TOWN TOOK DISASTER IN GOOD SPIRITS

The Glenn H. Curtiss Museum of Local History in Hammondsport (N.Y.), located in the old stone schoolhouse where I first tackled addition, subtraction and penmanship, now has members, dues and a publication, The Curtiss Flyleaf, with articles (this time about Curtiss’ daring Albany-to-New York flight in 1909) and a calendar of events.

I learn from the current calendar that a photographic exhibit on “1935: The Year of the Flood” opens July 1. I am stunned and subdued to realize that that thrilling adventure in a boy’s life took place a half-century ago. It is an intimation of antiquity, like discovering that your sons have gray hairs of their own.

It seemed to me in later years that the flood could have been the basis of a funny movie, despite a similarity in plot to Alexander Mackendrick’s “Tight Little Island.”

On the weekend of July 6 and 7, 1935, a long drought broke and all day Saturday it bucketed with rain. Keuka Lake rose and turned muddy from the runoff from the hills. The rain stopped for a while during the day Sunday, yielding to sweltering heat (so I’ve read in later accounts); then a new cloudburst hit that night and it poured for six hours, with thunder and lightning.

Hammondsport Glen, one of the many beautiful ravines in the Finger Lakes, with descending waterfalls and mossy shale rocks ideal for sliding into shallow pools, was customarily a tranquil stream at the west edge of the village. It turned left at the top of Church Street and then emptied into the lake. Sunday night it suddenly stopped making the left turn. The flood waters tore out the stone retaining wall and fanned across the down-sloping town, with the main torrent seemingly aimed at our house, at the foot of Church Street.

Toward midnight, my older cousin, Tony Doherty, came by in the eerie, rain-soaked darkness and carried my brother and me piggyback to the higher, safer house next door. The water was creeping onto our front porch, and urgent adult voices were shouting against the noise that the house was a goner.

But later a good-sized tree, swept down from the glen, wedged between two maples in front of the house and the rocks and silt built up behind it, diverting the waters onto the dirt lane called Orchard Street beside our house. In the morning, Orchard was washed out deeper than a man’s head. There were six feet and more of rocks and mud over most of Hammondsport.

And in amidst the debris were the barrels. The Georges Roulet Winery, which I think went under during Prohibition, had a warehouse in the glen, crammed with barrels of aging brandy. A few other barrels were full of pumice, the leavings of grape pressing, good for fertilizer or abrasives. The raging creek carried the barrels all over town.

We had eight barrels in our yard, and one of them, as my mother remarked in some amusement, looked as if we’d tried desperately to push it under our side porch.

The scenario for the next several days was of local gents wandering around town with a brace and bit, a length of rubber tubing and as many gallon jugs as they could handle. There were stories, probably apocryphal--like one about some men from Penn Yan at the far end of the lake, who drove their boat to Hammondsport, wrestled a barrel aboard (no easy chore) and made a triumphant slow return up the lake to Penn Yan, only to find they’d got a barrel of pumice.

Although the flood caused several deaths elsewhere in the county and the region, there were none at Hammondsport. But the damage was heavy. The local B&H; Railroad was wiped out for the next few years, bridges and houses were destroyed and it took the rest of the summer and beyond to bulldoze the village free of the outwash. It’s a part of the country where every house has a cellar, and most of them, like ours, were filled to the beams with a slimy, soupy muck that smelled worse with every hot and passing day.

State troopers came in to try to protect the barrels, the brandy being untaxed and therefore illicit, I suppose. There wasn’t a lot else worth looting and I don’t remember that anybody tried. But the barrels made the next few days very eventful indeed.

Life for part of the population, at least, was a blend of “I Spy,” cat and mouse (I won’t say cops and robbers) involving the barrel-tappers and the troopers, contests of hide-and-seek in which the brandy was sought and then hidden. The apocrypha included wonderful tales of barrels camouflaged and of merry pursuits across the rubble.

The vision of streets and yards strewn with barrels of brandy (the official count was 500 barrels, for a population of only 1,200) was, naturally, the stuff of instant legend. And then, or subsequently, I acquired the impression that the brandy was seen as a sort of cosmic consolation prize for all the havoc and dislocation; it was Nature’s way of apologizing for letting things get out of hand rain-wise.

The word miraculous was heard frequently that July, in fact, as in the lack of fatalities and in specific matters like the tree that diverted the rushing flood from our house.

Father Patrick J. Kelly of St. Gabriel’s, whose church and rectory stood just below the creek and were devastated by the torrent, became another chapter in the town legend. He had paced and prayed all night on his rooftop, and was given interdenominational credit for the intercession that delivered Hammondsport from even harsher fates. But the brandy, so far as I know, was regarded as a separate entry.

I understand that there is still some flood brandy, as it was always called, stashed away in Hammondsport cupboards. It was said to be very good, despite the rough voyage, and I hope someone will mark the anniversary with a sip or two, concluding that it has improved with age, which is everyone’s wistful dream.