Pittsford is the canal town seven miles southeast of Rochester, with the county's oldest village and farmland it decided in 1996 to keep.
The name is borrowed from Vermont. Colonel Caleb Hopkins named it for his birthplace, Pittsford, Vermont. The village's first settler put up a log house beside a spring-fed pond in 1789, the town was incorporated in 1796, and in 1814 the old town of Northfield made its final split into Pittsford and Brighton. The village followed in 1827, the oldest of the county's ten incorporated villages. Vermont kept sending people, too. One pioneer family came from Pawlett by packet boat on the Erie Canal in 1848, built a log cabin on their land, and moved in on Thanksgiving Day, 1849.
The Erie Canal is why the village looks the way it does. Once the canal came through in the 1820s, Pittsford grew fast and stayed a shipping point for local grain and produce into the late twentieth century: a flour mill, lumberyards, produce warehouses, a malt house, fruit dry houses. The warehouses, mills and silos that survived along the water are offices, shops and restaurants now. Schoen Place is where you see it best: the ten-story grain tower at number 11, and across the water the park at the Port of Pittsford, with a free dock, the canal tour boats and the Erie Canalway Trail running past.
Pittsford was farm country until the subdivisions arrived in the 1950s, and in 1996 it did something about what was left. Its Greenprint Plan bought the development rights to two-thirds of the remaining farmland, the first town in New York State to keep open space that way. So there are still working family farms on Clover Street, on Knickerbocker Road and behind the village. There are eleven town parks, Lock 32 on the canal with its old double lock among them, and two county parks, Powder Mills and Mendon Ponds. In winter there is paddle: four courts and a hut on Kreag Road, early October to the end of April.
The Pittsford tee in Crème Fraîche is the one for the canal path on a Saturday morning. The Schoen Place crewneck in Boathouse Blue is for the dock and the tour boats, or for looking like you are about to get on one. And if you grew up out where the farms still are, the Clover Street tee in Crème Fraîche.
Sources: en.wikipedia.org · en.wikipedia.org · en.wikipedia.org · townofpittsford.org · api.openstreetmap.org · api.openstreetmap.org · tcr1886.com