- By Dan Veaner
- Around Town
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Harriet Larin grew up on a small poultry farm in Lansing, around where the old fire house was on Ridge Road, not far from the intersection of 34 and 34B and within easy walking distance to the Rogue's Harbor Inn.
Ms. Larin is a delightful person with plenty to say, and so interesting it was hard not to sidetrack. As a child in the 1930s she and her cousin would visit the inn and she agreed to share her memories with us.
Lansing Star: I'd like to talk about Rogue's Harbor.
Harriet Larin: There was no "Rogues Harbor," it was "Rogues Harbor Inn." Rogues Harbor was totally the inn, because all the bad people came and stayed there. It was never a place. And in the early 1840s... it existed long before then. If you look up "Libertyville" you'll see when that started.
LS: I want to ask about your family.
HL: My family came into this area from down along the New England coast, some from Connecticut, some from Rhode Island, and they came here for a Revolutionary War grant, and they came here in 1797. Our family came from England in the 1600s, so they've been here a while. We're "down East Yankees."
They came here, and where the Ithaca airport is, that was all our land. My grandfather sold it to them, I can remember when he did it.
LS: You mentioned there is still a family cemetery there?
HL: There's a family cemetery, it's now on Cornell land by the horse testing area.
LS: Where is that? It's not in the industrial park, is it?
HL: No, it's North of that, it's at the end of the runway. There are a lot of grave stones still there. They started in around the end of the 1700s, and they stopped around 1860 when Forest Lawn Cemetery was opened. About the time of the Civil War. You don't find any in there since then.
My Great Grand Parents, and my Great Great Grandparents, the Browns, are over in Pleasant Grove. And I have another set of Greats and Great Greats in Asbury cemetery.
LS: Your family accounts for some of the original Lansing names.
HL: Yes, Brown, Osmun, Woodberry. And they intermarried everybody. Like the Conlon Road Conlon, it was Andrew Conlon, he married into a family, the Nettles. And that was Josephine Conlon Ernstein, did you know her?
LS: Did she live in the white house on Conlon Rd.?
HL: Yes, the big old white house. She was a language teacher. She taught French, Latin and German at Ithaca High School for years. (She was) head of the department.
LS: What about the Miniers, who built the Rogue's Harbor Inn?
HL: Major Daniel Minier was my Great Great Great Great Uncle. Four greats. He built that... see this is where the research on the dates has to come in... because I have other work that my cousin sent me and one says that he built it in 1840, one says 1865, and one says in 1820. I always heard that he built it in 1820 with the property he made from running the English blockade during the War of 1812. And it took about eight or ten years to build it. It's really done well. I mean, when you think of the time in the early 1800s building that clear out here... it's really in the wilderness. That third floor ballroom with the springs underneath it...
LS: Louise Bement sent me a note saying that they were not coil springs, but that it was a kind of spring construction, the way the joists were cut.
HL: Yes, exactly. Sort of like the early inner spring mattresses. Something like that. But they used to have some very fancy elegant balls there.
LS: Did you attend some of them?
HL: Oh heavens, not since I was born, but long ago. Because by the time I was born they didn't have the safety laws they do now, but they knew if they didn't have a certain standard they could be liable. They could be wiped out financially. So they were very careful about what they did.
By the time the Blanchards took that hotel over, that's when I remember it, it was in a sad state. They were really such a nice family. The mother, Mrs. Blanchard, had grown sons, and one was married. Ted, whether he was divorced or his wife died (I don't remember). He was always, I thought, sad, but he was awfully nice. He was so nice to us. He was the one who would take us up (to the widow's walk) and let us look out. His brother Paul was married to Dorothy, and they had the post office in that little building in the front, it used to be a gas station.
LS: Right, what is now the coffee shop.
HL: Yes. That was from '32 onward. I had a distant cousin Blanch who lived there on the corner, and she and I would go over there.
In those days in communities you knew each other. We didn't think anything of it. Ted was there doing things in the hotel, and we'd go over. He was always very approachable to Blanch and me. We'd tease him and and say, "Oh please, please..." and he'd take us up and let us look out.
LS: This was in the, what was it called, a "widow's watch?"
HL: A widow's walk. Cayuga Lake used to be very busy with scows and boats. It was part of the old barge canal. And then the Erie Canal came in. And they hooked it up so it wasn't part of the barge canal any more, but was part of the Erie Canal. When it was part of the barge canal you could go up on the widow's walk and you could see, with binoculars, you could see what was coming in, because you had the salt plant and you had King's Ferry which was a very active ferry at the time. It used to go across the lake.
LS: You were able to see all that?
HL: Yes you could see it. And also, since the boats were on their way north to Canada, which is freedom, that was a stop on the Underground Railroad.
LS: I want to get back to that. But you were able to go into the widow's walk?
HL: Well, you didn't go into it, it was just a platform with a railing (on the roof of the inn). The first time I went up the platform was there, and the railing. But the next time we went up he wouldn't let us go up on it. I remember him holding my ankles and just looking, because it needed so much repair that they just took it down.
LS: The stairs are still there (in the attic), though.
HL: The stairs were there... I can't remember whether it was a ladder or a stairway.
LS: The current owner said it is a stairway.
HL: I can remember I wanted to go up another step, but he wouldn't let me. (Laughs) But he was the nicest man. So kind and nice.
LS: Was he running it as an inn at the time?
HL: His mother did. And she had antiques in there.
LS: That she was selling or using for decorating?
HL: Both. The bedrooms... and she had a nice kitchen. And I remember at Christmas time when we'd go carolling we'd stop and she always had hot chocolate and cookies. With marshmallows! Not little bitty ones, but regular real ones.
LS: Was this the restaurant's kitchen, or was there a kitchen upstairs?
HL: The only kitchen I ever knew was downstairs, right there on the first floor.
LS: So it was being run as a hotel, not as a boarding house?
HL: I'm sure they had meals there. I'm not sure if his mother did it, or maybe Dorothy helped with it... When they first started the building in front was the gas station, and Paul ran that gas station. Then when they had the franchise to run the post office they built that little addition on to incorporate that.
LS: Was the bar and restaurant there at all?
HL: The bar has always been there. It was totally off limits! I never had my nose in there! It always seemed like the den of Sodom and Gomorra. I was raied in a WTC household. Do you know what that is? Women's Christian Temperance Union. And we didn't go in there. If you walked in there you might disappear from the face of the earth! (Laughs) So I have never been in there. And I told my sister who is "death" against liquor, "let's just walk through it." "Well what do you want to do that for?" I said, "Well remember we were never supposed to go in there." Oh! She wouldn't do it.
LS: OK, let's talk about the Underground Railroad. Because I want to tell you what the current owner told me. She tried to get the inn registered as a historical site used as a stop on the Underground Railroad and they wouldn't even consider it, because it was too public a place to hide people and they thought the tunnel must be a utility tunnel. But others have said that it was technologically possible to build a tunnel people could get through. So tell me what you know.
HL: Well what I know is that the public would be amazed if they knew how far inland, under ground, those (salt mine) tunnels are. And if you follow a vein it seems like it's endless down there, with the salt. People say it would take very little effort to take a tunnel from the hotel to meet one of their tunnels, and they'd have the exit.
LS: So you think it wasn't just a tunnel from the lake to the hotel, but one that went into the salt complex.
HL: Yes, and my own feeling is that it could very well be, because it wasn't like the owners of the hotel were doing this. They were just tapping into something that already existed. And they had the slaves going up that way. I mean, the slave owners, do they really want to come up against some of those miners? I don't think so. And besides, they could say to them, "You're on private property, get off."
So no one ever challenged it. So sure, it was a public place, but that's what was the beauty of it. Because that was a private place, a business. That's what I've always thought. And (laughing) that's as good a theory as any! Once they were in the barge canal and then into Lake Erie, they're into Canada. So I think it is very logical.
LS: There was a trolley that came from Ithaca to the inn, then went to a railroad. The station was where "The Crossroads" currently is.
HL: They called it a spur. It came in from Auburn, and they called it the "short line." That's where the turnaround was. They had a conveyance and they would bring the travelers down to the inn. They'd go from Auburn, which they said was one of the largest cities in the United States at the time. And Elmira. So this was a travel line. And the drummers, you know the drummers? They were the salesmen. They went out and drummed up business. They were called drummers. Have you ever heard of a drummer's sample? I have a drummer's sample of a kitchen stove. They had these small replicas of the big one (items they were selling), or little pieces of furniture. They are really collectible, these little things. They would come on the spur and they'd carry their suitcases with them and it was part of their equipment.
LS: What was Lansing like in general in those days?
HL: The people who came here in the very early beginnings were intelligent people, and they used their intelligence in their daily lives and in the way they farmed. And they were also very devout people. Each generation left more to the coming generation than they had started with. You know the library? That was the Truman school and I went there. That was a modern school that had inside plumbing and heating. We had four grades to each room.
LS: Was that the original location?
HL: Right there. We used to walk. I'm talking in 1932 so it had to be built before 1930. The people had to be school-oriented to build a school like that.