Every Lake
Chautauqua Lake
Seventeen miles of summer: the Institution, the Bemus–Stow ferry and the best musky water in the East.
- 13 ft · shore
- 25 ft
- 38 ft
- 50 ft
- 63 ft
- 75 ft · bottom
About Chautauqua Lake
Chautauqua is two lakes joined at a narrows — a deep northern basin and a shallow, weedy southern one — sitting at 1,308 feet, higher than the Erie shore a few miles north and draining the other way, south into the Allegheny and eventually the Gulf of Mexico. The name is Seneca, and the usual gloss is "bag tied in the middle," which is exactly what the outline looks like.
In 1874 a Methodist minister and an Akron businessman opened a summer school for Sunday-school teachers on the northwest shore. It became the Chautauqua Institution, the model for hundreds of "Chautauquas" across the country, and the reason the word means a summer of lectures, music and porches. Nine presidents have spoken there.
Between the Institution's gates and Jamestown at the foot of the lake are the things regulars measure a summer by: the Bemus Point–Stow ferry, which has crossed the narrows since 1811; the steamboat landings that became Lakewood and Celoron; and muskellunge fishing that has drawn anglers for a century and a half.
- Chautauqua, Bemus Point, Stow, Mayville, Lakewood, Celoron, Jamestown
- Route 394 and 430 along both shores, the I-86 bridge at the narrows
- Twenty-two named roads on the 12"
Turn it in your hands
Live 3D of the actual cut files — drag to orbit, pinch to zoom. Every road you see is engraved on the real thing.
