Sunday June 4th - Genesee Country Village and Museum - Wheatland NY - Not a hike but 5300 steps of walking

We originally went to 'Chili Nature Trail' which was a random find on Google Maps.  The trailhead and parking area exist but they are bizarrely located at the end of an apartment complex access road.  Even the street sign for the road is clearly a private road type sign.  This awkward access probably contributes to what I'm guessing is very low visitation because the trail looked pretty overgrown and 'ticky'.  

I went fishing in Google again from the parking lot of the Chili nature trail and when I saw the GCVM I suggested it to Brian immediately because we were only about 6 miles away and it isn't open all year round and, to be honest, despite gorgeous mild and exceptionally low humidity weather, my enthusiasm for a big hike was low.

There weren't very many cars at the parking lot when we arrived which was nice.  Admission seemed steep at almost 20 dollars per adult.  Thankfully, the scope, scale and quality of the village made it seem like a great value.  This is a living history museum in the vein of the Henry Ford Museum near Detroit.  It's a collection of historic buildings that have been moved into a single location and setup as a village.  These aren't monumental famous buildings like some of the Henry Ford's but they represent a wide swath of American history from the early 1800's to the 1920's.  

While there is a lot of architectural diversity at this museum, the focus is really on what happened inside the buildings.  Some of the buildings had costumed docents who were able to talk about what their building represented but others had craftspeople actually making things.  The scale of this museum is pretty epic.  Here are some of the buildings we saw:

  • Several churches
  • Several shools
  • Several retail shops
  • Land office (realtor)
  • Pharmacy
  • Bakery  

These buildings had people 'doing things' in them giving you a chance to see and converse with them as they crafted:

  • Some of the stores
  • Brewery (very fascinating and labor intensive)
  • Pottery maker (a very productive area with a single person making numerous pieces each day)
  • Blacksmith
  • Barn with several people demonstrating aspects of sheep sheering and wool handling
  • Cloth making
  • One of the larger, grander houses had a woman in the kitchen with a fire and some baked goods around so we assume she made them but we didn't spend a lot of time in that space.

If all that wasn't enough there was also one good sized modern museum exhibit space featuring exhibits about waterfowl hunting through history and a new exhibit about clothing's role in gender concepts. The clothing gender exhibit sounded very aggressively politically correct and preachy from the description I read outside but the actual exhibit did a good job at presenting some facts and concepts without being emotionally manipulative or saccharine.  There was one docent that spent a lot of time chatting with us about some Rochester history which was a nice bonus since the museum isn't really Rochester focused as much as it is the Genesee valley overall.

Most of the buildings are in 2 separate large areas, a 'grand meadow' area with the modern exhibit space and the 2 restaurants and a number of event space buildings.  The actual village area was on the far side of the meadow and featured about 12 blocks of buildings including the farm areas and a baseball field.  The baseball field is said to be the only historically configured baseball diamond left in the US. What exactly is different is beyond my interest and we didn't even make it back to the sports area but there were baseball games being played today and a lot of interest and attendance expected from them.

If all that wasn't enough, there are also 5 miles of hiking trails which we didn't even attempt to visit.

This was an amazing experience and far exceeded my expectations and I wish we wouldn't have waited 4 years to go visit this extensive facility.  The pictures and just a random smattering of buildings and don't really convey the sense of scope or the feeling that there was a lot more going on that just the aesthetic of the grounds and buildings.














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