Genesee Country Village: New York's Largest Living History Museum

A few miles south of here, on six hundred rolling acres in the hamlet of Mumford, sits one of the largest living history museums in the country. Genesee Country Village and Museum preserves sixty-eight original nineteenth-century buildings, hauled from across the Genesee Valley and reassembled into a single vanished world.

The museum began with one man's grief over what was disappearing. John L. Wehle, whose family had run the Genesee Brewing Company for generations, watched as old farmhouses, mills, and craftsmen's shops were bulldozed from the landscape. He was already a passionate collector of sporting art, but an architectural historian named Stuart Bolger convinced him that the region's vernacular buildings were equally worth preserving. In nineteen sixty-six, Wehle began acquiring them.

The village that opened to the public in nineteen seventy-six stretches from a pioneer log cabin all the way to a Victorian mansion. Interpreters dressed in period clothing demonstrate coopering, tinsmithing, weaving, and open-hearth cooking. A Greek Revival law office, a one-room schoolhouse, a working cider mill, and a print shop where type is set by hand all line the unpaved streets. The museum holds a large collection of artifacts and a significant collection of wildlife and sporting paintings in the John L. Wehle Gallery.

What makes Genesee Country Village different from a theme park is that the village buildings are original structures, not reproductions. Each survived because someone thought to disassemble it, number the boards, and truck it here. Taken together, they tell the story of how a wilderness became a farming civilization over the course of a single century, right here in the Genesee Valley.