatic changes have occurred?  The first 130 years were fairly typical of many small towns.  Population grew as the new town filled up with farmers, lumbermen, craftsmen, and traders.  Then the people faded away as farms consolidated and as the motor car enabled them to be drawn away to the cities.  But in Davenport’s case, the city has come to the country.  Recent growth is almost entirely the result of good economic times in Oneonta.  These are largely attributable to that city’s two colleges, its medical facilities, and its growing importance as a regional marketing center since the arrival of I-88.  In turn, the nearness of Oneonta to Davenport has led to western Davenport, in short, becoming to some extent a suburb of Oneonta.

 

       Adjusted Davenport Population Totals, 1800-2000

Source: Federal decennial Censuses of Population except where indicated by footnote.

   ^aPre-Davenport.  Kortright inhabitants in the area of the future Davenport estimated from the Kortright census, but Fitches Patent inhabitants guessed at about 50, based on 1810 estimate of 94.  (Fitches Patent in 1800 was part of Cherry Valley.)  Estimate excludes Wallace Patent residents (approximately 105) in lots later transferred to Oneonta.

  ^bPre-Davenport.  Estimates based on 1810 Kortright and Maryland censuses.  Excludes Wallace Patent residents (approximately 115) in lots later transferred to Oneonta.

  ^cFrom first Davenport census but excludes Wallace Patent residents (approximately 150) in lots later transferred to Oneonta. 

  ^dExcludes Wallace Patent residents (approximately 180) in lots transferred to Oneonta, all of which were included in the 1830 Davenport census.

  ^eExcludes 150 residents from the Houghtalling Hollow area in south-west Davenport annexed by Meredith in 1878.  The 1870 alternative estimate is consistent with years following while the census 1870 total is consistent with earlier years.

Land use and ownership.  Accompanying the recent rise in population has been an equally dramatic growth in the number of land parcels in Davenport.  Land use did not change greatly until after World War II.  In 1950, Davenport had 549 parcels of land of which slightly less than half were under ten acres.  One-fourth, 128 parcels, contained 100 acres each or more.  Between 1950 and 1980 with the increased demand for housing and the federal government  buy-out of many dairy operations there was a great move to sell and subdivide.  The total number of parcels more than doubled.  The biggest increase in numbers of parcels, from 262 to 835, came in those of 9.9 acres and smaller.  The biggest increase in actual acreage came in mid-size lots between 10 and 99 acres where the number of parcels grew from 159 to 286.[7]

The proliferation of smaller parcels, most or many of which are designated house lots, is the other side of the population growth story.  But there is more to land use change.  This is the widening ownership of land.  In 1950 only 50 out of 549 parcels were owned by those living outside of Delaware County.  Presumably, most of these lots contained vacation homes although out-of-town real estate developers held some.

In contrast, the 1980 lots owned outside of Delaware County had jumped to 387, more than a 7-fold increase!  If these were all house lots and were fully occupied (unlikely), this seasonal use might have increased total residents by one-half.  Even with normal seasonal residence of one week to several months each year, at times during the year the total population of Davenport will be significantly greater than the census figure.  (More in the Epilogue on the implications of changing land ownership for the future.)

The final point about these non-resident owners is that they all contribute to the Davenport budget through real estate taxes.  The political direction of the town will always be controlled by those who live and vote in Davenport, but of the total school and property taxes collected by Davenport, over thirty percent have in recent years come from non-residents.[8]

 

 

Commercial changes.  Along with resident population has come an increase in commercial activity.  The entire length of route 23 in Davenport has changed, beginning with the construction of the Holiday Inn in 1974.  Before that time, Oneonta’s south side farms, now mostly sold off to commercial interests, dotted the highway.  Six years later when Ben Beams built Raynor Overhead Door Co. on Route 23, there were about thirteen places of business in addition to Holiday Inn.  These by 1980 included Volkswagen, Ford-Lincoln-Mercury dealerships as well as Central Tractor Farm and Family Center.  Taylor Rental opened for business and Latham Modular Homes moved from Oneida Street about 1985.  The Southside area also boasted, in 1980, the Golden Rule Building Supply Center (which about 1982 became Pickett Building Materials), two tractor and farm equipment dealers (Able Equipment Company and John Deere), several auto body shops, and one motorcycle dealer, Falls Mills Motors.  There are still some family homes interspersed among the new businesses, but the entire character of the west end of Davenport has changed—including the traffic.[9]

The 2003 property reassessment.   Davenport’s Town Assessors in 2003 completed a major revaluation of all town properties, moving towards the ideal of an assessed value based on the “highest and best use” for each parcel and structure.  The result was to change slightly the importance of different classes of taxable properties, although residential dwellings and their lots remained the single largest taxable group at a little under two-thirds of the total.  Commercial properties came next, closely followed by vacant land, at 15% and 14%, respectively.  Agricultural land and buildings, the traditional mainstay of Davenport, were by 2003 a distant six percent.[10] 

Of greater consequence to individual owners were the many changes made to correct earlier under or over assessments.  There was little complaint from those whose assessments fell, of whom there were many, but considerable anguish on the part of others.  Assessments for a considerable number of landowners doubled and even tripled.  In general and on the average there was little change for industrial and commercial businesses and only relatively modest increases for residences. 

This was emphatically not true for land, for which average assessed values doubled.  Non-agricultural land without dwellings (“vacant” land) rose less than the average.  The assessed land values for house, commercial, and industrial lots more than doubled. 

Assessments on land and buildings owned by non-Davenport residents differed from locally-owned holdings only in that non-residents owned higher proportions of land and of industrial and commercial establishments.  Nonresidents in 2003 held about seven-tenths of all Davenport’s non-agricultural “vacant” land, recreational, and private forestland.  Residents, in contrast, owned about three-fourths of residential properties with dwellings.  For all taxable property, including commercial and industrial, nonresidents accounted for 44 percent of the total in 2003, up from 41 percent in 2000.

How farming has been revolutionized.  Nowhere are there more impressive examples of change than in Davenport’s two most traditional businesses, farming and lumbering.  Only the raw material inputs and the final products would be recognized by our grandfathers.  The processing and even the source of the raw materials would have left them speechless.

Let’s start with dairy farming.[11]  Out of doors, some cows are now fed in carefully tended and small paddocks from which the cows move in two weeks to let the grass recover.  (The system is based on the “intensive rotational grazing program,” developed originally in New Zealand.)  The grass itself may be nitrogen fertilized as well as manured.  It may include introduced varieties such as “sorghum Sudan grass” and “grazing alfalfa” as well as native orchard grass and clover.  Weeds amidst silage corn may be eliminated with a soil groomer and applications of herbicide. 

Traditional corn-silage has been joined by hay-crop silage (early 1940s), now called “haylage,” and most recently by “baleage”— round bales of hay encased in plastic to permit some internal fermentation.   Separate, specialized machines, most of which did not exist forty years ago, are needed to prepare the different kinds of silage, and silos themselves have been modified with plastic silo caps (already largely discontinued) and silo unloaders.  Hay for the barn is now dried partly in the field and partly inside with a hay drier, thus eliminating the traditional need for three full days of good drying weather.

 

 

Indoors in some barns a conveyor system now moves loads of dry hay directly to the cow stalls.  Elsewhere, rolls of hay are moved by conveyor belts among the feeding cows.  Some smaller farms no longer feed their cows traditional corn silage, having discovered that “baleage” and supplemental grain are more cost effective.  Milking machines appeared in the late 1930s, but today’s implements are often found in a “milking parlor” where the cows have learned to come to the machine (rather than the other way around) before returning to their stalls.  The milk feeds into a pipeline where it is delivered to a large, refrigerated bulk tank, replacing the iced milk can of earlier years.  Not yet found in Davenport, however, is a robotic system becoming popular in Canada in which the cow walks into a robotic stall, the robot feels for the udder, attaches itself, and milks the cow.

Other innovations since World War II include a mulch-tiller for “minimum tillage” corn-growing, tailor-made fertilizer packages to improve both yields and nutritional benefits for the cows, and exotic technology such as “hay-bines” and “disc-bines.”

Then there are the “farming” activities that did not even exist in Davenport until after World War II.  The most important of these today are the greenhouses, most of which grow annual plants and flowers.  As noted in Chapter 6, at the end of the 1900s there were five greenhouse operations in town whose several hundred glass and plastic-covered buildings covered perhaps six acres of land.  The geraniums grown by James R. Frazier (descendant and namesake of Davenport’s early Presbyterian minister, 1853-1912) are developed in Germany, raised to the seedling stage in Mexico, and delivered by truck to Southside Drive in Davenport.  The several varieties are grown in highly automated (temperature and water-controlled), double-sheeted plastic-covered buildings.  Air is pumped in between the plastic sheets to improve heat retention.  One of the three or four largest such operations in New York State, Frazier’s handles about four million geranium cuttings a year and ships by truck throughout the Northeast and by air to other parts of the country.[12]

 

 

 In Davenport Center, there are now two greenhouse growers.  Robert Amadon, a former teacher at CVCS, started his first operation in 1968.  This increased annually, mainly through sales to the former Jamesway store east of Oneonta.  Sons Bruce and Douglas and daughter Jaqueline Wright continue the venture, distributing plants throughout the state.  Dennis Valenti, another grower, has another smaller but expanding enterprise begun in 2000.

The lumbering and lumber mill revolution.  Lumbering, even more than farming, has become automated and controlled to a large extent by computers.  In the early 2000s there were two substantial lumber and timber operations in town.  One, Leatherstocking Timber Products, Inc., just west of West Davenport, is chiefly a buyer and distributor of hardwood.  In the timber brokerage business since 1994, owner Matthew Kent acquires hardwood within a 150-mile or so radius.  Leatherstocking then ships the specialty logs required by users to all parts of the world, including China and Indonesia.  No lumber processing is done at the West Davenport site.

A quite different timber operation, in Butts Corners, chiefly processes hardwood.  The mill is operated by Ron Greene and about forty-five sawyers, graders, foresters and other workers.[13]  Here the timber processing is state-of-the-art, which means, principally, that computer-guided band saws are mostly used in place of circular saws and all operations are monitored by closed-circuit TV.  Circular saws are still used for squaring up the logs, but band saws blades are thinner.  Less wood is wasted in sawdust when using a 100 rather than a 270 thousandth of an inch saw width.  Several band saws will often operate at once, each set to 64th of an inch tolerance, controlled by computers and infrared sensors, measurers and electric eyes.  Other machines do all the de-barking, and scanners locate any saw-destroying metal embedded in the delivered timber.

Computers with their infrared helpers will also figure out the most economical series of large and small, narrow and wide cuts to be made from a particular log.  They work faster and more accurately than a human operator.  Edgers employ two computers.  Blowers remove sawdust to a bag house tower and the air is filtered.  (Most of the sawdust is sold for farm use.)  Human inspectors still are used to grade and sort the finished pieces of lumber—but they register each piece in a small computer attached to the end of each marking stick

The Greene lumber mill consumes over 200,000 gallons of diesel oil a year for its trucks and its own electric generators.  A fleet of trucks—normally seven trailer-loads a day of 8,000 board feet each—deliver the annual output of 12-13 million feet throughout the east, as far north as Toronto, as far south as the Carolinas, Tennessee, and Kentucky, and west to Ohio, Indiana and Michigan.  Little is sold to the public directly; most trailer-loads go to cabinet-makers, furniture factories, and molding shops.  Some softwood goes for window frames, door casings and—basswood—for piano keys.  Timber is generally purchased or harvested within a hundred-mile radius.  Huge timber-cutting machines—a used one costs $175,000—walk up to a tree, holding their cab level on even a 51-degree slope.  Then clamps encircle the trunk, a button is pushed to saw the tree through at the base, and the tree is picked up and moved away for trimming.

Under the pressure of environmental necessity, a variety of portable bridges may be used to protect streambeds, and rubber mats protect the ground in wet areas.  In one sensitive and steep area near Hunter Mountain the company used a Chinook helicopter—based in Oregon—to move out over a million feet of timber.

Can you imagine what grandfather would have thought?

 

 

 

A subtle but important change – philanthropy.   This section may appear to be self-serving.  After all, the A. Lindsay and Olive B. O’Connor Foundation has generously supported this history project, and indeed much of the work of the Davenport Historical Society.  Nevertheless, organized funding by local foundations has in recent years played a vital role in many cultural, social and other aspects of Davenport life (and indeed throughout Delaware County).  This has been a relatively new phenomenon and deserving of note in any discussion of significant change in Davenport.

The town has always had its homegrown philanthropists, wealthier folk who were willing to give a hand to poorer neighbors or to support this or that young scholar or other worthy activity.  And the town has had its share of sons and daughters who have moved on to prosper in the outside world.  (Regrettably, until the advent of businesses in the new commercial district adjoining Oneonta, there are few or no examples in the twentieth century of Davenport folk achieving riches while staying at home.  William Simpson seems to have been one exception in the 1800s—see sidebar, Chapter 5.)  Organized homegrown philanthropy has only arrived in Davenport, and indeed in Delaware County as far as is known, in the years after World War II.

One impetus for both town and county was the worldly success of two of Davenport’s sons, the brothers Charles Robert (1874-1946) and  (Judge) A. Lindsay O’Connor (1881-1968).  Their father was Edward O’Connor (1844-1927), a lawyer, manager of local plays, and one-time editor of Davenport’s Charlotte Valley News.  (See Chapter 7.)  Edward O’Connor later moved his law practice from Davenport to Hobart, NY. 

It is two women, however, that receive much credit for the eventual philanthropic accomplishments of Charles and Lindsay O’Connor.  The first was their mother, Anna Taylor O’Connor (1844-1906).  She, as noted earlier, was an avid thespian and a strong supporter of Davenport’s Methodist Church and its many worthy activities.  Of equal importance to the current story is that she literally worked hard with her own hands to earn money—not an easy undertaking for the wife of a lawyer in the late 1800s—to secure her sons’ college education.  Those sons went on to achieve their degrees, became lawyers, and prospered financially, although in Hobart rather than Davenport. 

The second woman of note was Olive Beatrice Huggans (1879-1972), an energetic Hobart schoolteacher and later principal of the Prattsville (NY) Union Free School.  She married in 1910 Hobart attorney A. Lindsay O’Connor who in 1905 had joined his father and older brother in the firm of O’Connor and O’Connor.  Forced to give up teaching after moving to Hobart (her new husband was president of the School Board), she turned her considerable energies to church, temperance, board of education, and other civic activities. 

Upon the death of their father in 1927, the two sons continued the O’Connor practice.  Before this, A. Lindsay O'Connor had been elected and overwhelmingly reelected to the post of Delaware County District Attorney.  The formal partnership of O’Connor and O’Connor ended in 1930 when the younger man was elected County Judge and Surrogate for Delaware County.  In 1943 Judge O’Connor was appointed and later elected to the New York State Supreme Court, a position he held until his retirement in 1951.

The O’Connors from early on seem to have been interested in charitable causes.  The Honorable Charles R. O'Connor established a trust fund to support scholarships for Davenport’s new Charlotte Valley Central School.  At the Bicentennial Celebrations of 1976, as noted above, the new gymnasium of that school was dedicated in his honor. 

Olive B. and A. Lindsay O’Connor supported over time a wide number of institutions.  The O’Connor name is found on professorships and scholarships.  Named, too, were a residence hall of Harpur College, a Health Center at Mt. Hermon School in Massachusetts (which Judge O’Connor had attended), the O’Connor Campus Center at Colgate University, O’Connor Hospital at Delhi, and (in honor of the late Charles R. O’Connor) O’Connor Hall at SUNY-Delhi.[14]

Upon Charles O’Connor’s death in 1946, one-fifth of his estate was divided among two local churches, the Mount Herman School, and the Charlotte Valley Central School.  The remaining four-fifths went to A. Lindsay and Olive B. O’Connor.[15]  This increased the recipients’ capacity for philanthropy, and in 1965 Olive B. O’Connor established the charitable trust named for her and her husband.  The trust, to be “operated exclusively for religious, charitable, literary or educational purposes, including the prevention of cruelty to children and animals,” had by 1976 a remaining capital of about $20 million.  Its aim was to disburse about $1,000,000 in that year.  In the previous three years about two-thirds of the money granted went to health, welfare and social concerns.  Smaller amounts were given for cultural activities (opera and museums), religion (a variety of churches), education (student aid and libraries), and environmental programs.  Mrs. O’Connor remained president of the foundation until her death in 1972.

The two O’Connor trust philanthropies are not the only ones that in recent years have made a difference in Delaware County.  The annual reports of such local organizations as the West Kortright Center and the Hanford Mills Museum reveal as contributors the New York State Council on the Arts (NYCA) and, more locally, the Robinson Broadhurst Foundation of Stamford, the Dewar Foundation of Oneonta, and of course the O’Connor Foundation.  The Charlotte Valley Central School includes among it benefactors the Charles Haynes (of East Meredith) Fund, the Dow-Taylor Fund, and the Charles R. O’Connor Trust.

Though not undertaken by a philanthropic organization, the good works and local contributions of Leo Lomangino also deserve mention.  (See sidebar, Chapter 6.)

The following additional illustrations to be found here.