8 Quirkiest Finger Lakes Towns To Visit In 2026
Plenty of Finger Lakes towns have a strange chapter in their past. These eight decided to make it the main event. One bolted a 28-foot pancake griddle to the side of a mill and left it there. One still crowns Sauerkraut Royalty every August, decades after the last kraut factory closed. One built its whole reputation on a single baker's grape pies. What follows is not the polished lakefront version of the region; it is the odder, truer one, where a town's weirdest claim to fame is usually the thing worth knowing it for.
Aurora
The strangest photo stop in Aurora is a chicken coop. A Gothic-Revival one, to be exact, built by MacKenzie-Childs, the home-decor company that operates out of a former 65-acre dairy farm above Cayuga Lake. Highland cattle graze the grounds, artisans hand-paint the checkerboard pottery the brand is known for, and the "Chicken Palace" out back is fancier than most people's kitchens. The farmhouse tours are free.
Aurora runs on a single Main Street with no stoplight and does not need one. The buildings are old enough for the National Register of Historic Places, and most were restored in the early 2000s by Pleasant Rowland, the woman behind the American Girl doll company. Her money also went into Wells College, which anchored the village for over 150 years until it closed in 2024, and the 1833 Aurora Inn, now run as part of the Inns of Aurora group.
Hammondsport
Fewer than 600 people live in Hammondsport, and one of them held pilot's license number one. Glenn Curtiss was issued Aviator Certificate No. 1 by the Aero Club of America, and before he ever left the ground he was already the fastest man alive: in 1907 he ran a V-8 motorcycle of his own design to 136 miles per hour at Ormond Beach, a mark that stood for years. The Glenn H. Curtiss Museum south of the town square keeps his early aircraft, those motorcycles, and reproductions of the seaplanes and flying boats he tested on Keuka Lake.
The lake carries its own draw. Wineries ring the shoreline, and Bully Hill Vineyards looks out over the water with a tasting room, restaurant, wine museum, and art gallery. Every fall the Curtiss Museum runs its Wings and Wheels show, bringing seaplanes back to Keuka to land on the same water Curtiss once used as a runway.
Penn Yan
A 28-foot griddle is bolted to the side of Birkett Mills, and there is a good reason it is up there. On September 27, 1987, the mill mixed batter in a cement mixer, poured it out, and flipped a buckwheat pancake with a construction crane to set a world record. The record stood for years before a town in Rochdale, England, took it in 1994. Penn Yan kept the griddle up anyway.
The village also sits at the center of New York's largest horse-and-buggy Old Order Mennonite settlement. On Saturdays the Windmill Farm and Craft Market fills with quilts, produce, and Amish and Mennonite baked goods. The Keuka Lake Outlet Trail runs seven miles from town past old mill ruins toward Dresden, and Laurentide Beer Company pours out of a restored 19th-century carriage house on Maiden Lane.
Naples
Naples answers to Grape Pie Capital of the World, and the title traces to one woman's kitchen. Around 1959, longtime resident Irene Bouchard began baking Concord grape pies at home, and the dessert is largely credited to her; she turned a local oddity into an industry that the town now defends every September at the World's Greatest Grape Pie Contest, the centerpiece of the Naples Grape Festival. Just north in South Bristol, Arbor Hill Grapery and Winery spins the same grape into wines, jellies, sauces, and mustards.
Grimes Glen, near downtown, holds a stranger distinction: in 1882, Naples geologist D. Dana Luther pulled a fossilized tree more than 350 million years old out of the stone here, the oldest ever found in New York. The specimen went to the New York State Museum in Albany, but the glen kept the easier attraction: two 60-foot waterfalls at the end of a short, wet creek walk off Vine Street, a few miles south of Canandaigua Lake.
Phelps
Phelps was once the largest sauerkraut producer on the planet, canning more fermented cabbage than anywhere else. The factories closed decades ago; the identity did not budge. Every August since 1967, the town holds Phelps Sauerkraut Weekend in Redfield Park, four days of cabbage bowling, a parade, and a Sauerkraut Royalty coronation, honoring a title no one else wants and Phelps refuses to give up.
The Howe House Museum downtown has a genuine rarity: a two-story brick outhouse, one level serving the first floor and another the second. A block away, Flint Creek drops into a small waterfall right behind Main Street, visible from the back patio at Water Side Wine Bar, which strings lights over the deck at night. Crafty Ales and Lagers brews small batches nearby in one of the oldest buildings in town.
Seneca Falls
Seneca Falls carries two identities, one historic and one cinematic. The 1848 Seneca Falls Convention, organized here by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and a small group of local women, was the first women's rights convention in the country. The Women's Rights National Historical Park preserves that story, including the Wesleyan Chapel where the convention met and Stanton's home, and the National Women's Hall of Fame sits a few blocks away.
The second identity is a matter of local faith: many here are convinced Seneca Falls was the model for Bedford Falls in "It's a Wonderful Life." No document confirms it, and the town treats it as beloved legend rather than fact, which does not stop it from building all of December around the film. The It's a Wonderful Life Museum keeps memorabilia and cast material, including items tied to Karolyn Grimes, who played Zuzu, and the It's a Wonderful Life Bridge marks the spot residents believe inspired the movie's most famous scene. Cast members have turned up for the December festival in person.
Waterloo
In 1966, Congress and President Lyndon Johnson named Waterloo the official birthplace of Memorial Day, crediting a community observance the town says it held on May 5, 1866. Historians have been picking at the date ever since. A 2014 study by Daniel Bellware and Richard Gardiner argues the first real observance actually came in 1868, and that other towns have stronger claims, but Waterloo holds the federal title and marks the day every year regardless.
The National Memorial Day Museum on Main Street lays out the town's version, including the roles of local druggist Henry C. Welles and Civil War veteran John B. Murray. Each Memorial Day weekend, the Celebrate and Commemorate event fills the streets with a parade and Civil War living-history encampments.
Montour Falls
Montour Falls hides a 156-foot waterfall two blocks off Main Street. Shequaga Falls drops right behind the downtown, close enough that people passing through sometimes miss it entirely. Its admirers ran high: Louis Philippe, the future king of France, sketched the falls while exiled in the United States, and a local marker claims the drawing now hangs in the "Louvre" in Paris.
A small park at the base has a paved path straight to the viewing area, with a road bridge crossing above the top of the cascade. The Brick Tavern Museum downtown, currently under restoration, holds artifacts from the era when the settlement was still called Havana, and the Montour Falls Memorial Library is worth a look for its own oddity: built of local clay brick with round pillars instead of square ones, a detail echoed on a few nearby buildings. Watkins Glen and its gorge trail sit three miles up the road.
The Weird Is The Point
A bolted-up griddle, a two-story outhouse, a coronation for a cabbage nobody cans anymore, a king's sketch supposedly hanging in the Louvre: none of it was staged for anyone. Each of these towns took the odd thing that happened to it, a record, a factory, a fossil, a movie rumor, and decided to keep it rather than tidy it away. That is what separates them from the postcard version of the Finger Lakes. The lakes and the wineries are the easy sell. The griddle and the kraut royalty are the reason these eight towns are worth knowing.
