Seneca County
Between the lakes: Seneca Falls, Waterloo (Skoiyase) and the Montezuma marsh, where the Central Trail crossed.
Seneca County is the neck of land between Cayuga and Seneca lakes. The 1851 sheet names Skoiyase (drawn as Sa-yase) on the Seneca River near Waterloo, and Te-car-jik-ha-do, the salt marsh at the Cayuga outlet that became the Montezuma National Wildlife Refuge. The Central Trail ran along the river between Cayuga and Geneva on the line of NY-5/US-20 through Seneca Falls and Waterloo.
Sullivan’s army marched the same corridor in 1779, destroying the villages here and along the west shore of Cayuga Lake; the sheet’s dots on the shore between Romulus and Ovid are those towns. The county’s south, with NY-89 and NY-96 along the two lakes, carried the shore trails that the sheet draws on both sides of the lakes.
Trails through the county
- The Central Trail: Onondaga to Canandaigua — The western half of the Iroquois Trail across the Finger Lakes: Marcellus, Skaneateles, Auburn, the Cayuga crossing, Seneca Falls, Geneva and Canandaigua.
Sources
- Morgan & Parker, Map of Ho-de-no-sau-nee-ga (1851), digitized by Yale Beinecke Library
- Russell's 1962 redraw, Leventhal Map Center, Boston Public Library
- W. M. Beauchamp, Perch Lake Mounds, with notes on other New York mounds and some accounts of Indian trails, NYS Museum Bulletin 87 (1905)