7 Offbeat Finger Lakes Towns To Visit

In Trumansburg, the downtown storefront where Robert Moog built his first synthesizers still stands a few blocks from a 215-foot waterfall. That blend of the odd and the ordinary defines the Finger Lakes towns that sit off the main wine-tour routes in New York. Penn Yan still grinds buckwheat at a mill running since 1797. Hammondsport put the first pre-announced public airplane flight in the country into the air over Keuka Lake. These seven places skip the postcard shoreline for something more specific. Some turn on a winery or a gorge, others on a printing press, a cobblestone store, or a stretch of dirt track.

Penn Yan

Penn Yan carries one of the stranger place names in the state. Early residents came from both Pennsylvania and New England, and the village shortened Pennsylvania Yankee into a name that held. The village of about 5,000 stands at the head of Keuka Lake's east branch as the seat of Yates County. The Birkett Mills has ground buckwheat on Main Street since 1797, which ranks it among the oldest working mills in the country.

Downtown gives way to a small arts scene at the Arts Center of Yates County, a gallery set inside a former bank that kept its old vault door. The work on the walls comes from regional artists, and the space runs classes through the year. The Keuka Restaurant a few doors down trades in steaks, sandwiches, and a smoked brisket that regulars order without checking the menu. At the head of the lake, Indian Pines Park opens onto a swimming beach, a boat launch, and a picnic ground that fill up on summer weekends.

Hammondsport

Glenn Curtiss made his name in Hammondsport, and the village of fewer than 1,000 has traded on it ever since. On July 4, 1908, he flew his June Bug more than a mile over the flats near Keuka Lake in the first pre-announced public flight in the United States, and he later held US pilot's license number one. The Glenn H. Curtiss Museum fills 60,000 square feet south of the village with his aircraft, motorcycles, and engines, plus a restoration shop where volunteers rebuild old planes. The southern tip of Keuka Lake also gave the region its first commercial wine, with the Pleasant Valley Wine Company opening here in 1860.

The lake runs a short walk from the village center, and Depot Park gives easy access to the water with picnic tables and a small beach. The Finger Lakes Boating Museum, just outside the village in the former Taylor Wine Company buildings, displays canoes, runabouts, and iceboats that volunteers have restored. Bully Hill Vineyards looks down on the lake from the hills above town, where the tasting room pairs the view with its own labels.

Owego

Owego earned a national title in 2009, when readers of Budget Travel voted it the coolest small town in America. The village of roughly 3,900 lines the north bank of the Susquehanna River in Tioga County, with a downtown of preserved 19th-century storefronts. The Early Owego Antique Center runs two floors of furniture, glassware, and odd finds in a building that rewards a slow walk. Around the corner, the Owego Kitchen turns out paninis and pastries in a restored storefront that draws a steady local crowd.

Riverow Bookshop holds down the town's literary corner, a long-running independent shop stacked with used and rare titles. For a different kind of evening, Tioga Downs sits about 15 minutes west in Nichols, with harness racing, a gaming floor, and a hotel. Owego works best on foot, where the river, the bridge, and the brick Main Street stay within a few blocks of each other.

Palmyra

Palmyra claims four churches facing one another across a single intersection, said to be the only such corner in the country. The village in Wayne County earned the nickname Queen of the Erie Canal Towns during the waterway's boom years, and Lock 29 still works at the edge of downtown. On Main Street, the Grandin Building is where the Book of Mormon was first printed in 1830, a job handled in town rather than shipped to Rochester. The Sacred Grove, a wooded tract near the Joseph Smith family farm, draws Latter-day Saint visitors as the site of Smith's First Vision.

The William Phelps General Store opened in 1868 and never really closed in spirit. The Phelps family lived above the shop, and Sybil Phelps stayed on without electricity or running water until 1976, which left the store and residence frozen as a museum of 19th-century retail. A short walk away, Pal-Mac Aqueduct Park follows the old Erie Canal towpath past the stone remains of the aqueduct and a set of falls.

Aurora

Aurora packs a long history into a village of a few hundred people on the east shore of Cayuga Lake. Henry Wells, founder of Wells Fargo and American Express, settled here, and the lakefront still carries a row of preserved 19th-century homes. The Inns of Aurora has turned several of those houses into a lakeside resort with a spa, kayaking, and archery on the grounds. Down the road, the Fargo Bar and Grill handles the local end of things with comfort food, pool tables, and a patio over the water.

The Howland Stone Store Museum stands just south in the hamlet of Sherwood, inside an 1837 cobblestone store built by the Quaker merchant Slocum Howland. The collection tells the story of his daughter Emily Howland, an abolitionist and suffragist, and of the Underground Railroad route that ran through the area. North of the village near Union Springs, Great Gully cuts a limestone gorge with waterfalls and swimming holes on land protected by a Finger Lakes Land Trust easement.

Trumansburg

Trumansburg owes its name to a clerical slip. The founder was a Revolutionary War veteran named Abner Treman, whose surname appeared in several spellings before a post office application landed on the version that stuck. The village of about 1,700 sits in the town of Ulysses, northwest of Ithaca and a short way from the west shore of Cayuga Lake. From 1961 to 1970, Robert Moog built theremins and his early synthesizers in a downtown storefront, which puts the village at the start of electronic music.

Taughannock Falls drops 215 feet just southeast of the village, one of the tallest single-drop waterfalls east of the Rocky Mountains and higher than Niagara. The state park around it has gorge and rim trails plus a view down to Cayuga Lake. In the village, the Ulysses Historical Society Museum holds local records and artifacts, and Frontenac Point Vineyard pours its estate wines on a slope above the lake. The Finger Lakes GrassRoots Festival fills the fairgrounds each July with four days of music.

Dundee

Dundee runs a dirt track on the same oval where harness horses raced a century ago. Outlaw Speedway, a four-tenths-mile semi-banked dirt oval, hosts Friday-night racing from April through October across a range of car classes. The village sits in Yates County between Seneca and Keuka Lakes, close enough to Seneca that Big Stream runs down to the shore and brings anglers in season.

The hills around Dundee hold two of the region's most serious wineries. Hermann J. Wiemer planted some of the first vinifera on Seneca Lake in 1979 and built a national reputation on Riesling, with tastings that walk through how the wine is made. McGregor Vineyard, one of the older family wineries in the Finger Lakes, looks out over Keuka Lake and runs seated tastings with a plate of cheese, pesto, and chocolate.

Where The Region Gets Strange

The Finger Lakes reward the towns that picked one thing and refused to let go. Owego stacks two floors of antiques a block from the Susquehanna and once wore a national title for it. Aurora keeps the store of a Quaker abolitionist as a working museum. Dundee turns the slopes above Seneca Lake into some of the most awarded Riesling in the country and runs a dirt track on the side. The lakes and the wineries pull people in, but the particulars are what bring them back.