This review of Davenport’s two hundred-year history has been highly enjoyable but also disquieting for the editor. Again and again the questions arise, “Just what is Davenport? Who are its people? And what is the relevance of the town’s history for the present and future?” In a way, the history of Davenport has come full circle. It started out as a 14-mile long, thin settlement with Dutch and German immigrants near the mouth of the Charlotte having their own culture, speaking their own language, and barely in communication with the quite different Scots and Connecticut Yankees along Middle Brook and further up the Charlotte Valley.
Today it is still a long, slim town. Today’s culture gaps may be among new arrivals at the western end of town (business folk, immigrants from Long Island and suburbanites from Oneonta), older residents scattered throughout the town, and pockets of vacationers, craftsmen, artists and retirees along the back roads and in the hills.
Mary Briggs has been a redoubtable and altogether wonderful guide to these last two hundred years. She laid out the outline and structure for the preceding chapters. She reworked her old historical essays and contributed new material to help fill in her outline. She and the editor have met twice weekly for much of 2001, 2002 and 2003, discussing issues, reviewing events, interviewing other residents and filling in the gaps in the editor’s own knowledge of Davenport, its people, and how the town works.
Mary Selzer has been a keen observer of Davenport affairs since her arrival in 1936 as a new District 3 teacher, fresh from Oneonta State Normal School (forerunner of SUNY-Oneonta). She later married Harry Briggs of the extensive Davenport Center and East Meredith Briggs clan and became even more immersed in the details of village life, of poultry raising, and of small-town business operations. Her historical interest sharpened over time as she encouraged her students to uncover and understand past events. She subsequently served as Davenport’s third official Town Historian for twenty-eight years,
The editor’s own Davenport memories go back even further, to the late 1920s, but they are largely dreamy childhood recollections of summer activities with sisters, cousins, aunts, uncles, friends, parents and grandparents in the vicinity of Sexsmith Lake.
Mary
Selzer Briggs’ role in this cooperative enterprise has been to provide the
Davenport history and much of the written material.
The editor’s role has been to add additional background material and
statistics, to write about agricultural change and population growth, and to
regularize the organization and arrangement of earlier material.
He has also followed up a few new leads (such as the mystery of how
Davenport lost Southside Oneonta), helped check facts and references, and
contributed new sections relating Davenport to events in the world at large.
It has been a happy and stimulating collaboration.
We
have reviewed two hundred and more years of Davenport’s past with two hopes.
One is that our story will not only be interesting to our readers but
will also provide them with a renewed appreciation for the struggles and
accomplishments of their Davenport forbears.
From the pre-colonial wilderness and a multitude of strangers emerged a
community of hardy and mutually supporting men, women and children.
Families have come and gone, have risen, fallen and struggled through the
changing times. But Davenport
inhabitants remain resilient and self-sufficient.
The beauty and serenity of the hills and streams are eternal.
They continue to give support and pleasure to those who are here today.
The second hope is that
the story of the past will help us to approach the future.
But will it? Can we do much
more than our predecessors have done, taking each challenge as it comes along
and doing our best to overcome adversity and to strive for a somehow better
future life? Will we simply enjoy
our hills and homes and neighbors when times are good and then move on, as so
many of us did in the past, when attractions elsewhere prove stronger?
Will we allow more of our town to be absorbed into Oneonta, as Southside
Oneonta was sometime earlier between 1822 and 1837? This thought reflects the
fact that many “west-enders” already receive their mail at an Oneonta
address and most “Southside” Davenport businesses already list their
addresses as “Oneonta.” (The
Daily Star, Oneonta, of May 30, 2003, shows Frazier’s Garden Center at Old
Southside Drive, Oneonta, while The Country Crock will be found at “Rte 23,
Pindars Corners, Oneonta.”)
Or
can we see other possibilities? And
whatever we collectively chose, can we make the decisions today and tomorrow
that will improve our, and our neighbors’, prospects for a happier future?
What of Davenport’s future? So, where does Davenport go from here? First of all, few attempts to predict the future are successful. Would a returning veteran from World War II, even with a great exercise of imagination, have been able to envision the Davenport of fifty years later? He or she might have foreseen the dim outlines, but even that would have taken extraordinary foresight. True, the challenges to agriculture as then practiced were already in the air, but the growth and expansion southward of Oneonta were still over the horizon. Who could have imagined the changes that would eventually occur in the western part of town adjoining the sleepy “City of the Hills”? And who would have wanted to contemplate the economic and commercial decline still to come in Davenport’s several hamlets and many farms?
Some important qualities, as pointed out in Chapter 15, will remain constant. The quiet beauty of the town’s environs will always be there as long as it is protected from human degradation. Also enduring are the small town friendliness and willingness to pitch in with help for a neighbor. Other developments will bend to the winds and pressures of external, and perhaps some internal, events.
Climate change. The thought of longer-run climate change and global warming is still resisted by some, but the fact is all but certain. Two International Monetary Fund authors began a 2002 article on “Adapting to Climate Change” with words with which almost all scientists will agree:
After decades of debate, global warming is now recognized as inevitable, with its impact likely to be felt for centuries to come. Even the most conservative forecasts suggest that the earth’s climate is already warming at a pace that is without precedent over the last ten thousand years. (Peter S. Heller and Muthukumara Mani, “Adapting to Climate Change,” Finance and Development, March 2003, p. 29.)
Today one can argue with whether this warming is a long-term natural phenomenon about which little can be done or whether it is at least partially man-made and hence partly reversible within another 50-100 years. In either case, the question is what will be the impact of inevitable climate changes on Davenport?
Here, there seems to be both good news and some bad news. New agricultural possibilities could conceivably open up. “Predictions based on these [global warming] trends suggest that our average temperatures will increase by six degrees in the Catskills and will become similar to…Virginia by the end of this century.”[1] Virginia’s growing season in Davenport could help revive the town’s use of its rich bottomlands along the Charlotte River and Middle Brook. The lowering of energy costs for heating would help the bottom line of Davenport’s nursery and landscape businesses. The difficulties will be that other areas within New York and elsewhere will be seeing the same changes. Davenport must consider, therefore, whether it could try to encourage specific policies to improve the competitiveness of local farmers and growers. There is also likely to be, at least globally, more frequent and intense instances “of extreme weather—such as heavy and variable precipitation, heat waves, coastal storm surges, cyclones, and flooding.”[2]
Davenport for a while may benefit from one further effect of climate warming. Its attractiveness as a rural retreat may increase, either seasonally or permanently, to those living in warmer urban areas to the south and east. This could support the greater population growth foreseen in the next section, or at least encourage increased summertime congestion on the town’s roads and highways.
One
likely change will be altogether negative.
This will be the decline and gradual fading away of the area’s maple
trees, the successors of which will follow cooler climes northward.
What the Dutch scientists in Java (and plant geneticists elsewhere)
failed to accomplish at the end of the 1800s (see Chapter 6) will happen through
global warming, namely the end of Davenport’s maple sugar and syrup
production.
Future
population growth. The resident
population of the U.S. is likely to grow by 122 million persons, two-fifths of
the 2000 total, by the year 2050.[3]
Davenport’s population has doubled in the last forty years, but what
does the future hold? Many believe
(hope? worry?) that growth will continue. One
strong indication of the local belief in the continuation of recent trends is
the large number of potential but undeveloped house lots in town, both owned by
residents but even more by outsiders. In
2003 there were 774 vacant or undeveloped land parcels in Davenport.[4]
A whopping seventy-two percent were owned by persons or real estate firms
from outside of Davenport. The
total number of these 774 lots awaiting buildings can be compared with slightly
over 1127 parcels already built upon.
Much
land, too, in 2003 remained to be subdivided for possible development.
The clear implication was that local landowners and real-estate
developers, at least, anticipated a considerable further increase in Davenport’s
population.
The
bottom line seems to be that Davenport’s population will continue to grow,
although perhaps more slowly than some real estate investors might wish.
Oneonta, whose spillover has been the source of much but not all of
Davenport’s recent growth, is in something of a transition phase.
(This section was benefited greatly from communications with Jeff House
of the Downtown Oneonta Improvement Task Force and with Professor Barry Warren
of SUNY-Oneonta. The conclusions
drawn, however, are the Editor’s own.) The
city has prospered as a mid-size regional market center since the arrival of
Interstate-88. Its colleges
and medical services complement its mix of commerce and light manufacturing, but
these professional and educational services are not likely to expand much in the
near future. On the other hand,
their existence helps create a true “college town” attraction to artists,
independent craftsmen, self-employed Internet-linked professionals, and retirees
throughout the surrounding areas. The
successful theater and musical companies within the area and a prospective “Foothills
Performing Arts Center” on Market Street must further add to Oneonta’s
attractiveness.
The
“transition phase” of Oneonta comes from its ongoing adjustment process to
the large, national chain stores attracted to the city’s Southside.
These stores help develop and exploit the regional market, but they also
provide a challenge to existing retailers.
Those who survive will do so by attracting spillover customers from the
so-called “big box” stores or by creating specialized, “niche” markets
of their own. Specialized markets
increase with a rise in regional purchasing power, especially among artists,
craftsmen, and more affluent retirees and vacationers—the very groups that
find a college town environment most congenial.
The
other element in Davenport’s future growth will come from its continuing
attraction to vacationers and retirees. Until
recently, the Northern Catskills have remained largely “undiscovered” by
downstate residents and city dwellers from neighboring states.
That may be changing. In the
short term the region’s appeal may be encouraged by the fear of terrorism and
the decline in international travel that has arisen since the “9/11”
disaster and the more recent United States and British occupation of Iraq.
Other
rural changes. Current
developments in the United States as a whole could be increasingly a part of
Davenport’s future. The first is
a general deterioration of rural life, especially in the poorest counties of the
west and mid-west. This
seldom-discussed phenomenon was reviewed in a lengthy New
York Times survey of December 2002.
Around the country, rural ghettos are unraveling in the same way that inner cities did in the 1960s and 70s, according to officials and experts who have tried to make sense of a generation-old downward spiral in the countryside. In this view, decades of economic decline have produced a culture of dependency, with empty counties hooked on farm subsidies just as welfare mothers seem to be tied to their welfare checks. And just as in the cities, the hollowed-out economy has led to a frightening rise in crime and drug abuse. (Timothy Egan, “Pastoral Poverty: The Seeds of Decline,” New York Times, December 8, 2002, Section 4, p. 1)
Hints
of rural malaise have been felt in Davenport, but the town’s inhabitants
depend little these days on farm subsidies (social welfare is another matter).
Nationally, rural areas that continue to prosper are, according to the Time’s
Timothy Egan, “at urban edges, or they are places with sublime scenery or an
energetic college.” Davenport’s
relationship with Oneonta, the continuing health of Oneonta’s colleges, and
the protection of the area’s “sublime scenery” may turn out to be
important.
A
widespread social issue, however, arises in “sublime scenery” locations.
This is the conflict between more recent arrivals who want nothing to change and
older residents who must make their living from their properties and for whom
change, as recounted endlessly in the previous chapters, is inevitable.
This is already a familiar conflict within Davenport as it is throughout
the Catskills. In the nearby
Adirondacks it arises in particular over continued logging and has been labeled
a clash between the “forever wild-ers” and the “anti-forever wild-ers.”
The
duty of town assessors to value property at its “highest and best” use may
exacerbate the conflict by accelerating change towards wealthier vacationers,
retirees and suburbanite owners. Davenport’s
major property revaluation of 2003 raised overall assessments by only
twenty-three percent. For those,
largely nonresident, owners of undeveloped land, in sharp contrast, valuations
rose by eighty-three percent. This
could well increase the pressure on some owners to sell, perhaps even driving
down or at least stabilizing land prices. The
end result is likely to be a further influx into Davenport of those who wish to
enjoy the land rather than to use it for making a living.[5]
Will
planning help? Consider the
many events that have helped or hurt Davenport over the past two hundred years—chiefly
external forces such as wars, depressions, new technologies, government
policies, and competition from other regions.
Current examples of such external events have been acid rain from the
coal-burning states to the west and, in the future, climate change and global
warming. There may be one or two
steps that would make Davenport farmers (present and future) better able to
exploit new opportunities and make the town itself more attractive to current
residents and to future visitors, vacationers and retirees.
But mostly it will be a case of insuring the best possible education for
the next generation, hoping that they, like many of their forefathers, will be
able to successfully adapt to future developments.
As
to future farming success, the best advice may be that of dairy farmer and farm
advisor, Paul Cerosaletti. (See
sidebar.) Adapt.
Become better at business. Pay
attention to details. Improve
efficiency
There
may be a better chance to control Davenport’s future as shaped by population
growth and by the clash between preservation and development.
Think about a future town with half again as many inhabitants as in 2000,
say 1500 households rather than 1000. Will
these additional 500 or more dwellings extend further down Route 23 into
Davenport Center and even Davenport village?
Will these roadside dwellings be in neighborhood clusters or spread out,
as “urban sprawl,” along endless miles of highway?
Will the wooded hilltops be dotted with clearings and vacation homes?
What will alternative settlement patterns mean for town services, for
health and safety, for a sense of community, for attractive open spaces, for
agriculture, for all the qualities that currently make the town such a desirable
place in which to live?
An
attempt in the late 1970s and early 1980s was made to regulate Davenport land
use in the name of more attractive and livable communities.
The undertaking was met with outrage, the overturn of elected officials,
and the dismissal of the town’s planning board.
(See “Davenport’s Land-Regulation History” in the Appendix.)
The prevailing sentiment at the time was “No one is going to tell me
what to do with my farm!” Davenport
remained until recently one of only three towns in Delaware County without even
Subdivision Regulations.
About
the same time, the neighboring Town of Worcester adopted a land use law.
A reviewer of this section, historian Howson Hartley from South
Worcester, commented that the physical condition of Davenport, “invites
continued unattractive ‘sprawl,’ especially along Route 23.”
Hartley, a friend and close observer of Davenport, believes that “a
land use law is and has been badly needed.
The Town of Worcester has had such a law with sensible zoning regulations
for more than 25 years. This has
been a benefit to all and a detriment to none.”
There
are no simple, right or wrong answers to the questions of what future may be
best for Davenport. But if
agreement should be reached that some options are better than others, selected
land-use policies and instruments might help move the town in the preferred
direction.
Can
“Smart Growth” be the answer? There
was once a time when small towns and
suburbs worried about
whether to permit any further growth. The
argument, largely between developers and property owners, was over “growth”
versus “no growth.” Those
favoring no growth invented any number of devices, many involving zoning and
minimum lot size restrictions, to control and limit future land use.
In recent years the argument in many places has shifted. With higher incomes and continuing evidence of environmental and rural degradation, the concerns have moved on to “how and where should new development be accommodated?” One frequent consideration, for instance, is “preserving open space, farmland, natural beauty, and critical environmental areas.” The widely used name for this new movement is “smart growth.”
A
great deal of literature on smart growth is now available.
(See for starters the websites http://www,smartgrowth.org
and www.epa.gov/livability/about_sg.htm.) The
literature covers principles, methods, success stories, and other case studies.
The website of “Smart Growth Online” contains twenty-four pages of
resources under the heading, “Preserve Open Space, Farmland, Natural Beauty,
and Critical Environmental Areas.” A
1997 paper from the Center for Agriculture in the Environment looks “at the
way zoning, impact fees and other growth management options affect the rate of
agricultural land conversion and land values.”[6]
A few, though by no means all, of the smart growth “principles” seem
directly applicable to the case of Davenport.
(See sidebar.) Local
governments, in an example from the Environmental Protection Agency, can
encourage a wider approach to planning, involving not only urban areas but also
the surrounding region. Some
government funds are even available to support innovative smart growth
initiatives and experiments.
For
Davenport, there is one long-standing challenge in considering and applying some
of the new approaches. What kind of
consensus is possible in such a diverse, independent, and widely dispersed town?
Can those in fading hamlets, on fast-disappearing farms, and among the
recent arrivals whose new homes spread out along the highways and through the
hills—can these disparate voters reach agreement on a future vision for their
town? Part of the failure of the
1978-82 land regulation effort, it may be presumed, was the communication gap
between the majority of voters and the far fewer number of those who returned
the Planning Board’s questionnaire and who participated in the planning
discussions. Can Davenport in the
future avoid the pitfalls of the past? Can
the creativity and resilient spirit of those who came before us help us to
envision a welcomed future—and to agree on steps to pursue that future?
Davenport
has already experimented—unsatisfactorily—with one earlier effort to
introduce land use controls. In
1978, the Davenport Town Planning Board (Herbert More, Chairman), surveyed all
residents and landowners. Already,
although farms were declining, the town’s population had climbed back near its
earlier peak and, as noted in Chapter 15, land parcels had more than doubled and
out-of-town ownership had increased.
Many
although not all of the opinions revealed by the 1978 survey would be echoed
twenty-five years later:
(From Davenport Town Planning
Board, In Cooperation with Town Planning Advisory Service, Delaware County
Planning Board, “Summary Analysis of the Davenport Questionnaire,” April
1978.)
The
1978 survey was followed by four years of further inquiries, discussions, and
proposal writing. A new Zoning
Commission was created for Davenport and public meetings were held.
The Planning Board studied “ownership patterns, land use changes,
subdivision trends, population, economic data, etc.”
Finally a Proposed Rural Development Code emerged, each section having
been subject to “many hours of debating and compromising” by the Board.
The Board believed that “if adopted, the Code will be in the best
interests of all citizens and landowners in the Town of Davenport.”[7]
The
Summary of the proposed Code argued for town control over new development in the
absence of existing legislation. At
the time only limited local oversight was being exercised by the New York State
Health Department and Department of Environmental Control (DEC).
Sections of the tentative Code included land use codification,
subdivision regulations, site plan review, natural resource regulation, and
water supply, sewage and waste disposal standards.
The new
Code proposed dividing the town into four Land Use Districts: Hamlet, Highway
Residential, Rural Agriculture, and Highway Business.
Each District was to be governed by one or more land use schedules.
Under Highway Residential use, for example, a review would be required
for all dwellings built on slopes of more that 15%.
Building height would be limited to 28 feet, lot frontage to a minimum of
200 feet, and lot size to a minimum of one acre.
All structures would require minimum setbacks from the highway center or
right of way (75 feet or 50 feet, respectively, for all but the several hamlets)
and from side and rear lot lines.[8]
Even
before public hearings on the proposal, scheduled for June 14 and 17, 1982, a
newly formed “Citizens Committee for just [uncapitalized in the original]
Government” had issued a call to arms. (See
sidebar.) Individual liberties were
being threatened on all sides. Unacceptable
restrictions were to be placed on your farm, on your business, and on
having a “2-family dwelling on your hill.”
Later, the “Concerned Citizens of Davenport” organized to oppose the
new regulations.
With
the advantage of hindsight and the passage of time, many participants in the
ensuing conflict would agree that the code was too much, too soon.
It directly challenged the area’s long tradition of independence and
conservatism. There was a
widespread feeling that the plan owed too much to outside advisors.
The fear of being told what to do “on my farm” was a frequent
concern. Even the comprehensiveness
and the sheer massiveness of the proposal document (eighty-five pages long)
raised alarm bells and antagonized readers.
What was being hidden amidst all those words and formal language?
“Read the Fine Print.” Too
much, indeed.
Davenport’s
public hearing on the proposal drew an unusually large audience—perhaps
200-300—to the gymnasium of the CVCS.
Questions, comments and complaints abounded, but that first meeting was
orderly and generally well mannered. (Compare
with the Great Transfer Station Debate touched upon in the Chapter 15.)
One leader of the opposition, Ray Christensen, was however so incensed at
being “ignored” by the town elders and the Planning Board that he vowed to
run for Supervisor himself on an Anti-Planning platform.
(Ray had previously been instrumental in organizing and successfully
leading the town, along with Charles Cerosaletti, in the Great Dam Fight,
detailed in Chapter 12. Cerosaletti
was also active in the new Concerned Citizens group.)
The
next year Christensen did run, and he did win.
(Two-year incumbent Supervisor Kurt M. Gunther chose not to seek
reelection.) Four of the five
Planning Board members were defeated in the same election, to be replaced, in
effect, by a new “community service board.”
Land use planning and zoning regulations in Davenport were now dead—at
least for the next quarter century.[9]
Meanwhile Raymond L. Christensen continued to be reelected, serving as
Town Supervisor for the next fourteen years, until 1998.
The
physical shape of Davenport at the beginning of the new millennium was in part a
direct result of the free market in land and the absence of most land use
regulations and planning. Observers
in the early 2000s can form their own judgements about whether the absence of
tighter standards was good or bad. Most
can certainly agree that recent growth has not been all bad.
The relative prosperity of new homeowners in the west end of town has
made that section more attractive to the passerby than the older, declining
hamlets. The old mobile home
numbers of the 1970s are sharply reduced. The
homes are either now mostly confined to unobtrusive parks, are long abandoned
and crumbled into rubble, or have been supplanted by the newer, larger and more
attractive “manufactured homes.” Although
the town’s open space has diminished, at least after 25 years the “unsightly
brush” in old fields has been replaced by trees.
The
earlier opponents of planning would agree, too, that all land controls are not
necessarily bad. Ray Christensen,
in an interview of October 2001, said he was certainly not against all planning.
He approved of New York State’s recreation subdivision law, of minimum
5-acre rural lot standards, and of required percolation tests.
He advocated incremental planning on “a case-by-case basis,” giving
as an example the anti-dumping law instituted while he was supervisor.
One further indication of Davenport’s willingness to directly confront
growth and change has been the reconstitution of a Town Planning Board and the
approval in 2003 of town Subdivision Regulations.[10]