Bristol's Hills Keep the Old Meeting-Place Feeling

Bristol has a hill-town story with a little spark at the beginning. The story reaches back to Robert de LaSalle’s 1669 account of the Burning Springs, where natural gas bubbled to the surface and could be lit.

Then the story turns practical. Early families came from Dighton in Bristol County, Massachusetts, and from Connecticut. Town meetings were held at the old Methodist Episcopal Church in Bristol Center. Seven churches were active at one time, and the old district schools later folded into a central school system.

The land work was just as plainspoken: sheep raising, tanneries and chandleries at Muttonville, hops grown from 1853 to 1920, orchards, lumber, grain mills, fairs, field days, and festivals.

Even the old businesses feel tied to the hills. Sheep, hops, orchards, and mills all point to a town where work followed soil, slopes, roads, and seasons.

So Bristol is more than a pretty set of hills south of Canandaigua. It is burning springs, meeting rooms, church bells, school districts, sheep, hops, orchards, and roads that had to pull scattered neighbors into a town.