Cornell researchers and the New York State Agricultural Experiment Station in Geneva bred a strawberry variety decades ago and named it Honeoye, after this exact hamlet on the lake's south end. The berry became a staple of New York agriculture, prized for its early season and its flavor. And for most of the time since, nobody in Honeoye did much with the name. No festival, no signature event, no reason for the town to claim the fruit that claimed it first.
That changed this June. On the 28th, Main Street in Honeoye hosted its first-ever Strawberry Fest, a homegrown event built by local business owners rather than a tourism board or a chamber office. It wasn't a big production. It was Main Street shops, a handful of farmers, and a restaurant putting out a special menu for one afternoon. But the fact that it happened at all says something about how much has quietly filled in around this small lake over the past several years, and residents who only think of Honeoye as the quiet lake before Canandaigua may want to look closer at what's actually running on that stretch of road.
A Name Nobody Had Claimed Until Now
Honeoye Lake ranks tenth in size among the eleven Finger Lakes, according to the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, covering 1,772 acres across 4.5 miles of length in the Town of Richmond, about 28 miles south of Rochester. It's small, shallow by Finger Lakes standards at a maximum depth of 30 feet, and it has never had the wine trail infrastructure or tourism marketing that Canandaigua or Keuka built over the years. That scale is part of why the strawberry connection sat dormant for so long. There wasn't a Main Street dense enough to organize around it.
The festival's own site frames the berry's story plainly: a variety developed at Cornell, tied to New York agriculture, not widely grown around Honeoye today, but a natural thread for a community event once enough people were in place to pull one together. That's the detail that matters. The strawberry didn't get more common. The businesses around it got more numerous.
The Businesses That Made a Festival Possible Were Already There
A first-year festival needs existing infrastructure to lean on, and Honeoye's Main Street had already accumulated more of it than the town's quiet reputation suggests. Amy Linehan, who owns the Reed Homestead Shop and helped organize the festival, told Blue Water Healthy Living that the idea grew from wanting to reflect what already made the hamlet distinct: "its businesses, its agricultural roots, and the relationships that already exist here."
Those businesses aren't hypothetical. Birdhouse Brewing Company, at 8716 Main St, runs a regular calendar of live music that has nothing to do with any festival. Recent bookings tracked on the local Patch calendar include acts like Brad Allison, Teagan and the Tweeds, and Hello City, filling ordinary weeknights with something to do a short walk from the water. A few miles up East Lake Road, Aurora Lavender Farm runs its own steady rotation of hands-on programming: a lotion bar workshop, a yoga session held in the lavender field itself, a culinary class built around cooking with lavender. None of that was created for the Strawberry Fest. It was running on its own before anyone thought to put a shared event on the calendar.
That's the density that let a festival happen. A brewery with a music series, a farm with a workshop schedule, a shop, and a restaurant willing to build a menu around the day are enough moving parts to support a real event, even a small one, even a first one.
What Actually Happened on Main Street on June 28
The festival itself stayed close to its origins. Highlights included a Great Strawberry Pie Bake Off and the Best Honeoye Lake Strawberry Jam Contest, competitions organizers hoped would become the kind of friendly rivalry that gives a small-town event its personality. Mill Creek, the restaurant anchoring that stretch of Main Street, built a strawberry-specific menu for the day: grab-and-go shortcake and easy walkable lunch items for people moving between vendors, alongside its regular sit-down menu and a strawberry-inspired cocktail for anyone settling in.
Kelly Schmidlin, another organizer, described the effort behind the scenes as a group of women business owners and community leaders working together to make it happen, a detail that matters because it means the festival wasn't handed down by an outside organization. It was assembled by the same people who run the shops and kitchens residents already walk past.
That's the whole thesis of the festival in one line. It wasn't invented to attract outsiders. It was built to make visible what was already there.
The Marina and the Park Still Run the Rest of the Summer
The Strawberry Fest is one day. The rest of Honeoye's summer runs on infrastructure that's been in place longer and doesn't need a festival to function. Trident Marine, on East Lake Road, is the lake's only full-service marina, handling boat sales, rentals, and repair for a lake small enough that one operator can cover it. Sandy Bottom Beach, at the lake's northwest corner off Sandy Bottom Road, gives residents a public launch point for small trailered boats, cartops, and canoes, with additional parking near the baseball diamond according to DEC's own site listing.
Fishing stays a steady undercurrent here too. The lake supports walleye, largemouth and smallmouth bass, and chain pickerel as its primary sport species, with a strong panfish population of bluegill, pumpkinseed, and black crappie rounding things out. None of that changed because a festival happened in June. It's the baseline the festival got layered on top of.
What This Means If You Already Live Here
Organizers have said they hope the Strawberry Fest becomes an annual tradition on the scale of the long-running Naples Grape Festival, a benchmark that tells you exactly what ambition looks like in this corner of the Finger Lakes. Naples didn't get there overnight, and Honeoye's first year was modest by design. But the underlying claim is worth sitting with: a hamlet that residents have mostly described in terms of its quiet, its fishing, and its distance from the more built-out lakes just proved it has enough going on to throw its own party and mean it.
If you live around Honeoye Lake, the useful takeaway isn't the festival date. It's what the festival exposed. Birdhouse Brewing's music nights, Aurora Lavender Farm's workshops, Reed Homestead Shop, and Mill Creek's kitchen were all running before anyone organized a shared event around them. The Strawberry Fest didn't create Main Street's business scene. It just gave it a reason to introduce itself all at once.
High Falls | Sotheby's International Realty covers the full arc of the Finger Lakes, from the Honeoye Lake shoreline to the broader Finger Lakes region beyond it. If you're curious what a specific stretch of shoreline or a specific Main Street business district actually looks like up close, reach out and we'll walk it with you.
