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!!
This is a cemetery cache. Daylight hours only!
Established in 1792, the Williamsburg Cemetery is located in the town of Groveland on the site of the first European-American settlement community in western New York. The cemetery is the last surviving above-ground remnant of the vanished village of Williamsburg. The village was after Sir William Pulteney, a Scottish lawyer and Member of Parliament, who invested in lands in western New York after the Revolutionary War.
Captain Charles Williamson, the land agent for the Pulteney estates, began a project in 1792, to construct a roadway to open a route from Pennsylvania eventually meeting the Canaseraga Creek near the confluence of the Genesee River. While Williamson dreamt of a thriving city in the wilderness, the settlement only grew to the size of a village, flourishing until about 1806.
From this pioneer settlement derived a series of firsts in the county including a school, a grist mill, and in 1793, the first fair and horse races in the Genesee Country. All that remains today is a one-acre cemetery.
Notable burials include Politian Charles H. Carroll (1794–1865) and investor William Fitzhugh (1761-1839), who along with Colonel Nathaniel Rochester, founded the city of Rochester. Also buried there is James G. Birney (1792–1857), candidate for President of the United States on the Liberty Party ticket in the 1840 and 1844 presidential elections on an abolitionist platform.
The site was listed on the State and National Register of Historic Places in 2002.
Thanks to the Town of Groveland for permission to place this cache and to Lucky46 for his special cache container and work to place it!
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
