The Hand of Man

Legends of the Lake

Skimming the Surface

Pumping Cash Out of Seneca

Something about fishing.

Why Seneca?

The Lakes Country Rambler

Counting on the Lake

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Frozen in Time

Seneca Lake freezes over only slightly more often than that other place.

Owing primarily to its depth, Seneca Lake fully freezes over very rarely. Memories of those occasions are the stuff of lore, sometimes open to debate. It’s the kind of thing that used to happen more than it does today.

The late Robert Edwin Doran ‘22, a local physician and amateur historian, in his serial memoirs published in the Finger Lakes Times, included a 1979 accounting of recorded lake freeze-overs. There were four: 1855, ‘75, ‘85, and the last in 1912. None has been recorded since Doran’s article. The author collected newspaper accounts of skating parties, iceboat accidents, blocked steamboat navigation, and even horse races on the lake. (A collection of Doran’s writings is held in the Colleges’ library.)

The late E.E. Griffith, professor of English and drama, once told Professor Ted Theismeyer that as a child he had skated from Geneva to Watkins Glen — roughly 35 miles on blades. And in her recent book The Names of Things: A Passage in the Egyptian Desert, Susan Brind Morrow, who grew up in Geneva in the 1960s and ‘70s, recalls a first-grade teacher’s story of "a thousand swans [who] came down on the lake to land and froze to death. Their feet stuck to the ice and they could not take off again."

It is difficult to assess the veracity of this last report. A thousand swans on Seneca Lake seems only slightly less likely than, say, Hell freezing over. — D.C.

The Seneca Lake series was researched and written by Dana Cooke and Peter Rolph '85 — writer/editors in the Office of College Relations. Portions of the series also appear in the Fall '97 issue of The Pulteney St. Survey. To request a copy, e-mail Susan Murad at murad@hws.edu.