The railroad sold a Keuka grape-harvest holiday

The New York Central’s guide for the summer of 1890 told travelers to see Keuka Lake in September. Its chosen scene had pickers singing on the hillsides and steamboats stacked with grape crates. Work was part of the attraction the railroad offered its readers. Health and Pleasure on America’s Greatest Railroad: Summer Resorts and Excursion Routes, season of 1890.

The invitation extended beyond harvest. There were hotels, fishing, food and cottages along the shore. The writer described an effort to give Keuka something of Chautauqua’s character, without naming the people behind it or showing how far it had gone. Health and Pleasure on America’s Greatest Railroad: Summer Resorts and Excursion Routes, season of 1890.

Readers were given names to look for: the Fairchild House in Hammondsport, Grove Spring House and Ogo-ya-go on Bluff Point. Beneath the description, Excursion 183 offered a Penn Yan trip and return to New York at a rate of thirteen dollars, returning over the same route. Health and Pleasure on America’s Greatest Railroad: Summer Resorts and Excursion Routes, season of 1890.

Another guide had placed much the same visitor landscape on the page a year earlier. Bushrod W. James’s American Resorts, published by F. A. Davis in 1889, described vineyards, summer conveniences at Hammondsport and Penn Yan, and steamer connections between places on Keuka. American Resorts; with Notes Upon Their Climate (inspected 1889 edition).

The railroad’s harvest scene is still a sales pitch. Singing pickers tell us how the promoter wanted readers to imagine the work; they do not tell us what a picker earned or how a day in the vineyard felt. Those questions need workers’ accounts, payrolls and freight records beyond these guides. Health and Pleasure on America’s Greatest Railroad: Summer Resorts and Excursion Routes, season of 1890.