Written by Jim Farfaglia
All four seasons can be memorable, but doesn’t there seem to be something special about summer? Is it the months of no school, day after day of T-shirt weather, or vacations in exciting new places? Maybe a little of each? For me, what makes the season of sun really shine are the summers I spent at Fair Haven.
Some of my earliest cherished memories are of extended family picnics at the Fair Haven State Park. Sundays, after church, we’d head off in cars packed with ice chests, charcoal and swimsuits to claim a spot in the park’s picnic area. Nearby was a mowed field for ballgames, and the sandy beach was a short hike away. We enjoyed those days so much that my parents started renting a cabin on the bay near the park. We camped there several weeks at a time, forever linking my summertime memories with Fair Haven.
Decades later, I still fondly recall my family’s favorite destination, and now that I spend my time researching local history, what better topic to dive into than the best ever swimming hole of my youth. What I’ve learned makes me love Fair Haven even more.
Even before it incorporated in 1880, the village of Fair Haven was already a significant port for cargo ships, much like its Lake Ontario neighbor, Oswego. Also right around that time, railroads started making stops at Fair Haven, carrying goods like coal from Pennsylvania that was then loaded on ships headed for Canada. In return, ice from points north was sent to New York City via the Fair Haven port. All that commerce helped build the village’s economy, but even after rail and maritime shipping lost favor, Fair Haven still had something special to offer: the beauty of its lakeside location.
Every year, more people looking to escape summer’s heat visited the village, especially when a new park opened nearby. In 1930, as part of the growing trend of a national parks system, New York State secured 1,100 acres along the Fair Haven shoreline to create one of its state parks. Labor provided by the federally-sponsored Civilian Conservation Corps built cabins, blazed trails and planted shade trees. Though the new park shared some features with others across our nation, there was one thing that set Fair Haven apart: its natural sand dunes and bluffs.
Formed by a receding glacier during the Ice Age, the bluffs along Lake Ontario started out as towering drumlins composed of mud, clay, small rocks and sand left behind by the glacier. Centuries of wind and waves broke down those drumlins, leaving Fair Haven with an abundance of sand. I loved walking its beaches as a kid, my feet feeling on fire and sending me straight to the lake. Today, most of us swim in chlorinated pools, but they never seem to refresh me like Ontario lake water.
Fair Haven offers many natural joys. Walking the park trails and exploring the shoreline introduced me to sights and sounds I’d never experienced in my hometown fifteen miles away. And I’m not alone in what Fair Haven offered my senses. While researching its past, I found the website Fair Haven History, created by Robert Kolsters, who has written several books about the village. Along with important facts and milestones, Kolsters’ website includes some poignant memories of residents and visitors, like this one by Reverend George Lansing Taylor, who, in 1873, wrote about the sensory opportunities found in the park:
“And then a voice from all nature around me—nature true and sympathetic to her humble child—and a personal loving voice out of the glad deep above, whispered a calm unutterable through my soul; a calm of fullness, like that of slow rivers at freshet, or the tide’s full flow before it ebbs back to the sea.”
Enjoying nature is, I believe, essential to a full life. So is sharing it with others, and that’s where Fair Haven really shines. After a pleasurable afternoon on sand and in water, happy campers can travel just a quarter mile or so west of the park entrance to a community that welcomes visitors. That hospitality can be as simple as visiting the village’s grocery store, where as a kid I could buy a freshly-made donut that melted in my mouth after a hard day of playing. That store still stands, as do other historical buildings.
There’s the Fair Haven Library, founded in 1899 when a generous resident donated $48 to turn the upstairs of a two-story brick building into a cozy nook for booklovers. Downstairs was the village post office as well as several businesses offering clothing, magazines, dry goods and groceries. Sounds like the hardware stores that every community used to have. Fair Haven still does.
The village’s Hardware Café & General Store comes pre-packed with history, which luckily has been preserved by current owners Susan and Larry Lemon. Susan is also a writer, and through her essay about the Café & General Store’s origins I was able to take a stroll back in time.
The store’s story begins with a man named John Dietal, a German immigrant who lived in the Syracuse area in the 1860s and then moved to Fair Haven in 1872. Dietal was a tinsmith by trade and he built his hardware store in 1875 to carry items for stoves and tin products, but as customers began asking for more goods, he provided them. Soon villagers and visitors with all kinds of requests were walking into Dietal’s hardware store.
Today when you enter the Hardware Café it feels like you’ve stepped back in history. As Susan wrote, “The floors are the same ones your grandfather might have walked on as a child; the counters the same ones over which the general store proprietor might have sold him candy or sold his father any size nail he needed.”
When I step inside the Café I feel its history and the village’s history. As I looked for the right words to wrap up this retrospective about my favorite summer destination, I thought a comment found on a Cayuga County website promoting Fair Haven got to the heart of it. “Haven,” it proclaimed, “is only one letter away from Heaven.”
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