Welcome to Livingston County’s Bicentennial GeoTrail!
My name is Find R. Fox. I’ll be your guide to super-sleuthing the hides at these amazing, historical locations all around our beautiful 200-year-old county!
To make your travel through history a bit easier, imagine yourself in a Time Machine (your best mode of transportation will do). Set the dial (your gps unit) to the first year (coordinates) listed below, check the waypoints for Parking and push the navigate button! Whirl your way there then switch your coordinates as needed to navigate to the geocache to sniff out the container and sign the log sheet. Good Luck & Enjoy the journey!!
Hours: 8 AM - 8 PM. Please use the Trailhead for the one-way street to follow to get to the parking and the museum entrance.
At what is now the village of Caledonia, a dozen springs once formed a small lake which came to be called Big Springs. The Seneca people knew the area as Gan-e-o-di-ya, often translated as “big clear lake,” and Big Springs, together with nearby Spring Creek, was long regarded as a location of good trout fishing.
In the late 1790s, Scottish families began arriving in the Caledonia area. European American settlement was promoted by Col. Charles Williamson, agent for the Pulteney estate in the Genesee region, by offering immigrants land around Big Springs for $2 an acre and providing them provisions.
Using the abundant water power provided by Spring Creek, Big Springs, and other waterways in the town, a grist mill and saw mills were quickly established. Caledonia’s Sara Jane McBride, an early woman fly tyer working in the 1870s, relied on the cold waters of Spring Creek to support a study of entomology and fly tying.
By 1902, the lake in the center of the village of Caledonia had been drained and only a small swamp remained. The site was soon further developed, given to the adjoining Caledonia High School property, and became Tennent Park.
The brick Caledonia High School building, constructed in 1876, was expanded several times and then closed by the early 1940s when the Caledonia-Mumford School District was centralized. In 1952, the Big Springs Museum, operated by the Big Springs Historical Society, opened in an addition to the school building. Its collections offer a wide variety of artifacts representing rural life, from farm implements to paintings, toys, and even vintage washing machines.
Thanks to the Big Springs Historical Society and Museum for allowing placement of this cache!
NOTE: Both the Caledonia Village Police and Caledonia Fire Department are nearby.
This cache is 1 of 36 caches comprising the Livingston County Bicentennial GeoTrail (LivCo200) placed in the summer of 2021 in honor of Livingston County’s Bicentennial by members of the local geocaching group called the Bee Hive. For more information about Livingston County’s Bicentennial, visit the County Historian’s Bicentennial web page on the Livingston County New York website at https://www.livingstoncounty.us/1115/County-Bicentennial
