Great Workshop on Mapping at The Rockwell Museum!

Thanks to our grant from NOAA through the B-WET Chesapeake Program, the New York Geographic Alliance was able to bring a great professional development opportunity to the Southern Tier on January 26th. We held our Mapping the Susquehanna Workshop at The Rockwell Museum in downtown Corning. During this full-day workshop, Susan Hoskins guided the teacher-participants through map interpretation with topographic maps and aerial imagery of the Corning area over 100 years. Since many of the teachers live in or near Corning, we all learned a lot about the history of this important city in the Chesapeake Watershed. We saw an aerial photograph from 1972 that showed a house in the middle of an intersection, dumped there by a flood during Hurricane Agnes. 

We were fortunate to have Jim Pfiffer of the Friends of the Chemung River at our workshop. He led our group on a short walk over to the river, where he discussed the importance of the Chemung to Corning and Elmira and the problems that this important tributary to the Susquehanna has. We were joined by the local television station, WETM 18 in Elmira. If you want to see their on-air report, click here.

     

Photo on Left: Jim Pfiffer (center) discusses the Chemung River from the pedestrian bridge; Photo on Right: Participants enjoy a great docent-led tour of the galleries (with Janna Keser) at The Rockwell Museum. 

 

After a nice lunch, the group was treated to a tour of the galleries of The Rockwell Museum, the only affiliated-institution with the Smithsonian in New York State. The discussions on landscape paintings fit very well with the overall goal of this workshop. The teachers really enjoyed their day at the Museum. We hope that they will continue to partner with the New York Geographic Alliance on other watershed trainings in the future. We will definitely be partnering with the Friends of the Chemung in the future months ahead!

If you want to know more about the B-WET Program here in New York, contact the NYGA Office at (585)-292-2398 or email Tim McDonnell.