Paul Szmal: Good morning, it's 816. It's FLX Morning Monday and we're Zooming with Keri Lippincott at Historic Geneva. The website is HistoricGeneva.org. Good morning.
Kerry Lippincott: Good morning, good morning.
Paul Szmal: Last time we talked it was Ave Botter with you for the preview of Civil War Day at Rose Hill Mansion. So how'd it go?
Kerry Lippincott: It went okay. We had very good weather. Not as large a crowd as we anticipated, but everyone thoroughly enjoyed themselves. So that's in the end, that's what matters.
Paul Szmal: We're going to talk about something that's kind of related to that in our conversation today, but let's start with a Glenwood Cemetery tour. This is coming up this Sunday at 2 p.m.
Kerry Lippincott: Yes, so you can join our archivist Becky Chapin for a tour of burials at Glenwood. We're asking that participants meet us in Section 21 near the Paltney and Glenwood area of the cemetery. The tour is about an hour and it's $5 a person.
Paul Szmal: Is there a directory somewhere of which notable people are buried in which Geneva cemeteries?
Kerry Lippincott: That is a very good question. There is, I know for Washington Street Cemetery, there is a book was written a few years ago.
Paul Szmal: Oh yeah.
Kerry Lippincott: If you go to the cemetery, they used to have on the little library a directory of notable people. So I know definitely Washington Street Glenwood. I don't think so. You pretty much, hmm, we've got a couple of blog articles on our website that discuss several of the people buried at Glenwood, but there's not a guide for Glenwood.
Paul Szmal: This is a $5 per person. It's this Sunday at 2 p.m. at Glenwood Cemetery. Again, meet at Section 21 near the Paltney and Glenwood area. And our next History Happy Hour, you got to do this one if you're in Geneva. Boats and boating on Seneca Lake, October 17th at Lake Drum.
Kerry Lippincott: Yes, so you can join curator John Marks for a captioned slideshow that's going to feature information about canal boats and steamboats and then also talking about Fayette and Bowen. And the interesting thing with boats on Seneca Lake is I think in the 18th century primarily they were for transportation, so transporting people and goods with the canal. You could really go anywhere, goods could go anywhere in the world with the Cayuga-Seneca Canal that connects to the Erie Canal, so that could send you west towards New York City. And then the Chemung Canal connected up in Watkins Glen and that could take you south. And then steamboats primarily was a good source of transportation. And then in the 20th century you get the changing to more of recreation, sailing, boating, that sort of thing.
Paul Szmal: I knew all about the Erie Canal even before I came to New York. I didn't know about the Chemung Canal and that whole southern system, so you could go either toward Binghamton and the Susquehanna or toward the Atlantic and New York City. So it was really, we were perfectly located to be a hub of commerce back in those days.
Kerry Lippincott: Oh my goodness, yes, very lucky, very lucky.
Paul Szmal: So once again if you haven't heard about the History Happy Hour, it's a continuous loop slideshow. It's at Lake Drum from 430 to 630. It usually runs about 30 minutes or so, the loop.
Kerry Lippincott: Yeah, and then you can come. What, John, is funny is some folks they come and they're staying and then if you can't make any of the History Happy Hours, John usually converts those to a video. So you got to wait about maybe two or three weeks before he converts those to videos. I know our lacrosse one was very popular. That is now a video up on our website. So if you can't make it, just you can keep an eye on our website and social media accounts for the video.
Paul Szmal: Yeah, and try to make it to Lake Drum because that's always great to go no matter what's happening.
Kerry Lippincott: October 19th, we have a bird walk. I didn't really think about this at Rose Hill Mansion, and it's early when a lot of the birds are active from 730 to 9 in the morning.
Paul Szmal: Yeah, so we tried, we did a bird walk in the spring and now we're doing in the fall. I'm not a birder, so I'm told that there's different birds spring versus the fall. So it starts at 730 in the morning and it's being led by Stephen Kess, who's the founder of the National Audubon Society's Project Puffin, and he's a visiting fellow at Cornell.
Kerry Lippincott: Wow.
Paul Szmal: So yeah, so tickets are $10 a person. Advanced registration is required and space is limited, and you can go right to our website to purchase tickets. So you can learn all about the area bird species, the habitats, and behaviors. And I'm told the spring one was very interesting, so I'm sure that the fall one will be just as much fun.
Kerry Lippincott: Oh man, that's got to be one of the greatest jobs. The Cornell Lab of Ornithology is located in Sapsucker Woods, just north of Ithaca, and that's got to be a lot of fun working in Sapsucker Woods all the time.
Paul Szmal: Now, we talked about the Civil War day, and the premise of it, for people who might have missed it, was that the Union Army had taken over for a day. Rose Hill became a Virginia plantation, and so it ties in. We've talked about mourning and death and the way it was handled back at that time. So now you have a mourning Otis specialty tour at Rose Hill. It's October 19th and 26th from 5 to 7, just talking about the the very elaborate rituals that especially the well-to-do people had around death in the 1800s.
Kerry Lippincott: Yeah, so we're using the Swan family to talk about death and mourning, especially in the mid-1800s. So we do have, the mansion is dressed for mourning, so we do have in the parlor, we've got a small casket, we've got all of our windows are draped in black. So by going on this tour, we're going to talk a little a little bit about the causes of death, but then all these various rituals and practices that families like the Swans would have done for the funeral and the burial and then even afterwards, because there were all, I don't want to say strict rules, but there were more rituals about how you dressed and how long you mourned and what certain activities you could do and things. So that's what we're going to talk about. So we've got tours at 5 and at 7 on the 19th and 26th, so the tours will last about an hour and then we are offering refreshments after the tour and one of the things we'll be serving are funeral biscuits and these are basically cookies that were served after a funeral.
Paul Szmal: Oh wow, I hadn't heard about that part.
Kerry Lippincott: And then related to this is the Good Death Victorian mourning practices, that's on October 20th at 2 p.m. and of course one of the things that drove some of this was, you know, back in those days a lot of women lost children either during childbirth or shortly thereafter, and there were more diseases, so it was more common for people to die either as a child or die young than what we see today.
Paul Szmal: Yeah, I would say definitely death was part of everyday life. So you had a high infant mortality rate, you had diseases, you just had everyday life, it was just much more dangerous and I think to cope with all of this or to come to an understanding, people developed this concept of a good death and a good death was you were buried at home surrounded by your family and everybody would be united in heaven. That was the thought, it was one big family reunion once you passed away. So death was basically a rite of passage and you had not only mourning rituals but you had different ways of how people would honor and remember the dead. So you had memorial prints, you had post-mortem photography, mourning stationery, so the tour basically talks about the Swan family but the good death we're going to more in general about various things that people in the mid-1800s did to cope with death.
Kerry Lippincott: And then another cemetery tour, this one is St. Patrick's Cemetery, October 27th at 2 p.m. That cemetery is associated with St. Francis of Sales Roman Catholic Church and of course that ties in with the Italian and Irish communities in Geneva.
Paul Szmal: Yeah, so the cemetery itself was founded in the early 1840s and the interesting thing is St. Francis of Sales Church and the cemetery were on the outskirts of Geneva because the Irish as Roman Catholics weren't really welcome in the village. So for the maybe the good maybe 30-40 years of the cemetery's history, you had a lot of Irish starting in the turn of the 20th century, you get a lot of Italians there. So John Marks will be leading the tour at St. Patrick's on the 27th and again it'll last about an hour and tickets are $5 a person.
Kerry Lippincott: And then finally we have Every Building Tells a Story. It's the story of the Cornell Agritech campus. That's October 29th, 7 p.m. to 9 p.m. Gives a little flavor of that one.
Paul Szmal: Yeah, so this is a, we've done this, gosh this must be the third one, so we'd like to say Every Building Tells a Story but with Cornell Agritech it's Every Site Tells a Story. So it was once part of an 18th century Haudenosaunee settlement and then a 19th century farm and today Cornell Agritech has become a center for food and agriculture research, innovation, and development. So our curator John Marks is going to give a talk about the history of the site itself. We'll have representatives from the Friends of Parrott Hall to talk about the status of the building. And then the director of Cornell Agritech, Chris Smart, is going to talk about Agritech's current activities. And we're gonna, desserts will be served. This event is open to the public and there is a suggested donation of $25 which will benefit Historic Geneva.
Kerry Lippincott: All right, go to the website HistoricGeneva.org. Check out all the online exhibits and the digital collection that's there and also the event calendar with all the things that we talked about today and a whole bunch more.
Paul Szmal: Carrie, thanks as always. Good stuff.
Kerry Lippincott: Oh, you're welcome, you're welcome. Thank you.
