NEW YORK'S CHAUTAUQUA COUNTY

Article Tools

Image Gallery

Print

E-mail

Comments

RSS

Because Chautauqua County is real American Country, self-contained and mostly isolated from the mainstream, it has the assets of lifestyle that naturally accrue. The air is clean, a few doctors still make house calls, and baby-sitting can cost as little as a dollar an hour. If you run short of cash in midwinter, merchants in town will extend you credit until May when your work picks up again, and if somebody in your family is ill or about to have a baby, the town snowplow, without asking, will make a free pass up and down your driveway after every major snowstorm, just in case you have to get to the hospital. Even within village limits, if you

want to keep a pet goat or fertilize your garden with chicken manure, there's most likely no zoning ordinance to stop you (seven of Chautauqua's 27 townships have no zoning whatsoever, and only nine have town police). And even if there is an ordinance, there's probably no one from the county sheriff's department who would bother to enforce it. Maybe nicest of all, kids are safe riding their bikes even on major thoroughfares, they are not robbed of their lunch money or baseball gloves in public school, and, in some small pockets of the county, they are still innocent and secure enough to wave to a stranger in a passing automobile.

Chautauqua Countians believe in the power of advertising. And they advertise most things—from home knitting and homemade chocolates to septic tank cleaning and the Second Coming—with either bulletin board notices or small handmade signs stuck in thousands of lawns and corners of windows throughout the county. For the most part these signs speak of lean times, of businesses or farms gone bad or, even more desperately, of people hoping that some passing neighbor (not tourists, clearly) will stop, knock at the door and offer to buy a picnic table or one of only two 10-year-old autos sitting on a lawn near Brocton that calls itself "S&S Auto (BuySell-Trade).

" The signs lend credence to the claim in a 1986 report by the county's Department of Planning and Development that nothing much productive is going on, that increasingly the county's economy amounts only to "doing each other's laundry.

"But not every Chautauquan believes that doing each other's laundry is all that bad. Nor does everyone subscribe to the notion that the county's loss of industrial employment and its essential stagnation of population justifies gloom. Slim, bearded and wire-rimmed, 37-year-old Mitch Fitzgibbon looks the part of a former hippie. Unlike most of that once modestliving, socially and environmentally concerned generation, though, he did not shift into real estate speculation and BMW ownership and money market funds once the organic ideals of the late '60s and early '70s went out of vogue.

Rather, postcollege in 1974, he came to Mayville where his family summered, and, after a kind of earthy apprenticeship under a local carpenter-sawyer farmer, took a two-week seminar in smithing and loved it. He built his own forge, bought hammers and an anvil, was given a vise and, virtually overnight, became the village blacksmith. He married a local woman, Peg McAninch, who worked in nearby Westfield Hospital as Fitzgibbon struggled to build a clientele. They bought four acres and a carpenter's delight of a house, and built a rough-lumber smithy, on rural Quilliam Road where they now live with sons Andrew, seven, and Thomas, two, and various beasts.

RSS | Comments | E-mail | Print