Native peoples in small numbers lived around Keuka Lake for centuries before the Seneca took control, around 1500. But their main towns were at the north end of the lakes, and Keuka’s population remained small.

*White people started muscling in around 1790, after forced sales and unjust treaties. Jemima Wilkinson, the imperious frontier prophetess, ordered mills established along Keuka Outlet and settled her flock nearby. Jemima claimed to have died and come back to life, but she finally got it right in 1819, after which her following dwindled away.

*By the early 1800s a schooner plied the lake, and shipping ran southward to Bath and the Conhocton River. When the Erie Canal changed traffic patterns in 1825 the entire economy of our region collapsed until the Crooked Lake Canal (Penn Yan to Dresden, on Seneca Lake) opened in 1833, joining us with the Erie system. Now freight flowed northward, Hammondsport became a true port, and the economy revived.

*About then steamboats appeared, beginning with “Keuka,” a double-hulled centerwheeler that ran right up onto the beach.

*In the 1850s grape cultivation got under way… the first thing Pulteney people had ever found to justify the taxes on their land, according to one contemporary. Penn Yan and Hammondsport had academies offering high school education. Pleasant Valley Wine Company opened just before the Civil War. Hundreds of men from Yates and Steuben Counties died, while many more suffered life-long effects from their wounds.

*Railroads found their way to Penn Yan and Hammondsport, which helped the grape growers and wine makers, but also stimulated tourism. Families traveled by train and steamboat to lakeside resorts, there to spend a month or even a whole season enjoying the water and the scenery, with tasting tours laid on.

*An electric railway (or trolley) connected Penn Yan with Branchport, and Keuka College got under way by fits and starts, beginning as a ground for revival meetings.

*With a new century Glenn Curtiss opened the age of internal combustion, first on motorcycles and then in blimps and airplanes. Hammondsport became a dirty, smelly, smokey industrial town, until the Great War ended, and the Curtiss plant closed just as Prohibition began. The economy collapsed again, and drunken men taking pistol practice became routine on Hammondsport streets.

*The last of the steamboats gave up the ghost, and in 1919 local folks formed the Finger Lakes Association – now Finger Lakes Tourism Alliance – to promote family travel to the region. This meant improving the roads, and Governor Al Smith made an inspection, ordering that the West Lake Road be paved.

*Then came the Great Depression and the catastrophic 1935 flood, but Roosevelt’s New Deal repealed Prohibition, built the Glenn Curtiss Memorial School, and took up the disused trolley tracks in Penn Yan. When World War II came Mercury Aircraft jumped from two employees to 850. But 14 boys from Curtiss School died, and the other communities fared equally sadly.

*State Route 54 was installed in the 1950s, finally providing a good land route between Hammondsport and Penn Yan. Ira Davenport Hospital replaced the old Bath Memorial. Curtiss Museum and the Finger Lakes Trail both got into operation in the early 60s. Experiments by Charles Fournier and Konstantin Frank transformed the grape and wine business. The Hurricane Agnes flood took a toll in 1972. Family farms largely went out until the influx of Amish and Old Order Mennonites. The big wineries were largely succeeded by smaller “boutique” operations.

*As the farms went out the forest came back, and with it came the deer, the bear, the turkey, the beaver. The steamboats are gone, but locals and visitors alike crisscross Keuka in sailboats, motorboats, rowboats, and canoes. Another season on the lake.