One of the artifacts in the village of Aurora starts high up on the plateau, which makes up Ledyard, Venice Center and Genoa. Today, we call it a gully, but it was a small river 15,000 years ago when the last glacier melted and retreated north to its origins. The slopes on which we live today, were once sheer cliffs leading up to the plateau. As the ice melted on top of the glacier, the runoff into the Cayuga Lake basin cut down through the cliffs and slopes like a hot knife through butter.

Today, the ancient river flows only when really heavy rain runoff blocks off junctions way uphill and runs under Route 90 in a standard storm drain. The riverbed ran between the current Masonic lodge and the restoration yellow house (Zweigart) on the lakeside.

Over time, humans and animals have interacted with the waterflow in various ways. Wildlife, and later farm animals, found it to be a source of drinking water while grazing pastures or woodland tracts. Residents of Aurora got into the act in the 18th and 19th centuries with the growth of the village and with the construction of a wooden building somewhere on the north side of the river. Historian Sheila Edmunds finds in the records that a Sam Mandell built that first building as a carpenter's shop in 1838. With the construction date in the 1830s, it is likely that the shop was powered by flowing water.

By 1868, the property was transferred to his son, who enlarged it and put unspecified machinery into it. The records then show it was sold to the Creamery Company in 1894 and functioned as a creamery until the early 20th century. There is no record of its removal.

Along with the stone mill further up the lake, the creamery was a shipping point for agricultural commodities produced up on the plateau. In addition, that raises a few questions about the market for the output of the creamery: Was it used for butter, cheese or fresh market milk? What did the creamery do to the raw milk, which was usually chilled only with spring water? In later years, it was shipped out on the Lehigh Valley Railroad in steel milk cans behind steam and then diesel electric engines. Because the train stopped at many milk depots in each trip, it was called a milk run.

What they did do with the spoilage was to dump it in the river outside the building. That kind of action today comes with a high price and jail time. And where we traverse the uphill roads out of the village in all wheel drive vehicles, wagonloads of heavy farm produce, or milk cans, could not come down the steep hills of Sherwood Road or Poplar Ridge Road, because teams of horses could not hold them back. Our grandfathers took the teams up to Levanna Road, where there was an easy grade, and then went west and back down the lake road to Aurora.

We expect to continue adapting to and changing our environment. Let's hope our descendants can have as much faith and trust in our now and future paradigm and have the sense to adapt their era, for we are leaving them with a very heavy load to come down the hill.

William Dugan is former supervisor for the town of Ledyard