Welcome to Livingston County’s Bicentennial GeoTrail!
My name is Find R. Fox. I’ll be your guide to super-sleuthing the hides at these amazing, historical locations all around our beautiful 200-year-old county!
To make your travel through history a bit easier, imagine yourself in a Time Machine (your best mode of transportation will do). Set the dial (your gps unit) to the first year (coordinates) listed below, check the waypoints for Parking and push the navigate button! Whirl your way there then switch your coordinates as needed to navigate to the geocache to sniff out the container and sign the log sheet. Good Luck & Enjoy the journey!!
According to the Letchworth State Park site, there is a $10 fee for entry between 9 and 5 PM from May to October. However, some libraries and towns offer an Empire State Park Pass that you can borrow.
As you drive north from the Highbanks area in Letchworth State Park, you will pass a marker for a place called Gibsonville. There is not much there now, but it is a place with a colorful past, for it is one of the Park's two "Vanished Villages".
Ebenezer Allan, or Indian Allen, as he was commonly called was reputed to be "a man of bad character, one of the Tories of the revolution, and cunning as well as wicked." Thus Mildred Anderson quotes Doty's History as she begins her booklet giving the history of Gibsonville. Her well-illustrated work ascribed the name "vanished village" and it has remained in recent times to refer to the settlement whose first settler, in the 1790's, was apparently the infamous Indian Allan hiding from the Indians and New Jersey authorities who sought him because of crimes. Allen built a saw-mill along the Silver Lake Outlet just to the northeast of that marker.
A more permanent resident was Henry B. Gibson, hence the name, and the water power from the creek was the motivation for Allen and those that came after him. (Today trail 19 explores the vicinity of the village.) Mrs. Anderson writes that the village consisted of 16 houses, a general store, post office, blacksmith shop, primary school and gristmill. In the 1840's the grist mill was converted to a paper mill which made fine paper using remnant rags from the Perry knitting mills. The mill burned in l894 and was not rebuilt. The village gradually faded from the records and was finally gone by the time the land was acquired as part of the park.
In the spring of 1933, the United States was mired in a deepen depression. A new president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, had just taken office, elected on the promise of bringing a "New Deal" to Americans. One of his early programs was perhaps his most successful - the Civilian Conservation Corps.
The CCC was created on March 31, 1933, when President Roosevelt signed the Emergency Conservation Work Act. As he had told Congress, the goals of the new program were "relieving the acute condition of widespread distress and unemployment...the restoration of the country's depleted natural resources and the advancement of an orderly program of useful public works...."
By July 4, 1933, two hundred and fifty thousand unemployed young men had enrolled in the program. By the time the last CCC camp closed in 1942, nearly 3.5 million had enrolled in the program. It is estimated that over 3,000 enrollees served at the Letchworth Camps between 1933 and 1941.
Letchworth had four camps with about two hundred enrollees in each. Lower Falls was at the present day location of the Lower Falls swimming pool. St Helena was at the lower level picnic area at present day St. Helena area. Another camp was at the area known as Gibsonville. The fourth camp was on the east side of the river where present day "E Cabin" area is located.
At the very beginning of the CCC in 1933, the Gibsonville area was occupied by a CCC Camp with numerous buildings to house the corps members. The landscape was changed markedly by road and bridge construction; and today, the remaining evidence of Gibsonville is the chimney of the CCC dining hall and, a short distance south, one remaining residence that houses the Camping Area Caretaker at the Perry Entrance. This is known as the "Littledyke House" for one of the families still in residence when the State acquired the land for park purposes.
The Park was the perfect place to operate the camps. One criterion for camp establishment was availability of raw material -- thus Letchworth Park was equipped with a saw-mill and various stone quarries so the natural resources on site could be utilized. The chestnut blight had just devastated the forests of the east and salvage timber was everywhere. There were plenty of possible projects, especially since the Park had recently expanded northward from Wolf Creek and there was a growing public demand for facilities such as cabins, picnic areas, and recreational trails.
These camps were run by both military and civilian personnel. The organization and operation of the camp itself fell under the army, while the work projects were designed and approved through the Genesee State Park Region, National Park Service, and the Department of the interior.
The work done by these crews of enthusiastic young men 80 years ago is still a vital part of the park infrastructure. Road systems, picnic areas, stone walls and cabin areas are a product of the "CCC" as it was commonly called. Some of their work has been updated and modernized with such things as indoor plumbing, electricity, pavement and the like to render it acceptable and useful in today’s recreational climate.
In the area of the fore-mentioned chimney and a historic display, you will gather information for the WP2, hidden a short distance away and near the Gibsonville falls, which some have described as double drop falls. From there, you will find information for the Final and another waterfall. Hope you enjoy the stonework and that the water is flowing well so you can enjoy these lesser known falls!
Sources: Tom Cook, Tom Breslin, https://nyhistoric.com/2012/07/gibsonville/ , http://www.letchworthparkhistory.com/gibson.html , and http://www.letchworthparkhistory.com/glimpse3.html
Thank you to Doug Kelly at Letchworth State Park for approving this geocache! Permit # LSP-95.
From the historic display, answer the following questions to obtain WP2 @
N 42° 42.GIB W 77° 56.SON, where
G = First digit of Company Number
I = Number of enrollees in BACK row minus 2nd digit of Camp Number
B = Number of bushes in company emblem
S = Sum of last 2 digits in year when camp closed
O = Number of pianos in pictures
N = Number of men in photo with April date
You can validate your puzzle solution with certitude.
For those not using the checker: the sum of the WP2 North coordinate digits + 4 = the sum of the WP2 West coordinate digits
This cache is 1 of 36 caches comprising the Livingston County Bicentennial GeoTrail (LivCo200) placed in the summer of 2021 in honor of Livingston County’s Bicentennial by members of the local geocaching group called the Bee Hive. For more information about Livingston County’s Bicentennial, visit the County Historian’s Bicentennial web page on the Livingston County New York website at https://www.livingstoncounty.us/1115/County-Bicentennial
