Keuka Lake and Bluff Point reflect a long history of Native American life, early settlement, changing place names, agriculture, transportation, and education in the Finger Lakes region. For thousands of years, people lived here as hunters, gatherers, fishermen, and farmers, and the Seneca, part of the Haudenosaunee League of Six Nations, occupied this area as the “Keepers of the Western Door,” with Keuka Lake serving as a favored fishing site. Keuka’s distinctive Y shape led early European settlers to call it Crooked Lake, though the name Keuka probably meant “Canoe Landing” or “Lake with Bent Elbow,” while the Seneca name Ogoyage, meaning “the Promontory,” may have referred to the Bluff. Red Jacket, the Seneca leader and orator Sagoyewatha, was raised in his mother’s home just south of Branchport. After the American Revolution, a 1788 treaty transferred 2,600,000 acres of Ontario County from the Seneca to Oliver Phelps and Nathaniel Gorham, and much of the tract was soon purchased by Pulteney Associates and sold through Charles Williamson. Beginning in 1788, about 300 followers of Jemima Wilkinson, the Publick Universal Friend, settled near Seneca Lake and the Keuka Lake outlet, then later relocated north of Branchport because of land disputes and built a sizable home on Friend Hill Road in 1814; the district and later town of Jerusalem was named in recognition of Wilkinson and her followers. Penn Yan took its name from Pennsylvania and New England settlers, while Branchport was first called Esperanza and renamed in 1831. In 1798, John Beddoe built his family home at the site of today’s Keuka Lake State Park, and he and his son Lynham helped develop the north end of the west branch of the lake; in the late 1830s, John N. and Henry Rose built the estates Esperanza and Hampstead. The steep hills around the lake were once heavily forested, and timber from cleared land supplied farming and lumber markets, including masts for British ships and later the USS Constitution, before farms spread widely and agriculture diversified. By the beginning of the 20th century, Bluff Point and many nearby hills were covered with vineyards, part of a wine industry that began with American grapes developed in the 19th century and supported cooperage, packing, shipping, and tourism. Paul Garrett, known as the “Dean of American Winemakers,” lived on the Bluff, and Garrett Memorial Chapel, where he and his family are buried, was built in 1930. The modern wine industry was further enabled by the 1976 New York State Farm Winery Act, which allowed vineyard owners to make and sell wine as well as grow grapes. The lake also served as a natural roadway for people and goods, with logs floated to mills and railroads, steamboats operating from 1837 into the 1920s, a toll plank road linking Penn Yan and Branchport from 1849 to 1879, and an electric trolley connecting Penn Yan, Keuka Park, and Branchport from 1898 to 1927, including the 30-cent “Round the Loop” excursion by steamboat and trolley. In 1890, Reverend George Harvey Ball founded Keuka College at Keuka Park with Free Baptist support; it was reorganized in 1921 by President Arthur H. Norton as a college for women and returned to coeducation in 1985.