The Independence Day celebrations of July 4, 1899, struck Geneva with a “boom and a bang less than an instant after midnight Monday night” and ended 24 hours later. The Geneva Daily Times assigns the noisy celebrations to boys, who set off the firecrackers and “other devices” and “big boys and men who got up early to go to Rochester, or Watkins, “or somewhere else.” Presumably, the older girls, wives, and female servants of these households arose even earlier to cook breakfast and pack picnic baskets with food they had spent the previous day cooking and baking.

The 8 o’clock Central Hudson westbound passenger train took 1,600 passengers to Rochester: “They were in the seats, on the seat backs, in the aisles, on the platforms, the steps, and the roofs. The [electric trolley] cars to Cayuga lake park were crowded all day long.”

What is now Cayuga Lake State Park on Lower Lake Road in Seneca Falls was a much-loved private park, where July 4 was celebrated with fireworks, bonfires, Ice cream, and dances in the pavilion. It was the most popular summer resort in Geneva, Waterloo, and Seneca Falls. At the height of the season, as many as 11 trolley cars, jammed with picnickers, arrived and departed every hour. Excursions to the park were offered by both the Auburn railroad line and lake steamers, bringing passengers from towns along the Erie Canal and from the southern end of Cayuga Lake. The good people of Seneca Falls rode to the park on their own standard-gauge railroad, a 2.83-mile extension of........

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