On a winter's day in upstate New York the sun sets over the hill, the light reflected off the snow preserves the day a little longer. Over the hill and way down is Cayuga Lake, one of the deepest lakes the country it doesn't freeze. On the lake shore is Ithaca, the Athens of upstate New York. Ezra Cornell had founded one of the coeducational universities there in 1865 and the Ithaca Conservatory of Music (now Ithaca College) opened its doors in 1892. No backwater then or now, the Finger Lakes is one of the great bio-regions in the United States. Which brings me to Verne Morton, photographer; also an amateur naturalist, his photos were often used in field guides published by Anna Botsford Comstock and Liberty Hyde Bailey of Cornell.
The Village of Groton is located in the southern part of the Owasco Lake watershed, which is another way of saying that if the glacier that dug the trench of the lake had been mightier, Groton would be underwater. To be precise it would be at the bottom of a Finger Lake. As things turned out, Groton sits in a valley - a phantom lake - one of several in Central New York. People who dismiss interstate highways as boring may just be inattentive. Heading south from Syracuse along Interstate 81 en route to Groton, you are also traveling through an empty Finger Lake.
When you live in the Finger Lakes you learn the glacial language of eskers, moraines, and drumlins. Eskers are long, twisty ridges of sand and gravel; they are often used as ready made roadbeds. The word drumlin has its origins in old Irish, meaning ‘little ridge.’ Drumlins have been described as resembling half-buried eggs, for their characteristic gentle, rolling shape. Moraines vary but are basically large jumbles of glacial junk.
Phantom lakes and buried eggs.....how did these things become part of the landscape?
If you have ever dragged your fingers through sand on a beach, you have imitated the path that the glaciers carved when they retreated northward during the Pleistocene period. At a point which became the south end of the future lake, the glacier began its earth-moving operation. Digging deeply, pushing and tossing dirt and stone to the sides, the glacier started to melt, and as the ice melted, the trenches became shallower and broader. In photographs, the southern ends of the Finger Lakes resemble Scandinavian fjords, but because these glaciers were rather thin, the areas between lakes are rolling hills rather than rocky moraines. Cayuga and Seneca Lakes are so deep that they do not freeze over in winter.
When Groton was incorporated in 1860 there were 569 inhabitants; since then the population has quadrupled but the village still looks much as it did in this photograph taken in 1904. The hedgerows and fences on the hill are the visible signs of the military lots, so-called for their use to reward service during the Revolutionary War. The settlers who bought the plots came to farm, the same occupation that the Iroquois they displaced had practiced for centuries, but the new people were in a hurry and they burned what General Sullivan’s army had left intact Historian Barbara Graymont, has described them as engaged in “ a strange task indeed for men at arms - a warfare against vegetables.” Fertile farmlands, apple, plum, and peach orchards, and cornfields taller than the humans who cultivated them – all were laid waste during Sullivan's campaign. By the time Verne Morton took his picture there was little old growth forest left in upstate New York.
Verne Morton (1868-1945) lived in Groton all his life; he began taking photographs in 1896. What prompted his interest I don't know but the detailed documentation he left with along 12,000 negatives and the consistent clarity of his prints testify to its importance. This was an avocation rather than a hobby. Morton's photographs of people and places in and around Groton, Freeville, and Dryden are more than curiosities, they are documents of a history that is inscribed on the land. . I think Morton would have appreciated geographer Yi-Fu Tuan’s concept of geopiety, an attitude toward the land as. “full of numina or local powers,” something the Iroquois understood.
For further reading:
Barbara Graymont – Seneca in Handbook of North American Indians, 15, Washington, D.C., Smithsonian Institution: 1978.
Verne Morton - Winter Sunset Near Groton, 1904, History Center of Tompkins County, Ithaca.