One-Tank Trip / Allegany State Park
Vivid foliage, haunting tales color Allegany
Allegany State Park is a marvel any time of the year, but it is visually spectacular in autumn.
My wife, Lyn, and I get to the park at least once a month for the meetings of the Allegany State Park Historical Society. In the fall, the farther south we drive on Route 219, the more intense grows the yellow, green and crimson illumination of the countryside.
Last fall our trip started from Buffalo in rain. By Springville the sun began to break through. Swatches of landscape would light up, then panoramas, until the clouds moved in again and muted the colors. By Ellicottville the blue sky opened leaving only a few billows of white. In Salamanca this shifting display of colors and shades of colors climaxed in the giant hills of Allegany, a rumpled rainbow-quilt of fall splendor.
The Historical Society met in the great room of the Tudorstyled Red House Administration Building. Elk heads command massive fireplaces at either end of this paneled room. Leaded French windows display a view of lawns, lake and forest.
Adele Wellman, a park naturalist, collected our group there and then led us out on a 45- minute tour of the woods. She gave us the opportunity to learn to identify 15 species of trees, including red maple, sugar maple, tulip, hemlock, hickory, butternut and two varieties of aspen. Some younger, quicker minds actually learned them.
One of our members found a soccer-ball-sized mushroom called a puffball. He sliced it open and found its pure white insides perfectly intact. Wellman approved and he took it home to saute. He offered to share, but we all waited to see if he survived.
Allegany is the largest park in the New York State Park System. Established in 1927, it is 100 square miles of forest on the Pennsylvania-New York border located 75 miles directly south of Buffalo on Route 219.
The park is surrounded by the Seneca Indian Reservation, which follows the curve of the Allegany River forming the park’s northern border.
The park is divided into two sections: Quaker Run to the south and Red House to the north. Each section has a large lake, a store, a restaurant and its share of the nearly 700 cabins and campsites. There are 53 miles of hiking trails, 55 for snowmobiles and horses and 27 for skiing. There are picnic grounds, bathing beaches and two museums.
Ghost stories
Thunder Rocks, a collection of gigantic rocks on top of one of Allegany’s mountains, is something no park visitor should miss. Just about a half-mile west of them, also inside the park, are the remains of a once-thriving little village called New Ireland. In the 1850s, John Carmody emigrated from Ireland and worked on the railroad running between New York and Pittsburgh by way of Limestone. He stayed over in Limestone and saw land for sale cheap. He brought friends and relatives from Ireland and they settled it. Life was not easy there. Poor 21-year-old Mary McCarthy died when a house collapsed on her, and there are people who claim they still see her near the remnants of the basement of that old house.
In the southeastern part of the park called Wolf Run there is a wild stretch of deserted farms reverting back to forest. If you look carefully you can find the foundations of barns and houses and, here and there, a collection of grave markers.
Farther north on the west side of the park opposite Cold Spring, George Heron told us tales of the Ga-hi-ne on the Witches’ Walk. Heron, now in his 80s, was once president of the Seneca Nation. Ga-hi-ne is a kind of a light that people have experienced alone late at night.
“It seems like the light of an approaching lantern, carried about knee high, and then a frightening presence passing close by,” Heron said.
Once a man fell asleep fishing in there by Witches’ Walk. He awoke and saw a giant snake across the stream from him. He ran home to find that his hair had turned white.
They say a pot of gold is buried in there, but no one has been able to find it, and many are afraid to look. During the Civil War, three Senecas ran into three Union deserters. The soldiers asked the Indians for help getting to Canada and said they had stolen money in gold to pay them. They needed directions, food and clothes.
The Indians drove a hard bargain: a whole handful of gold. After the deal was done the Indians decided to bury their gold since it was “hot.” The oldest of them took it back into Witches’ Walk and buried it, but he died before he could tell the other two where it was buried. It has never been found.
At the Red House entrance to the park, one large mountain stands out to the south. It is called “Old Baldy.” Once it was covered with American chestnut trees, but blight killed them off and left it barren. Now it is reforested. Long ago, Old Baldy was an Indian fortress with a trench and a palisade surrounding its peak.
One foolish day in May I bushwhacked up the mountain all by myself, found some interesting rock formations at the top and came very near to descending the wrong side into the interior of the park. While wandering about, semi-lost, I could not help but visualize the Seneca’s Gonusquah, the false-face maker, and their horned serpent monster, there with me in the woods. I survived.
If you go, take a map and a compass. Follow the North Country trail from the sign on Bay State Road just before the Red House entry. At the height of the land, strike east for the summit.
On the crumbling old road that comes into the park from Limestone near Thunder Rock, there is a gravestonelike monument to Job Moses. I don’t think he is buried there. He earned too much money from oil to be buried in such a lonely site. Moses drilled the first commercial oil well in the park during the oil boom of the 1890s. His was the first of 200 or more wells that once pitted the forest and crisscrossed it with roads. Forty percent of the underground mineral rights of the park are still in private hands and when the price is right, old Job’s ghost may return.
During the big boom there was a circuit-riding preacher who horse-backed his rounds through the oil fields to exhort against the drilling. “The Lord stored oil in the earth to fuel the fires of hell,” he warned. “To remove it is sinful and the world will feel His wrath.” Be careful you don’t run into him down that old dirt road.
In the Art Roscoe Ski area, the rusted specter of a fire tower creaked her storied past for decades. Then the Fire Tower Restoration Committee, headed by retired park forester, Terry Dailey, resurrected, repainted and repaired the old lady so that now anyone visiting the park may climb to her top. If you are there on a tour day, a guide will take you into her cabin at the top and tell you some of those tales.
Lots of us remember haunting Charlie Dach’s family restaurant just outside the Red House entrance. They served up sumptuous meals for many years but are long closed. We recently heard the sad news that the attractive old restaurant building is beyond repair and is slated to come down. The good news is that the old restaurant in the Administration Building is open again and the word is that its breakfasts and lunches are excellent.
If you insist on fine dining on your trip to the park, you might consider the new Seneca Allegany Casino in Salamanca. There are arguments for and against this bit of Las Vegas plopped down on Allegany’s doorstep, but there is no question about the crowds and the glitz and the cash it has brought. The ghost of old Chief Cornplanter must be smoking his pipe contentedly nearby.
If you go
Allegany State Park: http://nysparks. state. ny. us/ parks/info. asp?parkID=91.
For reservations: (800) 456-2267. For general info and directions: (716) 354-9121 For information on scheduled nature hikes and other programs, contact park naturalist Grace Christy at (716) 440-4488.
Allegany State Park Historical Society. The public is invited to the group’s monthly meetings, held with speakers at 1 p. m. on the third Saturday of each month. From June through September, the meetings are held in St. Johns in the Woods Chapel in Quaker Run; from October to May, they are in the Red House Administration Building. For information: www.asphs.org .
