Maps ---- Rochester, Monroe Co. / Sodus, Wayne Co., NY ------- and surrounding communities
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(Aug. 29, 1999) -- Iroquois legend has it that the Finger Lakes are fingerprints left by the Great Spirit. The Great God Manitou wanted to reward the Iroquois people with a piece of the happy hunting ground.
But as he pushed the paradise down from the heavens, his hand slipped, causing six indentations that later became the six major lakes -- Canandaigua, Keuka, Seneca, Cayuga, Owasco and Skaneateles.
Geologists tell a different tale to account for the 11 Finger Lakes, which stretch from Conesus Lake on the west to Otisco Lake on the east, with Hemlock, Canadice and Honeoye also in between.
Vast glaciers first advanced into upstate New York from the Hudson Bay area about 1.2 million years ago. As ice ages came and went, waves of glaciers bulldozed across our region, gouging and widening creekbeds and river valleys into deep channels. As the glaciers melted, they filled the channels with water and sealed them off with huge deposits of stone and soil.
When the last glacier melted about 13,000 years ago, the Finger Lakes were complete.
Glaciers are what make a lake a Finger Lake. Although Syracuse-area lakes, such as Onondaga, are oblong and run north-south like the Finger Lakes, they weren't carved out by glaciers. So they don't make the cut.
After the glaciers receded, plants sprouted in the newly uncovered land, followed quickly by animals and then aboriginal hunter-gatherers.
''This region was rich in plant and animal life,'' said Dan Barber, Rochester Museum & Science Center curator of regional history. ''It was a lush area. (Tribes people) could make a good living.''
The first signs of farming and permanent Native American settlements date between 3,000 and 3,500 years ago.
Europeans arrived in the area in the early 1700s, usually explorers, Jesuit missionaries or scouts establishing company trade routes, Barber said.
Many early settlers had been soldiers in the 1779 campaign of General John Sullivan. His mission was to wipe out the Iroquois for fear they would side with the British in the Revolutionary War.
After the war, the soldiers returned here for the rich farmland, said J. Sheldon Fisher, curator of the Valentown Museum in Ontario County. ''The climate was just right. It had the soil, the fine scenery. Everything was ideal.''
By the Civil War, Barber said, farming and the population were booming in the Finger Lakes region.
Steamships could be found on every lake, and Seneca and Cayuga lakes boasted a sizable industry in table grapes, said Emerson Klees, a Rochester historian who has written several histories of the Finger Lakes region.
While development has increased in the region since World War II, manufacturing has been on the decline, Klees said, pointing to such examples such as the now-closed Smith Corona plant in Cortland, Cortland County.
Tourism has begun to fill that void. The Finger Lakes region attracts nine million visitors a year, for an economic impact of $1.5 billion, according to the Penn Yan-based Finger Lakes Association.
Many of those visitors come for the wineries. Keuka and Seneca lakes, in particular, are lined with vineyards.
For New York state, wine is a $500-million-a-year industry, employing 18,000 workers. And the industry is growing in the Finger Lakes area. Since 1976, the number of farm wineries in the region has quadrupled, to 60.
The Finger Lakes are important for another, more vital beverage. Numerous communities across upstate New York depend on the Finger Lakes for their drinking water.
For scenery and natural resources, ''the Finger Lakes are really second to
none,'' said Brad Edmondson, past president of the Ithaca-based Finger Lakes
Land Trust. ''They're one of the great undiscovered treasures of the United
States.''
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