Lodi Point Was a Seneca Lake Landing Before It Was a Park

Lodi Point is quiet enough today that it can almost hide its older job. New York State Parks now presents it as a Seneca Lake boat launch and picnic site, the kind of place where someone might pull in with fishing gear, a cooler, or a small boat and think mostly about the weather.

The older names tell a busier story. The Pomeroy Foundation says the point was once known as Goff’s Point and Lodi Landing. By the 1820s, Seneca Lake had become an important branch of the Erie Canal system, and the marker identifies Lodi Point as a steamboat landing and warehouse site by about 1829.

That meant real work happened here. The Pomeroy history says the Seneca Chief, one of the early steamboats on Seneca Lake, is believed to have stopped at Lodi Point during its 1828 inaugural voyage. Steamboats kept serving the point into the early 1900s. Warehouses held groceries, coal, lime, salt, lumber, grain, and other goods that moved by lake before trucks made that kind of work feel ordinary.

Then the point became more social. The old hotel years brought picnics and reunions under names like Willow Hotel, Bennett Hotel, and Lake Breeze Hotel. In 1923, the former hotel property became Geneva YMCA’s Camp Young. A fire in 1936 ended that camp chapter, but it did not erase the point’s habit of gathering people by the water.

So a simple lake stop carries more than scenery. A launch ramp, a picnic table, and the wide Seneca Lake view sit on top of freight, steam whistles, summer crowds, camp days, and old lake names. Lodi Point is still a place of arrivals and departures; the boats are just smaller now.