The Finger Lakes history room

The history around us.

Early flights from Keuka Lake, reformers in Auburn, and the people who worked along these shores. Find a story about a place you know, then follow its sources.

134 published stories

Sources, maps & searching tips

The lake filter finds stories that name that lake. Era filters use checked dates from facts and profiles; an undated story may still mention a year. Open any story to read its sources and see what remains uncertain.

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Regional Story

History story

Emily Howland, beyond the directory’s job title

The 1929 directory put Emily Howland under farming. Its short entry also recorded an honorary degree and connections well beyond that label.

The history around us.

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Emily Howland, beyond the directory’s job title

Four ways of sampling Otisco’s fish

Follow a question through the sources.

The causeway mattered to Otisco’s fish count

An old engine in a new Canandaigua steamboat

The flags that called Canandaigua’s steamboats

The Honeoye ponds that helped stock Conesus

What Honeoye’s fishing diaries could—and couldn’t—count

When the Glen Springs guest books became history

Getting to Glen Springs took more than a train ticket

The mail contract with two departure times

The telegram still needed a stage driver

Putting bends back into Honeoye Inlet

Rug samples, daylight and a failed signal from Mars

The lock failed. Boats used another way in.

Before Otisco Shores became a county park

Reading Owasco’s history beneath the lakebed

Someone came for the bank keys

The storm crossed the lakes after midnight

A failed lock stood between the two lakes

Canandaigua and Naples in a 1964 winery register

Ontario County counted its fruit one row at a time

A state forest with a city water system

Two tables in the Skaneateles Community dining room

The dredge could not keep the Seneca inlet open

The sewer was a milestone, not the end of Honeoye’s water work

The photographer came to Grandmother’s dining room

Counting the work in Taylor’s organic-grape trial

The railroad sold a Keuka grape-harvest holiday

A sewing society wrote the work into its rules

How Douglass’s paper asked readers to find the next reader

Sarah Hance’s next classroom

The July Cornell began cooling with Cayuga Lake

Three names in Conesus’s wine records

The picnic advertised in train times and steamer fares

The house a congregation helped build for its pastor

The Geneva club that put tea-room takings toward scholarships

The college that began in Canandaigua storefronts

The Mary and Hannah: a newspaper, an urn and different names

When a college welcome did not feel welcoming

An estate, a hospital and two opening days

The Penn Yan boats that had to wait

The lake record that begins with repeated visits

Emma Lampert put her class on the record

When fourteen municipalities planned for one watershed

The Wells students who wrote the rules

After the fire, Wells College moved into Aurora

Cabbages and orchards in Cayuga County’s farm census

The praise and the footnote at Blackwell’s commencement

The letter that tried to keep Glen Haven open

The volunteers behind a trail between two lakes

The harvest that kept Skaneateles’s teasel shops busy in winter

The Glen Haven invitation that drew more than praise

Daniel Shays’s later life near Conesus

The Frontenac fire, before the inquest report

Blanche Scott learned to fly. The dates are harder.

A summer at Edgewater

Emerson Park came together in more than one step

A cold engine in the Hammondsport tent

The museum reopened before the restoration was over

The station that nearly came down

The work behind racing through Watkins Glen

A farm became a school on Hemlock Lake

The electric railway that ran on steam

Remembering Roseland as a working park

The little office beside the library

Four rented rooms and an evening concert

The millrace that became a canal feeder

Honeoye’s reservoir, on paper

The canal celebration that came before navigation

Before Sonnenberg’s gardens reopened

Carriages, a hotel and a lakeshore park

Blackwell’s diploma, seen from the gallery

The canal that opened a section at a time

The retreat that became Muller Field Station

The greenhouse work behind Sonnenberg’s gardens

The questionnaire that took a picture of Conesus Lake