History
Over 200 years ago, there were Iroquois villages on Seneca Lake’s surrounding hillsides. During the American Revolutionary War, their villages, including Kanadaseaga ("Seneca Castle") were wiped out during the Sullivan Expedition by troops that invaded their homeland to punish them for assisting the British. Today roadside signs trace Sullivan and Clinton’s route along the east side of Seneca Lake where the burning of villages and crops occurred.
After the war, the land of the Iroquois was parceled out to veterans of the army in payment for their military service. A slow stream of white settlers began to arrive circa 1790. Initially the settlers were without a market nearby or a way to get their crops to market. The settlers’ isolation abruptly ended, though, in the 1820s with the opening of the Erie Canal.
The canal linked the Finger Lakes Region to the outside world. Steamships, barges and ferries quickly became Seneca Lake’s ambassadors of commerce and trade. The former, short Crooked Lake Canal linked Seneca Lake to Keuka Lake.
There are numerous canal barges resting on the bottom of the lake. A collection of barges on the southwest end of the lake, near the village of Watkins Glen, is being preserved and made accessible for scuba diving by the Finger Lakes Underwater Preserve Association.
Read more about this topic: Seneca Lake (New York)
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