An interview with Jane Pearson from the Keuka Lake Association Newsletter
Occasionally, we are all asked for our birthdate in the form MM/DD/YYYY. On January 6th of
2025, I met Jane Pearson, one of the reasons why it is important for us to express the year with
four digits. Though born on 9/30/21, she is certainly not three years old.
Most people reading this can only imagine what life was like at Keuka Lake 100 years ago. Jane
can discuss it. Picture a time in the 1920s when your home may have had a phone, but didn’t
have a refrigerator or even electricity. Your well water was delivered by a hand operated pump.
Jane witnessed changes to this and much more in her 103 years (so far) at Keuka Lake.
In her early years, the lakeshore was minimally developed and summer homes were mostly
small cottages. Steamboats that provided transport along the shoreline were being replaced
by cars, but Jane recalls riding the trolley that ran from Branchport to Penn Yan before it
ceased operation in 1927.
Jane’s parents and grandparents also grew up in the area but her roots take her back further to
her great grandfather, Dr. J. C. Wightman who, in the 1800s, built the stone house that still
stands at the south edge of Branchport, along the lake.
As a child, Jane attended primary school at the Stone Schoolhouse, now offices for the Town of
Jerusalem. She recalls summers when she and her cousin took the rowboat out to catch fish
that they would clean and cook over a fire they built along the opposite shore. At night, fishing
boats with propane-fueled lights, attracted minnows to the surface and lit up the whole
northern end of the lake. In later years she learned to waterski and spent time sailing with her
brother on his A Scow and the smaller but faster E Scow. Sugar Creek provided a place to catch
turtles and explore the habitat.
Keuka’s water level was not well controlled (as it is today) and Jane remembers a time,
probably the flood of 1935, paddling a boat over the decks of cottages on Campbell’s Beach
which is now Camp Good Days.
Winters were often harsh and the long-forgotten act of ice harvesting took place each winter in
Branchport at the basin south of town. Large blocks of ice, insulated with saw dust, were stored
at the ice house and utilized through the summer for the ice boxes of residents before
refrigeration became widely available. As the ice broke up in the spring it was also time to tap
the sugar maple trees to make syrup.
After attending Penn Yan Academy and Keuka College, Jane took a job with IBM in Rochester, but like
so many nearby grape vines, her roots had been firmly planted at Keuka Lake. In 1948, as a single
young woman, she took earnings from her job at IBM and bought a parcel of land along the lake. That
purchase made her roots grow deeper as she later married, had four children and built a summer
home on the property. She and her husband Bill, never wanted to leave and at the age of 103, she still
spends her summers in that home and drinks Keuka Lake water.
But this story doesn’t end there. Jane’s daughter Ann, and husband Rob, live across the lake on West
Bluff Drive. Occasionally, above the pristine waters of the lake, a red, white and blue seaplane flown
by Jane’s grandson, points to yet another generation for which the lake feels like home. All because of
Jane.
Jane could never remember a time when Keuka Lake water was undrinkable. To some degree, it
resides in every cell of her body and has sustained her for more than a century. When asked if it was
perhaps possible that Keuka Lake water gets credit for her longevity, her immediate response was
crisp and to the point: “Didn’t hurt. That’s for sure!”
See the full Keuka Lake Association Newsletter at this link: https://www.keukalakeassociation.org/pdf/newsletter/91_pdf.pdf
