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Our Women Have Made Us Famous
No one person or small group of people can lift a new national park off the ground. Spurred on by the new Women’s Hall of Fame, the 1976 bicentennial celebrations, the preservation surveys sponsored by Cornell University, the decision by the owners of Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s home to list it for sale, and the new state Urban Cultural Park, citizens of Seneca Falls were actively embracing their history and coalescing around preserving it by the time the National Park Service arrived in 1978.
The various projects became like tributaries running into a base of community pride for Seneca Falls and its heritage. The Women’s Hall of Fame, the earliest local effort, created renewed interest in women of achievement. The Elizabeth Cady Stanton Foundation came into existence to raise the funds to purchase Stanton’s house. The state’s new Urban Cultural Park program had a mission of economic development in addition to preserving historical sites and promoting recreation. Each of these projects had attracted a core group of local people. Their work created a network of individuals dedicated to recognizing and celebrating the history of Seneca Falls.
The network meant that when Shary Berg and I first came to Seneca Falls there could be a warm welcome to the National Park Service. It was thrilling news to the groups that the Park Service was recognizing the story of the women’s rights convention in Seneca Falls as nationally significant, that the structures associated with this story were nationally significant, and that Seneca Falls was nationally significant. This message was an unanticipated and welcome boost to their community pride and expanded their dreams exponentially.
In 1968 Shirley Hartley had led a group of women, many with ties to the newly opened Eisenhower College, in creating the Women’s Hall of Fame. Her efforts inspired a gathering of twenty-five for a Founders’ Tea in 1968. The group agreed that it would induct into the Hall, after a rigorous nomination and selection process, American women of distinguished achievement in the arts, sciences, or social activity. Their first ceremony was in 1973. Twenty women were inducted, including Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. A decade into the Hall’s existence, President Becky Holden, along with Marilyn Bero, Joe Doyle, and George Souhan, headed a campaign to raise the funds to purchase a former bank building on Fall Street, in the heart of downtown, as the first permanent home for the Hall. After a successful fund-raising effort, the group purchased the bank building, which included an imposing walk-in vault on the first floor. On July 19, 1979, during the Convention Days weekend, the new museum opened on the first floor, with its offices on the second floor. The exhibits featured the accomplishments of the women who had been inducted into the Hall.
In 1976 Cornell University professor of architecture Stuart Stein began a new course focused on preservation of historic architecture in the smaller communities that surrounded Ithaca, New York. A group of his students chose to focus on Seneca Falls and began working with Anne Ackerson, the director of the Seneca Falls Historical Society, to complete “blue form surveys” of structures. They were not focused on women’s history but were assessing and recording the historic mansions remaining in the village; Seneca Falls had a stellar collection of grand houses in close proximity to downtown. The following year, Tania Werbizky became the leader of the student survey team working in Seneca Falls. Tania was excited by the emerging focus on historic preservation and also was well connected with the state historic preservation officials in Albany. She and Anne Ackerson organized small meetings in living rooms around the community encouraging residents to preserve their history.
Anne Ackerson had come to Seneca Falls to study art history at Eisenhower College. After graduating she was hired by the Seneca Falls Historical Society as its first professional director. Much of the historical society’s energy went to maintaining a historic house museum that it had operated since 1961. The museum tended a collection of artifacts from Seneca Falls and told the story of how an affluent family lived in late nineteenth-century America.
Tania worked with Ackerson’s successor, Ann Hermann, to produce Lost and Found: Nineteenth Century Architecture in Seneca Falls, which was published in 1981 with funding from the New York State Council on the Arts. Based on survey information, it included extensive descriptions of selected homes, as well as photographs. Enlarged prints of the photographs were installed as an exhibit in the Women’s Hall of Fame.
This early work laid the foundation for a critically important project completed by Hanns Kuttner in conjunction with the newly formed Elizabeth Cady Stanton Foundation. Hanns connected with Tania through Anne Ackerson. Tania advised Hanns that if the Stanton Foundation wanted to raise funds to preserve the Wesleyan Chapel in addition to the Stanton house, they needed to get the chapel listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
The National Historic Preservation Act of 1966 created the register as a way to accumulate a list of places in America worthy of preservation. The law made the National Register a project administered by the Department of the Interior and allowed Congress to provide funds to help those who wanted to preserve register-listed places. It did not authorize the federal government to acquire these places. The Stanton Foundation started the process to prepare a nomination that met the standards set by the National Register, a program within the National Park Service and separate from the programs for operating national parks. When the issue arose in a meeting of the Stanton Foundation, Hanns Kuttner raised his hand and volunteered to complete the application. Having put up his hand, he was charged with writing the nomination. Hanns was fifteen years old.
Tania suggested that Hanns follow a creative new approach: the first-ever “theme district,” of noncontiguous sites in Waterloo and Seneca Falls. Individual structures and sites could be nominated to the National Register, as could historic districts. Delineating districts had involved identifying a coherent collection of structures. Here the nomination argued that the geographically dispersed structures in the district together told the story of an effort to bring about social change. The register listing took the name “Women’s Rights Historic Sites Thematic Resources.” This critical step would foreshadow the efforts to merge the sites in Seneca Falls and Waterloo into the National Park Service as the first “idea park,” with the story being recognized as nationally significant even if the historic structures were not found to meet Park Service standards. The significance of the idea of the 1848 convention overrode the concerns regarding the structures.
Anne Ackerson and Hanns worked to write the application for the noncontiguous historic district that would include the Wesleyan Chapel as well as the homes of Stanton, Hunt, and M’Clintock. Hanns was not discouraged by the condition of the buildings. He could imagine a brighter future. He and his family had journeyed to Williamsburg, Virginia, for the bicentennial. There he viewed many before-and-after pictures of the structures and toured the completed development. He absorbed the perspective that history can be re-created.
His prose was so persuasive that the request was approved, first at the state level by an advisory committee that met periodically in Albany to review nominations. In time, the state historic preservation officer of New York sent the nomination forward to the Keeper of the Register at the Department of the Interior. Hanns’s vision and work accomplished the improbable: the National Park Service officially designated all the historic sites in Seneca Falls and Waterloo connected to the 1848 convention as nationally significant, including even the Wesleyan Chapel, also known as the village laundromat.
In the summer of 1976, New York State outfitted a barge with exhibits on state history and sent it on a tour through the Erie Canal and its byways as a bicentennial observance. The barge spent several days of its tour tied up canal-side in Seneca Falls. Augie Sinicropi visited and was struck by the absence of any mention of Seneca Falls or the 1848 convention for women’s rights. Augie had grown up in Seneca Falls, left for eight years of study at Ohio State University, and then was drafted into the army. He returned to Seneca Falls in 1973 as an eye doctor, serving his patients from a storefront along the main shopping street. With fresh eyes and a new perspective, Augie observed that, among his many cousins, the girls were not encouraged to go to college, but the boys were. He noticed that the special sites related to women’s rights had no protection and little recognition. Augie created and started up a program to improve the downtown, spearheaded by a revitalization committee that he organized.
Augie’s plan began with the three retail blocks of Fall Street: repairing the sidewalks and curbs, improving parking, removing parking meters, and planting trees along the sidewalks. It also included removing the high-mast highway streetlights on the main street and replacing them with more welcoming pedestrian-scale vintage-style streetlights. Augie was aware that large new shopping malls were planned both to the east in Auburn and to the west toward Rochester, and he wanted the Seneca Falls shopping district to continue being a gathering point for the community and as well a viable shopping attraction. Augie worked with the Chamber of Commerce as his sponsor; this strategy of initially focusing on economic development inspired the support of the business community. And his first projects appealed to the whole community. Who could object to better sidewalks and free parking? The very first planner for Seneca County, Kay B. Stevens, a recent Cornell graduate, secured a $300,000 community development block grant from the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development to fund phase one of the improvement program.
In June of 1978 Augie traveled to Canandaigua, New York, for a conference on the future of the Finger Lakes, and first heard about a new state program for community revitalization, the Urban Cultural Park program, or UCP. The New York State Office of Parks and Recreation would be tasked with turning the idea of revitalization through heritage into a functioning program. Like the federal government’s National Park Service, the New York Office of Parks and Recreation would be responsible both for state-owned historic sites and a set of recreation- and visitation-focused natural parks. The program primarily provided funding for community planning; it did not fund staff or acquisition or preservation of historic structures.
Augie discovered that Seneca Falls was on the UCP list of communities being considered for designation—but was number thirty-two on a list of thirty-four. In August Augie traveled to Albany with Corinne Guntzel, a board member of the Stanton Foundation, to promote Seneca Falls to the new staff for the UCP. They persuaded the UCP director Charlie Breule and his senior staffer Rad Anderson to visit Seneca Falls, which they did that September. Just one year later, in 1979, Seneca Falls had jumped to number two on the UCP list (Saratoga Springs was number one).
At the November 21, 1979, Seneca Falls Village Board meeting, Bert Fortner and Phil Prigmore were hired to complete the required “Work Program” application for UCP designation. Graduates of the Cornell School of Architecture, Art, and Planning, Bert and Phil had previously developed programs for historic preservation in several towns around New York State including Penn Yan, Wellsville, and Alfred before bringing their talents to Seneca Falls. Their experience and skills as architects, designers, and planners created the bridge from Seneca Falls to the state UCP program.
The UCP program director Charlie Breule requested the application be submitted as a notebook. Always creatively unconventional, Bert and Phil believed not many would read and then share a notebook. They printed their program on newspaper sheets so that they could distribute a large quantity. Practically living next to the printing press at the newspaper offices of the Hornell Evening Tribune, they created a brilliant sixty-four-page document with an astounding number of photographs and descriptions of Seneca Falls and ideas for promoting the community through this new program. It was published for the community and the UCP just two weeks later. On December 13, 1979, the state approved the Work Program with its unconventional format and announced its selection of Seneca Falls as one of its first UCP projects. The immediate benefit was UCP funding for an Early Action Project to create Elizabeth Cady Stanton Park across the street from the Wesleyan Chapel. The diner where Shary Berg and I first ate breakfast was relocated, and that created a visual and pedestrian opening to the new pocket park and the historic canal, and provided a dramatic view of the Seneca Knitting Mill across the canal.
In January 1980 the revitalization committee appealed to the Village Board to create a 450-acre historic district to preserve the historic context of the structures and downtown area. The historic designation would also make the district eligible for state and federal grants to support the UCP project. After a drawn-out and spirited debate, the Village Board approved the 450-acre preservation district in July 1980. Bert and Phil had been advising on issues in Seneca Falls after completing the Work Program and were waiting to be hired as the village planners. Finally, Bert and Phil went to a Village Board meeting in July 1980 to say they were moving on to other communities. Instead, the board hired them on the spot.
Bert and Phil were alike in having jovial personalities. They had a habit of communicating with a vocabulary of quacks: friendly greeting, quiet sympathy, disappointment, joy—all had a distinctive quack. Bert said it began at a youth hostel in Zurich, Switzerland, on New Year’s Day in 1970. He and Phil were sitting around with a collection of fellow travelers, all talking in different languages, but not including English. After a while, without speaking, Bert quacked. Silence. Then all the travelers began communicating in quacks. Bert and Phil never stopped quacking.
In 1975 they began their professional career in a small Ithaca office rented for sixteen dollars a month in Sheldon Court, a Cornell building just off the campus. There were no phones in the building, but there was a pay phone on the sidewalk below. Passersby would answer the pay phone and shout up at the windows to announce a call. As their business expanded, they rented a second room in the same building, increasing their monthly expenditure to thirty-two dollars. When the building required they put a name on the doorbell, they chose “The Whole Duck Catalog,” and the company name was born. By 1978 they had left Collegetown and moved to the penthouse above the Home Dairy, East 141 State Street, overlooking the Ithaca Commons downtown mall. It was a fourth-floor walkup in a building with twelve-foot-high ceilings.
Augie, Bert, and Phil enthusiastically supported the beginning efforts of the National Park Service. Richard Stanton was appointed Park Service regional director in Boston early in 1980. For the new director’s review trip to Seneca Falls, Augie motored his personal boat down to the marina near the Taughannock Falls Inn just north of Ithaca, where Stanton was staying along with Terry’s boss, the associate for planning Charlie Clapper, and me. Augie brought us up Cayuga Lake on a gorgeous spring day, especially pleasing to the regional director, whose passion was kayaking on the waterways around Boston. At the north end of the lake, we moved into the barge canal to arrive in Seneca Falls by water. Opened in 1915, the barge canal replaced multiple locks at Seneca Falls with a pair of locks, one leading into the other, with a total lift of forty-nine feet. Beyond the locks was a lake that had at its bottom the land where much of the industrial activity of Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s time took place.
We arrived at the lower lock chamber, and the enormous metal doors opened to let us through. As water rushed into the lock chamber our boat quickly rose almost twenty-five feet. A second set of enormous doors opened to let us enter the upper lock chamber. More water poured in, and again our small open boat was raised almost twenty-five feet. It was breathtaking and more than a bit scary to me, having invited my two bosses to this adventure. Director Stanton however was loving it and was standing next to Augie, up front at the steering wheel. As more enormous doors opened, the director was looking at Van Cleef Lake and the handsome Trinity Episcopal Church across the lake, and a bit of historic downtown Seneca Falls. Augie was thrilled and proud when the director turned to look at him and said, “Great idea for a park.” The director was then given the grand tour of Seneca Falls and Waterloo.
Augie put on a reception at the end of the day for the Park Service regional director to meet local leaders, with a generous spread of pepperoni and cheese and crackers. That night, at 4 a.m., I was awakened by furious knocking on my door. Charlie Clapper greeted me with the news I needed to take the director to a hospital, as he feared he was having a heart attack. A frantic drive to the Tompkins County Hospital did end with welcome news: Director Stanton would recover from pepperoni heartburn and be able to finish out his visit.
In the spring of 1978 the owners put the Elizabeth Cady Stanton house up for sale. The family had owned the house for twenty-six years. Word got around the community of some seven thousand residents that a developer planned to purchase the house and move it across town to become the office for his new housing development. That developer’s plan failed, possibly in part because of community objections. But under the continued threat of the desecration of the house, a group of residents formed a new committee to buy and preserve the property for its historic significance.
But then, before the committee could raise the $35,000 listing price, Ralph Peters, a teacher who lived across the country in Seattle, drove through Seneca Falls over a weekend, saw the “for sale” sign on the Stanton home, and was horrified the house could be sold for unknown purposes. Peters drove back home to Seattle, and in one phone call to Audie Malone, the real estate listing agent in Seneca Falls, purchased the house. The new Stanton committee phoned Peters and confirmed to their relief that he just wanted the house preserved. Peters and the committee agreed that the Stanton committee would buy the house from him and preserve and protect it.
The local effort to raise the funds to purchase the house had been organized by Lucille Povero, who now led the way to create a new nonprofit organization, the Elizabeth Cady Stanton Foundation, and would become its first president. The foundation was officially formed in January 1979 and began to raise funds. Peters seemed willing to sell the house for the same $35,000 he had paid for it. Hanns Kuttner volunteered to write an application to New York State for funds, and about $15,000 was granted to the new foundation by the Office of Parks and Recreation, home of the UCP program. Additional contributions included a grant for $4,000 from the National Park Service regional office and small donations raised locally. But by the fall of 1980 the Stanton Foundation was still $11,000 short of its $35,000 goal.
Lucille Povero was feisty and determined. Her cousin, Ann Mazzaro, worked in New York City for the actor Alan Alda, then the star of M*A*S*H, one of the most popular situation comedies then offered by network television. Povero contacted Alda through her cousin and invited him to come to Seneca Falls for a fund-raiser. He said he did not do public appearances but asked how much they needed. When told $11,000, he and his wife, Arlene, sent off a check for the exact amount. The Stanton Foundation now had the funds to buy the home.
In 1979 the vision shared by the Stanton Foundation and the National Park Service had been that once the new park was authorized by Congress, the National Park Service would purchase the home from the Stanton Foundation, thereby reimbursing the foundation for the funds it raised. We still shared that dream as Congress and President Jimmy Carter authorized the new park. However, less than a month after the legislation to create the national park was enacted in December 1980, President Ronald Reagan was inaugurated. His new secretary of the interior, James Watt, banned all purchases throughout the National Park Service, effectively blocking completion of the Stanton transaction and destroying our shared vision. Our ladies’ agreement unraveled.
Nancy Dubner was an early outside instigator for preservation in Seneca Falls while serving as the assistant commissioner for the New York State Department of Transportation. One of her early career highlights included working with Eleanor Roosevelt. Nancy had long lived in Rochester, and prior to serving in her transportation post she had been Lieutenant Governor Mary Anne Krupsak’s western New York office director. She therefore had ties to political networks helpful to the efforts in Seneca Falls. During the planning for a replacement of the Ovid Street Bridge over the barge canal, Nancy had cause for frequent visits to Seneca Falls, and it was through her work on the bridge that she met Augie Sinicropi, the local representative for the bridge planning. The two of them worked to persuade her agency to lower the bridge lighting from high-mast highway lights to a height more appropriate for historic downtown Seneca Falls.
Nancy’s experience guiding the incorporation of Eleanor Roosevelt’s home in Hyde Park into the National Park Service made her a valuable counselor in Seneca Falls. She would later lead the campaign to obtain twenty-eight cosponsors for the federal legislation to create the Women’s Rights National Park.
In July 1979 Seneca Falls hosted its first Convention Days, honoring the 1848 women’s convention. The celebration was scheduled on the weekend closest to the 1848 July convention date and would become an annual event. The weekend celebration included a parade, vendors, music, children’s games, ice cream socials, and a five-kilometer run. Crowds flocked to Seneca Falls from the surrounding region. The Stanton Foundation adopted the suggestion of Betsy Shultis to create a play to reenact the 1848 convention. Shultis wrote the script, and Corinne Guntzel portrayed Elizabeth Cady Stanton, a role she reprised in future annual performances and for which she became beloved in the community.
Mary Curry was a stalwart and determined Seneca Falls troubadour. Even before Convention Days began she set up a card table next to the Wesleyan Chapel / Seneca Falls laundromat on the convention’s anniversary and explained to passersby the significance of the building. Mary had served her country during World War II and was determined to create awareness of the history of women’s rights and the 1848 convention in Seneca Falls. She was an equally determined documenter of current history and clipped articles from papers and magazines to create a significant personal archive on women’s history.
Also in 1979, the Regional Conference of Historians organized a women’s history conference in Seneca Falls. A couple of hundred attendees were hoped for, but some four hundred showed up and raised a new energy for Seneca Falls as a place for historians to convene.
The press corps were among the most enthusiastic supporters for the park. They showed up and covered event after event in engaging detail. Their constant reporting on every program, every change, every question, every bump in the road created an army of informed supporters for the cause. Their stories were the engine behind much of the community support of the park.
Doug Auer was the manager for the Seneca Falls radio station WSFW, with Elaine Woodmancy, Greg Cotterill, and Paul Crumlish on his news staff; Howard Van Kirk was owner and editor of the Seneca Falls weekly Reveille paper; Carol Ritter wrote for the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle; Dave Shaw covered for the Syracuse Post-Standard and the Herald-Journal; and Jack Rosenberry (followed later by Marty Toombs and Doris Wolf) wrote for the Finger Lakes Times.
Doug Auer captured the importance of the press in Seneca Falls:
Seneca County was situated in the midst of three media markets: Rochester, Syracuse, and Ithaca. Both the Rochester and Syracuse papers had offices in Seneca County. Not to be outdone, so did the Geneva paper, the Finger Lakes Times, and of course, Seneca Falls had its own weekly, the Reveille. Rochester and Syracuse TV and radio regularly employed stringers in Seneca County. And we had radio in Seneca Falls and later in Waterloo. Seneca Falls and Seneca County had better coverage than they deserved, given a county population of only 33,000. Seneca Falls was a hot hand even before the national park arrived. The Seneca Army Depot was the target of protests for the bombs believed to be stored there. And the Cayuga Indian land claim was casting a chill over land ownership and transfers, and tempers. The media coverage was very competitive: great bunch of reporters, very smart, all good writers, all knew a story when they smelled it and ginned up the coverage. The glue that held it all together—Euchre. Every break in court proceedings or any public meeting being covered was quickly transformed to a game of Euchre. You had to play very very fast, and cheating was the ticket to winning. There was also an annual bonding pilgrimage to the Ovid Courthouse including the after-meeting game of quarters at Dottie’s Place, a bar in Willard where all the walls and the ceiling were decorated with every souvenir she collected in her lifetime. Best White Russians in the world—made in the blender.
George Souhan owned radio station WSFW during this time. He enjoyed hosting a program he called “Chewin’ with Souhan” and interviewed me on the program several times to highlight events in the national park. The station’s Doug Auer was also the driving energy behind a three-year struggle to get a sign on the New York State Thruway that would tell travelers where to exit for the national park. When the Thruway Authority finally agreed to the request, they called a meeting and asked how they might abbreviate the name of the park. I said they could not. Finally, I agreed they could delete the word “historical,” which still left a sign over forty feet wide. There is an enormous “Women’s Rights National Park” green-and-white sign to the east of the Seneca Falls exit, and also to the west.
You cannot miss it.