Shequaga Falls

Shequaga Falls drops 156 feet at the end of West Main Street, close enough to town that you can watch it from your car. The name comes from the Seneca word for tumbling waters. A Colonial-style residence from the 1830s sits in front of it, with a bed and breakfast operating next door, and at night the falls are lit softly enough that the effect is more suggestion than spectacle.

Montour Falls looks flat until you understand what you’re standing in. The village sits just south of Seneca Lake in a dramatic stretch of the Portage Escarpment, where glaciers spent themselves some 18,000 years ago carving out the valley and the seven glens that radiate from the village edges. The hills run a thousand feet up on all sides. Shequaga is only the most visible of a couple dozen waterfalls in what locals have long called the Valley of Tumbling Waters.

There was a Seneca village here first—Queanettquaga, more often called Catharine’s Town after Catharine Montour, the matriarch who led it. In August 1779, the Sullivan-Clinton campaign came through and destroyed it along with some forty other Haudenosaunee villages across the Finger Lakes. Orchards were cut down, livestock killed, and the cropland salted so nothing would grow back. The people who lived here scattered as far as Niagara and Canada. Catharine Montour died in 1804, and a grave mound south of the village still marks her.

Settlers moved onto the emptied ground within a decade. George Mills was appointed postmaster in 1802, and the settlement went by Mill’s Landing before it was incorporated as the Village of Havana in 1836. The Chemung Canal had opened three years earlier, tying Seneca Lake to the Chemung River at Elmira, and the railroad arrived the same year—enough to make Havana a manufacturing town and, briefly, the seat of Schuyler County. The canal closed in 1878 and little of it survives. In 1895 the village renamed itself Montour Falls, in honor of the woman whose town it had been built on top of.