Small Festival to Small Festival

My boyfriend came up to Cooperstown for the first time this weekend.  Being a small town area I was hoping to find some interesting things for us to do.  It also being Fall there were a number of Harvest Festivals being advertised all over the place.  I figured going to see these festivals would be a great way to spend a beautiful Saturday afternoon.  

We started off by driving to Fly Creek for the Fly Creek Cider Mill's Apple Fest.  We paid two dollars each and got into the festival area.  The festival itself was not all that impressive, there was a band playing, a raffle and some games, not much else.  It was, however, my first time at the Cider Mill and that was very cool.  We walked in and there were free tasting samples of almost everything, so you walked around the room sampling different sauces and salsa's; you also had the opportunity to taste their apples, cookies, hard cider, wine and of course the regular cider.  Up the stairs it became more of a crafter area and guests had the opportunity to see the cider making process at work.  When we were there a film crew also happened to be present.  The whole cider mill experience took us maybe an hour/hour and a half.  We left with Black Current Apple Wine (very good), apple donuts, cider, and hard cider.  

With still a large chunk of the afternoon before us we decided to held down to Milford for the Garlic Festival.  The Garlic festival was not that large either, especially for a girl who is used to seeing the center of her town shut down for the Apple Harvest Festival.  There was one or two crafters, a couple people selling food made from garlic, some antiques, lessons on how to garlic, and a little stage for performances.  Nothing too exciting, it took us maybe fifteen minutes to get through, and the garlic chocolate chip cookies were not good.  I hear after Jay and I left one of my professors came and started to perform on the stage.  

So the lesson learned was that Cooperstown is a beautiful area with really friendly people, but outside of visiting the Hall of Fame and the Cider Mill it appears that you are in charge of making your own fun.

Productive Days

Normally, up here in the Cooperstown, we have Professional Seminars on Fridays.  Professional Seminars are days when guests, like different people who work in the museum field, come in and lecture for the day, telling us about their experiences.  Since this was the  first week of classes though, a professional seminar was not scheduled.  Thus, I received a day to be active.

There is nothing like actually being able to get up and moving in the morning and get out for a run.  Cooperstown is actually a beautiful town, with lots of cute and historic-looking streets to run down and soak up some fresh morning air, especially while the weather is still halfway decent.  I promise pictures at a future date, but its unfortunatley raining at the moment, so it is not the best of times to go out and retrace the running route.  

Besides the exercise and getting a few chores done, I also had the chance to go to the library and get some work done.  One of the assignments for next week that I wanted to get done today was for my Culture and Collections class, which involved finding a historic paper print and writing about it.  I decided to start in the library and wander the stacks.  While down in the basement I discovered an old New York register and almanac dating from 1831.  In the front of the book there was a lithograph of Albany's City Hall.  Take the old, well-worn book off the wall, I sat down and studied it for an hour, and tried to decide what story the picture was telling.  

After about an hour I finished up my writing and went t go print out some journal articles to read for my American Cultures class.  While CGP and SUNY Oneonta, have a great collection of online resources, I still found myself logging onto my UConn web account and looking up some journals that way.  I find that UConn's site is definitely more user friendly and also seems to have more resources readily available, but that;s probably because its a much bigger institution.    The UConn web log-in is a one time deal, you start the session by logging on and then you can navigate through different gated research sites, the Oneonta website, requires to you login every time you move to a different database, which is much more time consuming and my main issue.  Besides that, UConn's website is a little better formated and has easier interfaces established, so its much easier to find basic information quickly.  I found though Oneonta had a lot of what I was looking for the information was easier to get to on UConn's page.

Recommendation for Ice Cream

This evening a bunch of us went out for ice cream at Stewart's, which is on Chestnut St, across from the Great American in Cooperstown.  Stewart's is a place that is part grocery store, part convenience store, and part  ice cream shop.  One would think that being part gas station that the ice cream wouldn't be that great, but it is actually terrific.  It was a place that a first discovered while visiting my grandmother who used to live in Cambridge. NY.  It seems to be a business pretty much confined to Upstate New York, and moving into Cooperstown and finding one was like providence, like a coming home in some ways.

For a tourist town like Cooperstown, Stewart's is pretty much one of the only places that is open year round to get ice cream, and also has very affordable prices.  It was only about $2.75 for a make your own sundae, where you choose the ice cream and then they let you go to the toppings counter and put what every you want on it.  It was also only $2.75 for a hand-packed pint.  For good ice cream at a reasonable price it seems to be the definite place  to go if looking for ice cream in Cooperstown.

Research Week: Day 4...Local History and Hometowns

Today, we took a walking tour of Cooperstown and discussed the town's history.  As a little bit of background, Cooperstown was established by William Cooper in 1786.  William Cooper was the father of James Fenimore Cooper, the famous American author of the Letherstocking Tales (The Pioneers, The Last of the Mohicans).  


The Pioneers is based off of real-life experiences of James Fenimore Cooper, and many of the characters represented in the book are characterizations of real people, like Judge Templeton who is a representation of William Cooper.  Since The Pioneers tells a story that is interwoven in Cooperstown's past, myths about the history of the town have arise from the events in the books, and some people in the town view the James's book more as history than as fiction.

Our class took this mythological history under discussion and began to wonder about how biased people are about their own town's history, and who is the best person to write a local history, a native or an outsider?

The problem is that many people including myself, do not want to hear maligning things about our hometown's past, whether or not these events concern us at all.  Thus, when doing research some locals are apt to not study some of the more gruesome details of a town's history and instead focus on things to be proud of.  So one would think that in this case it might be better for an objective outside historian to write a local history, however there are problems with that.  Locals are usually the ones who are more interested in their town's history and more likely to delve as deeply as possible, locals are also the ones who are likely to start with a wide base knowledge about the town, and set the elderly more at ease when asking questions.  There is not real right or wrong answer, I am sure that the truth is somewhere in the middle, this problem does lead to another interesting question though.

Why do we not want to hear bad things about our town's past?

Most people were not even alive when many events took place, many people probably don't even have family who lived in the town when a terrible event took place.  Still, despite being a first generationer in a town we don't want to hear about bad things that happened in our town, even if they happened a hundred years ago.  I know that being born in Southington, CT, I don't want to hear outside historians coming in a talking about slavery that took place in my hometown, but at the same time as a historian I know these are important things to learn about.

It would seem to me that the issue is that out hometown is part of who we are and a piece of our history, whether or not we were involved in the events.  Some how we feel a deep connection to the place of our birth so an affront to it can feel like a personal attack.  We are also associated with our hometown, so in a way feel associated to the past deeds that happened there.  When writing histories about unpleasant events in our home town, we many worry about what our neighbors are going to think because they will be interested, and how that will reflect on our family.  It seems like a very complicated issue to me, with so many angles.

The Day I Almost Burned Down the House...Sort of

So, today I was thinking about what type of story I was going to tell tonight.  Was i going to talk about the documentary we watched in class that was very serious, but had one random porno part in it, or was I going to talk about how certain things you read challenge the way that you think and view the world.

Turns out that tonight wound up being more interesting then I planned.  To be honest I am a terrible cook, but one of my goals in moving out-of-state and off to grad school, is to learn how to cook.  Tonight I decided to really start that adventure, and decided to start relatively simple.  I wanted to make scrambled eggs and home fries.  Well, I used some canned potatoes, boiled them a bit to soften them and then started to fry them up.  I didn't have vegetable oil or regular butter, so I used some pam and some spray butter (error number 1).  Things seemed to start by going alright, I am a little impatient so I tried to rush the process a little, and turned up the heat (error number 2).  The potatoes started to steam, maybe smoke a little bit so I opened the door, but it didn't click, because I don't cook often to turn the fan on over the oven (error number 3).

The smoke filled the room, and the fire alarm went off.  One key thing to remember at this point, is that I technically live on the Farmers' Museum's property.  So when the fire alarm goes off security is immediately notified.  Thank goodness a few days earlier the guy in charge of our lease warned us that if the fire alarms ever went off because we were cooking we need to immediately call security to tell them it was a false alarm or the fire department will come.   Remembering that, I got in touch with security before they called the fire department.  Still a maintenance guy was near by and rushed into the house to open a bunch of windows and deactivate the alarm, checking to make sure everything was fine.  (he opened a bunch of windows that were too tall for us to reach to close however).

Once he finally left i sat down to eat my dinner, which was, to my disappointment, a bit burnt.  All that trouble for nothing good.  Halfway through eating, though, a security vehicle pulls up in front of the house, and a guy knocks on the door to check that everything was ok.  Then he OF COURSE needs to call the main office and say, "just talked to Amanda she said she burned some food."  Thanks, I get an incident report written up now.  Oh well, basically the night ended with me going for a walk and finding some ice cream.

Till tommorow

End of Week 1: Introduction to the CGP experience

Well, my first week as a student in the Cooperstown Graduate Program has come to an end, and boy was it a busy first week. I arrived in Cooperstown, NY, population about 2,500, last Saturday, making the move from Connecticut to NY for two years.

I grew up in a town, with a population of 40,000, so coming to Cooperstown, which has a population that is about 5% that size is an adjustment. The town, however, is beautiful, and I live next to the Farmer's Museum and the Leatherstocking Golf Course, so when i look outside every morning I see both sheep grazing in the fields and hear golfers teeing off.

This past week was know as Orientation week. We were shown the basics of the program and had the opportunity to get to know the other students in our class. The CGP (Cooperstown Grad Program) is a small, exclusive program so there are a total of 17 students in my class, and only about 30 in the entire program. That means you have little choice about meeting everyone, and better be able to get along with them all.

The first week consisted of us learning about all the resources available to students, the NYSHA library, Farmer's Museum, Fenimore Art Museum, Baseball Hall of Fame, and SUNY Oneonta main Campus. Not only are there many organizations working closely with the program, but there are so many great people all around the town that have been welcoming and more than ready to help answer questions and let students be involved in the community and the museums.

More to come!