5 Best Sights in Auburn, The Finger Lakes

The limestone-and-shale Fillmore Glen State Park, 17 mi south of Auburn, has five waterfalls and a stream-fed, stone-walled swimming pool. Named for the nation's 13th president, the park also has a replica of the cabin where Millard Fillmore was born. (The actual site is 5 mi east.)

Some of Auburn's most famous residents are buried at Fort Hill, an outstanding example of the parklike burial grounds resulting from the rural-cemetery movement of the early 1800s. Rising over a middle-class residential and commercial neighborhood near downtown, Fort Hill is a great place for a quiet walk under giant trees and for views of the city. Among those buried here are William H. Seward, who served in the cabinets of two U.S. presidents; Harriet Tubman, who liberated hundreds of slaves; and Captain Myles Keogh, who fought (and died) alongside General George Custer at Little Big Horn.

Now part of the National Park Service's Harriet Tubman National Historical Park, the property's simple white clapboard house is where, beginning in 1890, Harriet Tubman tended to elderly African-Americans; the adjacent brick house served as her primary residence. Before Emancipation, Tubman led more than 300 slaves to freedom in the North. At the encouragement of William Seward, an abolitionist who served in two presidential cabinets, she settled in Auburn in the late 1850s. Seward and his family lived on the same road, a mile closer to town. The grounds are open for self-guided tours; house tours are given twice-daily (reservations are not required but are encouraged).

William H. Seward (1801–72), a governor of New York, U.S. senator, and secretary of state under Presidents Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Johnson, lived in this distinguished Federal-style home. The Seward family occupied the house (built in 1816–17) until 1951, and virtually every object here—the furnishings, the library, the tableware—was theirs.

Fourteen brilliant stained-glass windows are the centerpiece of the chapel interior, a Louis Comfort Tiffany creation with mosaic-inlay floors and nine leaded-glass chandeliers. It's the only known Tiffany-designed chapel interior still intact. A lunchtime music series is held here in July and August.