5 Best Sights in Seneca Falls, The Finger Lakes

The meticulously restored Elizabeth Cady Stanton House is where one of American feminism's most important leaders shaped social reform as she raised seven children. Stanton's feminist colleague, Susan B. Anthony of Rochester, was a guest in the house. A tour helps you to understand Stanton's charisma and power. The house, a mile east of the Declaration Park and visitor center (across the canal), is open early March through mid-December, with tours daily at 11:15 and 2:15 and more frequently in summer.

Elaborate woodwork and Victorian furniture decorate the 1855 Queen Anne mansion on Cayuga Street, which is lined with grand homes. A female ghost is said to wander its 23 rooms.

Why did reform movements flourish in the Finger Lakes? Many of the answers are at this museum, where narratives of water power, transportation, industry, and cultural history are interwoven to tell the story of 19th-century Seneca Falls. The museum has interactive exhibits for kids, who are urged to ask questions of tour guides.

The gathering of 300 women and men at the Wesleyan Chapel in 1848 produced the Declaration of Sentiments, the bedrock document of the modern women's rights movement. It proclaimed—audaciously, at the time—"that all men and women are created equal." Today the document's words are etched on a 140-foot-long wall between the national park's visitor center and the adjacent Wesleyan Chapel Declaration Park, which encompasses a steel structure housing remnants of the chapel. Tours are given daily at 10:30 and 1:30 and more frequently in summer.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott, and a handful of other pioneers in the women's rights movement organized the first Women's Rights Convention in the Wesleyan Chapel in Seneca Falls in 1848. Today, the park incorporates the site of the convention (the Wesleyan Chapel Declaration Park), a visitor center, and several off-site historic homes of key convention participants. Exhibits and an orientation film at the visitor center explore the development of the women's rights movement in the United States.