The Finger Lakes region is home to dozens of waterfalls but none are more famous as the tallest waterfall east of the Mississippi River, Taughannock Falls. Learn about the complete history of the State Park at Taughannock Falls from the origin of the name to the geology behind the formation of the three major falls within the park. Join Seneca County Historian Walter Gable for another edition of the Our Finger Lakes History podcast…
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Hello Fingerlakes 1. My name is Larry Butler. I was born after Dad got back from WW2 in Cortland Memorial Hospital. We lived across from the Elm Tree Inn in Mclean until 1948 when my grandfather, Jack Norton, moved to Southeast-on-Owasco’s mud flats and joined that community’s permanent, year-round residents. My father soon after purchased a 38′ long, 8-wide trailer from Ney M Rowley Trailer Sales in Dryden that took up residence against the boatshed wall for a few years. Both grandfather and father were slaves of the Smith-Corona Marchant typewriter factories in Cortland and Groton. My mother strung tennis rackets in Cortland in a factory I don’t have the name of and grandmother worked in the Cortland fishing line factory, which was great for us lake dwellers as she got to bring home plenty of scrap line to fish Owasco Lake. My parents moved into Moravia and we settled on Grove Street until my father and the school janitor, Bob McAllister, created the first “trailer park” on the hill overlooking Moravia High School, much to the dismay of the Moravia elite. Only gypsies lived in trailers in the 1950s. We changed that picture. We were Irish! They sold off the trailer park decades later just before I graduated Moravia Central School and joined the Navy in 1964 to avoid the draft for the stupid Vietnamese war of attrition. Navy moved me to Charleston, SC, and though I moved around the planet working on ships as a civilian contractor, I still live on the beautiful Ashley River across from Magnolia Gardens, today. Fear not. The 1820 steamboat dock at the plantation is right where it has always been and the tidal waters have not risen a measurable amount since the dock was installed. The tides, caused by the Ashley and Cooper rivers joining in the harbor and forming the Atlantic Ocean, make us have floating docks.
My connections with the Finger Lakes is all broken up, now, but internet videos of ice fishing on Owasco Lake, now polluted by Moravia’s mandated sewer system, and my first 18 years as a Finger Lakes citizen are very strong indeed. Imagine my dismay when I discovered pictures of Parson’s Falls in the NY Falls webpages. We boys spent many weekends camped out right where the falls went over its miniature Taughannock Falls cliff into the Owasco Valley below. Why we didn’t go over, too, remains a mystery.
Thank you all for access to your website and multimedia access.