Emergency Crime Scene and Biohazard Cleanup in Honeoye, NY

Honeoye is a hamlet and census-designated place in the Town of Richmond, Ontario County, at the north end of Honeoye Lake, one of the smaller Finger Lakes.

The name Honeoye comes from the Seneca word ha-ne-a-yah, meaning 'lying finger' or 'where the finger lies', from a legend of a Native American who cut off his own finger after it was bitten by a rattlesnake.

During the American Revolution, General John Sullivan's troops destroyed the Seneca village here in September 1779 and built a small garrison called Fort Cummings on the site.

Captain Peter Pitts was the first European-American to settle the area in 1789, founding the settlement of Pittstown, which became the town of Richmond.

Honeoye had a population of 723 at the 2020 census, up from 579 in 2010, within an area of less than one square mile along U.S. Route 20A.

In the 1920s the City of Rochester studied damming the Honeoye Valley and flooding the hamlet to turn Honeoye Lake into a municipal water reservoir, but the plan was never carried out.

Honeoye Central School packs the whole Honeoye Central School District into a single K-12 building with about 600 students, whose teams are the Bulldogs.

The hamlet's lakefront Sandy Bottom park and beach, together with a state boat launch, anchor a summer season of boating and swimming on Honeoye Lake.

Honeoye Lake is prized in winter for what residents call exceptional ice fishing, and the area averages about 55 inches of snow a year for skiers headed to nearby Bristol Mountain and Hunt Hollow.

Honeoye was a hotbed of abolitionism in the mid-19th century, and abolitionist Helen Pitts Douglass — the second wife of Frederick Douglass — came from Honeoye.