Finger Lakes
Based on Wikipedia: Finger Lakes
Imagine eleven lakes so deep that their bottoms lie below sea level, carved by glaciers into long, slender shapes that early settlers thought resembled the fingers of a giant hand pressed into the earth. These are the Finger Lakes of New York State, and they hold secrets spanning two million years of geological violence, centuries of Indigenous civilization, and the birth of movements that would reshape American society.
Written in Ice
The story of these lakes begins not with water, but with ice—sheets of it, miles thick, creeping down from what is now Hudson Bay. Around two million years ago, the Laurentide Ice Sheet began its slow conquest of North America, and it would return again and again over the millennia, each advance reshaping the land beneath it.
Before the ice came, this region was simply a series of rivers flowing northward. The glaciers transformed them into something far more dramatic. As the ice moved, meltwater beneath it acted like a rasp, grinding deeper into the rock. The glaciers themselves pressed down with unimaginable weight, carving channels that would eventually become lake beds. When the ice finally retreated around fourteen thousand years ago, it left behind natural dams of debris—terminal moraines, geologists call them—that trapped water in the gouged-out valleys.
The result is striking and a bit paradoxical. Seneca Lake plunges to 618 feet, Cayuga to 435 feet, yet neither is more than three and a half miles wide. They're deep trenches filled with water, not the broad shallow pools you might expect from glacial action. And here's something stranger still: while the valleys were carved hundreds of feet deep, the surrounding uplands show almost no evidence of glacial erosion. The ice seems to have been too thin at higher elevations to leave its mark, focusing all its destructive power in the valleys below.
This selective carving left another distinctive feature. Some tributary streams now hang 390 feet above the lake floors, their waters cascading down as waterfalls because the glaciers deepened the main valleys far faster than the side valleys could keep pace. These hanging valleys give the region its famous gorges and waterfalls.
Lakes Before Lakes
Scientists studying the sediments along Cayuga Lake discovered something unexpected: evidence of a much older lake that existed here roughly fifty thousand years ago. They named it Glacial Lake Nanette, and it filled the same bedrock valley where Cayuga now sits. Then another glacial advance buried it under fresh debris around thirty thousand years ago.
This discovery matters because it tells us the Finger Lakes region wasn't carved in a single glacial episode. The valleys existed long before the most recent ice age and were deepened repeatedly over multiple glaciations. Patches of ancient sediment from between ice ages still survive in some of the hanging valleys along the lake margins, like geological time capsules.
The eleven lakes, from west to east, are Conesus, Hemlock, Canadice, Honeoye, Canandaigua, Keuka, Seneca, Cayuga, Owasco, Skaneateles, and Otisco. Locals divide them into "major" and "minor" categories, with Seneca, Cayuga, Skaneateles, Owasco, Keuka, and Canandaigua earning major status based primarily on their size.
Other lakes in the area have been excluded from the official count for various reasons. Waneta and Lamoka, southeast of Keuka, drain into the Susquehanna River rather than Lake Ontario, so they're sometimes called the "fingernail" lakes—close relatives but technically outside the family. Silver Lake, west of the Genesee River, has all the geological characteristics of a Finger Lake but sits too far from the others to be included. Oneida Lake to the northeast is occasionally dubbed "the thumb," though it's shallow and different in character from its deeper cousins.
The Haudenosaunee Homeland
For thousands of years before European contact, this region was the heart of Haudenosaunee territory—the people Europeans would call the Iroquois. The Seneca nation lived near the lake that bears their name, the Cayuga near theirs. The Tuscarora joined them around 1720, while the Onondaga and Oneida occupied the eastern edges of the region, and the Mohawk lived farther east still.
These weren't scattered bands of hunters. The Haudenosaunee built towns. Gen-nis-he-yo stood where Geneseo is today. Kanadaseaga, known to colonists as Seneca Castle, rose near modern Geneva. Goiogouen—Cayuga Castle—overlooked Cayuga Lake from the east. These were substantial settlements with longhouses, agricultural fields, and sophisticated political structures.
The Haudenosaunee Confederacy was arguably the most powerful Indigenous political entity in colonial North America. For nearly two centuries after first contact with Europeans, they maintained control of the Finger Lakes region through a combination of military strength and diplomatic cunning. They played French and British interests against each other with remarkable skill, understanding that neither colonial power could ignore them.
The Finger Lakes also became a refuge for other displaced peoples. In 1753, remnants of several Virginia Siouan tribes, collectively known as the Tutelo-Saponi, settled at Coreorgonel near present-day Ithaca under Haudenosaunee protection. Their village would stand until 1779.
The region holds archaeological mysteries too. The Bluff Point Stoneworks consists of enigmatic stone structures whose age and builders remain unknown. We simply don't know who built them or why.
The Destruction
By the late eighteenth century, the balance of power had shifted. France had lost its North American empire, removing one counterweight the Haudenosaunee had used against British expansion. The colonial population kept growing, and settlers pressed relentlessly westward.
The American Revolution shattered what remained of Haudenosaunee unity. Some nations sided with the British, others with the Americans, fracturing the Confederacy along lines of civil war. British-allied Haudenosaunee warriors attacked American frontier settlements, prompting retaliation.
That retaliation came in 1779 as the Sullivan Expedition, a military campaign that systematically destroyed Haudenosaunee towns and food stores throughout the Finger Lakes region. The Tutelo-Saponi village at Coreorgonel was among those burned. By the campaign's end, Haudenosaunee power was effectively broken. After the Revolutionary War, the survivors were confined to reservations, and their ancestral lands—including the entire Finger Lakes region—were opened to purchase and settlement.
The Phelps and Gorham Purchase of 1790 covered roughly the western half of the Finger Lakes. Settlers flooded in, mostly from New England with a smaller influx from Pennsylvania. The architecture they built—Federal and Greek Revival styles—still marks the landscape.
The Burned-Over District
The early nineteenth century transformed the Finger Lakes into one of the most religiously and socially volatile regions in America. Historians call it the "burned-over district," a term suggesting the area had been so swept by the flames of religious revival that no fuel remained.
The Second Great Awakening hit here with particular intensity. Christian revival meetings drew thousands, and entirely new religious movements emerged from the ferment. Palmyra, at the northern end of the lakes, became the birthplace of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The Hill Cumorah, where Joseph Smith reported finding golden plates, still hosts an annual pageant drawing thousands of visitors.
But the reformist energy wasn't only religious. Seneca Falls hosted the 1848 convention that launched the women's suffrage movement in America—the gathering where Elizabeth Cady Stanton and others drafted the Declaration of Sentiments demanding equal rights for women. Waterloo claims to be the birthplace of Memorial Day.
The region was also deeply involved in the Underground Railroad, the network that helped enslaved people escape to freedom. Harriet Tubman, the "Moses of her people" who personally led dozens to freedom, made her home in Auburn. Her house is now a museum.
Industry and Innovation
The towns around the Finger Lakes developed distinctive identities. Hammondsport was home to Glenn Curtiss, a motorcycle racer turned aviation pioneer who competed with the Wright Brothers for supremacy of the skies. The thermal air currents around the lakes still make it popular with glider pilots.
Elmira, just south of the lake region, has a dual legacy. Mark Twain spent his later years there, writing in a study shaped like a riverboat pilothouse. But the town also housed one of the Civil War's most notorious prison camps, where nearly three thousand Confederate prisoners died from disease, exposure, and inadequate food.
Corning built its identity around glass. The Corning Glass Works and its associated museum made the town a center for both industrial glass production and the preservation of glass art spanning millennia. Hornell, southwest of the lakes, became a railroad hub where locomotives were repaired for decades and passenger rail cars are still manufactured today.
Wine Country
The same geological features that make the Finger Lakes visually striking also make them ideal for growing grapes. Their extraordinary depth creates a moderating effect on the local climate—what meteorologists call a lake effect, though in this case it works through temperature rather than snowfall.
Deep water changes temperature slowly. In winter, the lakes retain summer's warmth, protecting the surrounding slopes from extreme cold. In spring, they hold onto winter's chill, which sounds like a disadvantage but actually protects young grape shoots from late frosts. The grapes are shielded during the vulnerable period of spring growth, then again before fall harvest.
The lakes' long, narrow, north-to-south orientation creates additional complexity. East-facing slopes get morning sun; west-facing slopes get afternoon light. Combined with variations in soil and elevation, this produces a remarkable diversity of growing conditions in a relatively compact area.
Today over four hundred wineries and vineyards surround six of the lakes—Seneca, Cayuga, Canandaigua, Keuka, Conesus, and Hemlock. They grow Chardonnay, Riesling, Gewürztraminer, Pinot Noir, and Cabernet Franc alongside American native grape varieties. The Farm Winery Act of 1976 opened the floodgates for small producers, transforming the region into New York's largest wine-producing area.
The oldest continuously operating sacramental winery in the Western Hemisphere sits on Conesus Lake. On Hemlock Lake, the O-Neh-Da Vineyard—named with the Seneca words meaning "Lake of Hemlock Trees"—was founded in 1872 by Bishop McQuaid and continues producing pure grape wine for churches and secular customers alike.
Preservation and Threat
The two westernmost lakes, Hemlock and Canadice, have followed a different path from their more developed neighbors. Since 1876, they've supplied drinking water to Rochester, and to protect water quality, the city gradually acquired most of the surrounding land. Over decades, abandoned farms and cottage sites were reclaimed by forest. Today only scattered stone walls and old foundations hint at the previous human presence.
In 2010, this land became the Hemlock-Canadice State Forest, covering nearly seven thousand acres. With their steep, forested, largely undeveloped shorelines and deep clear water, these two lakes offer something rare: a glimpse of what all the Finger Lakes might have looked like before European settlement.
Hemlock Lake holds another distinction. Its nesting bald eagle site, dating to the early 1960s, is the oldest in New York State. Eagles raised there helped restore the species throughout the region after decades of decline from pesticide contamination.
The 584-mile Finger Lakes Trail winds through the southern portion of the region, connecting to the much longer North Country National Scenic Trail that stretches 4,600 miles across the northern United States.
Yet the lakes face serious threats. The region sits atop the Marcellus Shale and Utica Shale formations, two major natural gas reserves that became accessible through hydraulic fracturing—fracking. The Finger Lakes became a center of resistance to the technology, with residents concerned about groundwater contamination and industrial impacts on a region whose economy depends heavily on clean water and scenic beauty. Some of the first direct actions and local legislation against fracking in America originated here. In December 2014, New York State banned fracking entirely, citing pollution risks.
Since 2017, toxic algae blooms have affected all eleven lakes, becoming an annual occurrence for most. The blooms are driven by nutrient runoff from agriculture and development, warming temperatures, and the lakes' own depth—the same characteristic that makes them beautiful also means they don't mix and flush as readily as shallower waters.
And in an irony that would puzzle the nineteenth-century settlers who saw this region as pristine wilderness, trash from New York City is now shipped to landfills in the Finger Lakes area. The deep valleys that glaciers carved became convenient places to bury what the metropolis discards.
Eleven Fingers, One Hand
The name itself is surprisingly recent for such a distinctive geographical feature. The oldest known published use of "finger lakes" for this group dates only to 1883, in a paper by Thomas Chamberlin for the United States Geological Survey. A decade later, R.S. Tarr formally adopted "Finger Lakes" as a proper name. Earlier usage in maps or documents hasn't been verified.
What the Haudenosaunee called this collection of waters is harder to recover. We know they named individual lakes—Seneca and Cayuga preserve those names, and "O-Neh-Da" survives as a winery's brand. But whether they had a collective term for these eleven aligned bodies of water, shaped by forces operating two million years before any human walked their shores, remains uncertain.
What we do know is that these lakes—born of ice, witness to the rise and fall of nations, home to religious revivals and reform movements, supplier of wine and water—continue to exert their influence on those who live along their shores. The glaciers that carved them are long gone. The forces they set in motion are not.