Question: Campaigning for elections is nothing new. In October of 1924 this gentleman came in an automobile entourage to Baldwinsville for a barbecue and political rally. Can you identify the candidate? What position was he running for and did he win?
Last week’s answer: The photo from last week shows the area just southeast of the old Baldwin Canal Bridge. The buildings in the background have all changed either by fire, demolition or remodeling. The water in the foreground is an old canal flume that ran to the Amos Mill. It was a sluiceway that bought water to that mill’s water wheels. This private flume started at the dam, passing under the powerhouse of the J.C. & J.C. Miller Knitting Mill, then under Oswego Street, aka Bridge Street, and under the tall building on the left before reaching the mill basin.
Other industries adjacent to the Amos Mill also were supplied with power from this flume: the Scythe and Fork Factory, the Morris Axe Company, an iron furnace, a first Baldwin saw mill, the knitting mill, the first Darrow pottery, a pump works, fork plant, novelty manufacturing building and the original electric light generating utility. Because of the number of industries, this area was given the title “cradle of early village industries.”
As noted in a recent History Mystery, the Baldwin Canal was completely covered over in 1965. When the Union Block collapsed in 1964 causing the need to lower the structure to one story, the bricks were used to help fill it in. Today the sluiceway in covered over with the village parking lot just north of the dam and the power company.
Want to know more? Several of Anthony Christopher’s “Sketches” also deal with this area.
Contact Editor Sarah Hall at [email protected] or leave a message at 434-8889 ext. 310 with your guess by 5 p.m. Friday (please leave the information in the message; we are not generally able to return calls regarding History Mystery responses). If you are the first person to correctly identify an element in the photo, your name and guess will appear in next week’s Messenger, along with another History Mystery feature. History Mystery is a joint project of the Museum at the Shacksboro Schoolhouse and the Baldwinsville Public Library.
