Curiosities of the Finger Lakes: Hidden Ancient Ruins, Flying Machines, the Boy Who Caught a Trout with His Nose and More

by Melanie Zimmer

The Finger Lakes region is known for its beauty, but look carefully and you will discover some of New York's other abundant--and unusual--treasures. The cliffs of Excelsior Glen are scattered with ancient Indian pictographs, and Bluff Point conceals the ruins of an unknown civilization. The wine industry has its own strange stories; discover why one wine producer was banned from using his own name. Among the oddities of the Finger Lakes region are the world's largest pancake, a slice of Susan B. Anthony's seventy-eighth birthday cake and the anecdote of the boy who accidentally caught an eight-pound trout with his nose. Join author Melanie Zimmer and uncover these and other curiosities and strange tales of the Finger Lakes.

Genres: Travel

160 pages, Paperback

First published May 4, 2014

Reviews

[Kelly Sedinger]

I read this as research/inspiration for a sequence of novellas and short stories I hope to write someday soon about life around one of the Finger Lakes. I strongly recommend books like this: short and breezy reads full of interesting tales about colorful people in specific locales, the less-traveled the better. There's a lot of entertaining and colorful stuff in here.

[Cheryl Gatling]

This book is a mish-mash of interesting bits of local history, stories that are individually not long enough for a whole book, so they are lumped together. The book is by nature uneven. Some of the items are more interesting than others, some more fact based, and some more speculative. I was more interested in the history, and less interested in the ghost stories.

Let’s just address the items in the subtitle: hidden ancient ruins, flying machines, and the boy who caught a trout with his nose.

I was very interested in the hidden ancient ruins. They were elevated pathways, one foot high, lined with stones, in geometric shapes as if they formed rooms. This was very hard to imagine as there weren’t really any good pictures. Supposedly the local Native Americans were asked what they knew about the structures, and they said they didn’t build them. They had been there when they moved in.

What amazed me most was how little anyone cared in 1880. Two men named Samuel Hart Wright and his son Berlin Hart Wright documented the ruins. The author points out that they were not trained archeologists, so their procedures weren’t correct or thorough. But couldn’t they have gotten archeologists to the site? Instead, the land was just plowed over for farmer’s fields. A road was paved right through it. Underground phone cables were laid through it. Stones were removed by local people to build houses with. Now there’s nothing to see.

But surely this is still something worth studying. Surely the shape of the stone pathways still exists under the surface. But what do I know? And besides, someone has to pay for scientific studies of things.

As for flying machines, there was a Glenn H Curtiss who was an early pioneer of flight. The Wright Brothers got all the historical glory, but they weren’t the only people racing to fly. Curtiss flew, too, and went into the airplane manufacturing business.

As for the boy who caught a trout with his nose, he was leaning over the edge of the boat, looking into the water, when a fish jumped out of the water and bit him on the nose. The fish was knocked off into the boat. There is a photo of the boy, the fish, and the boy’s mother. The boy grew up to be an accomplished steamboat captain. So that was fun.

[Claudia]

Seriously, any book that has as part of it's title "...the boy who caught a trout with his nose..." needs to be read. Just for that alone.

This is just a series of stories collected by the author from in Finger Lakes region of New York.
There are:
- Indian tales from various creation myths including birds receiving their songs and the creation of lacrosse. And that Native Americans were some of the lost tribes of Israel that lost their history.
- Ruins (now buried beneath feet of cultivated ground) that may be connected to the Hopewell mound-builders as well as ancient pictograms.
- Haunted castles and houses.
- Introduction of grape vines to the Finger Lakes.
- Various inventions including Curtiss' motorcycles and airplanes as well as Case developing the sound track for our silent movies.
- The ghost deer (they are actually just white, not albino) of the Seneca Army Depot
- A piece of Susan B. Anthony's birthday cake (seriously)
- Disappearance of the HMS Ontario on Halloween (it's been found and the actual location is not given since it is a grave site)
- Quick origins of the Mennonites and Amish
- Only surviving intact Tiffany decorated chapel in the world (Willard Memorial Chapel in Geneva, NY)
- And the curious boy, that went angling with his mother, who was leaning over the side of their boat to look under the water and literally an eight-pound trout jumped out of the water and attached itself to his nose. There is a picture of the boy, his mother and the trout.

Amusing and interesting bits of nostalgia regarding the area.

2019-159

[Eva]

This book had good points and bad. The book points is that it got me interested in a few sites around the Finger Lakes that I wouldn't have known about and some interesting inventions that transpired here. As a tourist advertisement book it is successful. The bad is the author's Eurocenterism and bias against the Indigenous populations (while she did give them a chapter and a half, called the Iroquois their endonym of Haudenosaunee out of understanding that Iroquois means "snake" in the Algonquin languages, she also said that the missionaries brought "morality and spirituality" to the Finger Lakes despite the next chapter being literally on the Haudenosaunee's spiritual beliefs. She mourned the lack for writing and discounted all oral traditions by the natives) lopsided focus of subject matter (Chapter 6 which was focused on hauntings was very long and sometimes went on excessively of the grisly details of places which makes me think that this author really likes true crime), and various typographic errors that it seems the publishing press did not catch. Overall a mixed bag written by an amateur historian.