Wiscoy

The reservoir formed by the damming of Wiscoy Creek. (Screenshot of a Google satellite-view.)

Years ago, Spring of 1966, while I was a senior at Houghton, I was introduced to a bucolic rural location by my wife-to-be.
The name of this place was Wiscoy (“wiss-KOY”) Creek, a few miles northeast of Fillmore, which was a few miles north of Houghton.
She wasn’t my wife yet.
We’d pile into my car (“the Beast”) and roar up to Wiscoy Creek. It was a place to escape Houghton; let it all hang out — shorts, etc.
It was she that introduced me to this place; I had never even known of it.
My favored rural hangout was under the Erie-Lackawanna Railroad trestle east of Fillmore. A train might cross it, and I’m a railfan.
That railroad has since been abandoned, and the trestle removed.
Wiscoy Creek fed the Genesee River, and was a narrow gorge through the western hills of the vast Genesee Valley.
A flood-control dam had been installed upstream.
The local power-company had installed a generation system to generate electricity from the outflow from the dam.
A large wooden pipe, known as “the flume,” four to six feet in diameter, had been installed down the gorge from the dam to the generating station — at least a mile or so.
We’d hike atop that pipe to the dam.
Since it was wood, it had numerous leaks: high narrow fountains of misty spray 90° from the pipe-casing.
The drill was to avoid the leaks, yet not fall off the pipe, which wasn’t too hard.
A few years ago I went back up the road we had traveled, but found nothing; not even a dam.
Apparently I hadn’t gone far enough.
Yesterday (Friday, March 13, 2009), at the YMCA, the guy from Fillmore was in the Mens Locker-Room when I arrived.
“Aren’t you the guy from Fillmore?” I asked. —He knew me, and was trying to make conversation.
“Yes,” and then a long confused silence followed.
“Actually from Wiscoy,” he finally said.
“Oh yeah?” I said. “Seems to me there was a dam there, but I couldn’t find it a few years ago.”
“Actually there are three,” he said. “One holds back Rushford Lake.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I water-skied that.”
“A second is at Mills-Mills; and the third dams Wiscoy Creek.
All are flood-control dams, but the power-company put in generating stations to generate electricity from the outflows.
Rochester Gas & Electric bought that power-company, and the generating-stations become them, although all have since been abandoned,” he said.
“So that dam at Wiscoy Creek still exists,” I said.
“Yep, ya can buy it of ya want. It’s for sale,”
“I’m gonna go back and find that sucker. I bet I can find it on my Google satellite-views,” I said.

My wife of 41+ years is “Linda.”

“Houghton” is Houghton College in western New York, from where I graduated with a BA in 1966. I’ve never regretted it, although I graduated as a Ne’er-do-Well, without their blessing. Houghton is an evangelical liberal-arts college. (At that time the college would not allow shorts or sleeveless dresses.)

“The Beast” was my first car, a 1958 Triumph TR3 sportscar. It was very fast.

The “Erie-Lackawanna Railroad” was a merger of the Erie and the Delaware, Lackawanna & Western railroads in 1960. The line east of Fillmore was a way to bypass all the Erie’s grades west of Hornell. It was abandoned when the railroad became no longer through to Chicago.

The “Genesee River” is a river that flows north across NY state and empties into Lake Ontario at Rochester. Its valley was the nation’s first breadbasket, mainly because of the Erie Canal (and a feeder canal down the valley).

“Rochester Gas & Electric” is the power-utility based in Rochester.

I work out in the Canandaigua YMCA exercise-gym.