Walk the Charlie Major Nature Trail on a weekday afternoon in September and you'll pass the usual cast: a runner with earbuds in, a couple with a golden retriever off the north lot near Mill Road, maybe a kid on a bike who's outpacing everyone. The creek runs alongside the whole way, low and clear this time of year, and if you slow down enough you'll notice stone foundations poking through the brush that have nothing to do with hiking infrastructure. They're not trail features. They're what's left of the reason the trail exists at all.
Most write-ups treat this as a nature walk with a bonus history plaque. It's closer to the reverse. The path you're on used to be a working railroad, and the businesses waiting at the far end of it aren't a coincidence bolted onto a pretty walk. They're doing, loosely, the same thing the mills along this creek did in 1840.
A Railroad Built to Feed the Mills, Not the Views
The trail follows the old right of way of the Skaneateles Short Line Railroad, which ran under a few different corporate names. The first version operated from September 30, 1840 until August 1850. A second Skaneateles Railroad incorporated in 1866 and opened for business on October 1, 1867, running until 1940, though it stopped carrying passengers in 1932. For most of that run, the line's job wasn't tourism. It served the paper mills, grist mills, distilleries, and woodworking mills that lined Skaneateles Creek, all of them powered by the same moving water the trail now runs beside. On the passenger side, it also connected the New York Central line at Skaneateles Junction to the village, where riders could transfer to steamboats for a run around the lake.
That's the part worth sitting with before you get to the trailhead. This wasn't a scenic railroad. It was infrastructure for an industrial creek, and the three wooden bridges you'll cross today exist because the original line needed to get equipment and goods across that water at multiple points. The Town of Skaneateles still describes the route the same way: a corridor just over a mile long between Mill Road, north of Old Seneca Turnpike, and Crow Hill Road in Mottville, with the creek crossings and mill remnants intact enough to see if you're looking. Different mapping sites will clock the distance anywhere from 0.8 to 1.5 miles depending on where they start counting from, but the town's own figure of just over a mile is the one to trust if you're planning a walk around it.
The Water Never Stopped Working
Here's where the history stops being background and starts being current. At the Mill Road end of the trail sits a building with its own industrial pedigree. From 1840 to 1864, it housed the Earll & Kellogg Distillery, before the operation converted the property to a paper mill. That's the same stretch of decades the railroad itself was built to serve.
Today the building is home to Last Shot Distillery, which opened in December 2015 at 4022 Mill Road, close enough to the trail's north end that reviewers on hiking sites have described stumbling onto it mid-walk rather than driving there on purpose. Last Shot's co-owner and distiller, Chris Uyehara, spent 37 years as a chef before making the switch, and partnered with John Menapace, whose engineering background and access to the building made the space workable. Both are longtime Skaneateles residents, and the building's history links the current distillery to its earlier use.
Skaneateles Brewery shares the same structure, close enough that visitors routinely describe doing a tasting at one and walking over to the other without leaving the building. Neither business is powering machinery off the creek the way the original mills did. But the water itself hasn't fully stepped out of the story: Last Shot's gin is made with fresh New York State grains and cut with water from Skaneateles Lake, the same lake that feeds the creek this whole trail runs alongside. The mills are gone. The thing that made this stretch of land useful in 1840 is still, in a smaller and more drinkable way, part of what's made here now.
If you'd rather eat than drink at the end of your walk, Willow Glen Diner sits a short drive from the Mottville trailhead in the hamlet of Willow Glen, serving the kind of classic diner fare that doesn't need much explanation beyond "it's there and it's good."
Getting There and What You'll Actually Find
The trail runs year round and the surface is packed dirt and gravel the whole way, flat enough that reviewers with mobility devices have called it manageable in a way a lot of Finger Lakes trails aren't. Dogs are welcome on leash. Fall brings foliage along the creek corridor, while winter sections can get slick, so footwear matters more in January than in September.
| North end (village side) | South end (Mottville side) | |
|---|---|---|
| Access point | Mill Road, just north of Old Seneca Turnpike | Crow Hill Road, Mottville |
| Parking | Small lot at the trailhead | Larger lot, with a playground on site |
| What's nearby | A short drive back into the village; Last Shot Distillery and Skaneateles Brewery, both in the same historic building | Willow Glen Diner, a short drive away |
A few things worth knowing before you go:
- Last Shot Distillery keeps seasonal hours that run afternoon into evening on weekends, so it's worth calling ahead rather than assuming it's open, especially outside peak season.
- The Mottville trailhead has a picnic spot right along the creek near the Crow Hill Road bridge, which is the better pick if you're bringing kids and want them to burn off energy at the playground before or after the walk.
- If you're doing the whole route out and back, budget closer to an hour on foot. Bikes will move faster given the flat, packed surface.
None of this makes Charlie Major Nature Trail a destination hike. It's not competing with the gorges further south in the Finger Lakes, and nobody's claiming it should. What it offers instead is something a little rarer: a mile of walking path where the reason for its existence, the reason for the bridges, and the reason a distillery happens to sit at one end all trace back to the same creek doing the same basic job it's done since before the Civil War. The railroad moved what the mills made. The trail replaced the railroad. The building stayed, and so, in its own way, did the water.
If you've lived in Skaneateles long enough to have your own loop through this trail, you already know the rhythm of it. If you're still working out where the town's daily routines actually happen, this is one of them, and it's been running quietly at the edge of the village for longer than almost anything else here.
For more on what makes Skaneateles worth knowing block by block, Catherine Armijo writes about the village from the inside, whether you're already home here or just getting to know the place.
