Gates Keeps Canal Memory on Rochester's West Side

Gates looks like a west-side Rochester suburb now, but its old map was much bigger and busier. The town was incorporated in 1813, named for Revolutionary War General Horatio Gates, and once included places that later became part of Rochester and Greece. That helps explain the “County Cornerstone” idea on the town seal: Gates was not a leftover edge of Monroe County. Pieces of the modern county map grew out of it.

The canal story belongs to that wider Rochester-side setting. The Erie Canal reached Rochester in 1823, and the Genesee Valley Canal opened from Rochester toward Scottsville in 1837. Those routes moved flour, farm goods, people, news, and money through the region.

Gates should not be imagined as a canal village in the same way Newark or Fairport might be, but it sat beside a city and countryside being remade by water routes.

That older movement still gives Gates some depth under the plazas, ramps, side streets, and quiet neighborhoods. A place can feel practical and suburban now while still carrying a land-and-transportation story underneath it.

The Hinchey Homestead helps the story land. The town history ties early settlement to farm families like William Hinchey’s, and the old clapboard farmhouse still gives Gates a real house to stand beside the bigger map story. Gates is not flashy history. It is the kind of place where boundaries changed, roads filled in, nearby canals pulled markets closer, and a farming town slowly became part of greater Rochester’s everyday west side.