|
Coates Kinney
of Kinney's Corners
by
The region around Keuka Lake has produced a number of native sons and
daughters who have had distinguished careers in other parts of the country
but were not forgotten in the land of their birth. One such person is
Coates Kinney, although his name may not be familiar even to the local
people who pass the monument in his memory, located on a triangle of land
in front of the Merry-Go-Round convenience store at Kinney's Corners about
half way between Penn Yan and Branchport.
The monument is a granite boulder with a bronze plaque that reads:
1827 - 1904
NEAR THIS SPOT WAS BORN
COATES KINNEY
SOLDIER, STATESMAN, POET
ERECTED BY GU-YA-N-GA CHAPTER
D.A.R. PENN YAN, N.Y.
AND THE STATE OF NEW YORK
1927
Coates Kinney was born on November 24, 1826, at Kinney's Corners, Yates
County, and named after his grandfather, Stephen, and his father, Giles
Kinney, who ran a tavern there. Although he left New York State for Ohio
with his family in 1840 at the age of fourteen and never returned to live
in Yates County, his boyhood years near Keuka Lake provided material for
many of the poems for which he became well known.
In Ohio he studied and became a one-room country school teacher for a
while; then read law and was admitted to the Ohio bar. He always wanted
to be a writer and achieved sudden fame in 1849 with the publication of
what became his most famous poem, "Rain on the Roof." Today the poem is
most noteworthy as an example of popular verse of the period, but for
the rest of his life he was known as the author of this poem.
Rain on the Roof
by Coates Kinney
When the humid shadows hover
Over all the starry spheres
And the melancholy darkness
Gently weeps in rainy tears,
What a bliss to press the pillow
Of a cottage-chamber bed
And lie listening to the patter
Of the soft rain overhead!
Every tinkle on the shingles
Has an echo in the heart;
And a thousand dreamy fancies
Into busy being start,
And a thousand recollections
Weave their air-threads into woof,
As I listen to the patter
Of the rain upon the roof.
Now in memory comes my mother,
As she used in years agone,
To regard the darling dreamers
Ere she left them till the dawn:
O! I feel her fond look on me
As I list to this refrain
Which is played upon the shingles
By the patter of the rain.
Then my little seraph-sister,
With the wings and waving hair,
And her star-eyed cherub-brother —
A serene angelic pair —
Glide around my wakeful pillow,
With their praise or mild reproof,
As I listen to the murmur
Of the soft rain on the roof.
And another comes, to thrill me
With her eyes' delicious blue;
And I mind not, musing on her,
That her heart was all untrue:
I remember but to love her
With a passion kin to pain,
And my heart's quick pulses quiver
To the patter of the rain.
Art hath naught of tone or cadence
That can work with such a spell
In the soul's mysterious fountains,
Whence the tears of rapture well,
As that melody of Nature,
That subdued, subduing strain
Which is played upon the shingles
By the patter of the rain.
From Selected Poems of Coates Kinney (1927).
Kinney was a lawyer in Cincinnati when the Civil War broke out. He served
in the army for four years rising to the rank of lieutenant colonel. After
the war he edited a succession of newspapers in Ohio and became active
in Republican politics. According to The National Cyclopedia of American
Biography (1892), "His attainments as a classic student, critic,
and thinker, exhibited by his strong, clear writing in prose, his eloquent
speeches, and his brilliant conversations, give him a high position among
American scholars, writers and orators. But his reputation rests mainly
upon his extraordinary originality as a poet."
His fame howerer, did not last long after his death in Xenia, Ohio, in
1904. His poetry never had the esteem of that of James Whitcomb Riley,
another Middle Westerner, whose poems used homey themes similar to those
of Kinney. His life was not chronicled in the prestigious Dictionary
of American Biography, nor did his obituary appear in the New
York Times. He was not forgotten in Yates County, however, and in
1927, twenty-three years after his death, the monument to his memory was
erected at Kinney's Corners.
Although no official sign or map identifies the hamlet as Kinney's Corners,
it is known by that name to everyone who lives there or nearby. A post
office, with the official name of Bluff Point, established in 1850, was
closed in January, 1983. Kinney's Corners was a stop on the electric trolley
line that ran from Penn Yan to Branchport. The largest buildings today
are the Methodist church, founded in 1832, and the small store. Still
for those who take the trouble to notice there is the monument to native
son, Coates Kinney, and for those who look further there is a handsome
portrait at the Yates County Historical Society painted by Philip W. Prugh.
|
