Stony Brook State Park is a state park located in Dansville in Livingston County, New York. The park is south of Dansville on New York State Route 36. Route 36 also connects the park to Stony Brook State Park Campground a short distance away.
The signature attraction of the park is the eponymous brook, which is an example of small, post-glacial streams in the Finger Lakes area. The small creeks and brooks in this area cut through the Great Lakes-area escarpments following retreat of the ice age glaciers, creating deep, narrow gorges, with many waterfalls, which are uncommonly accessible.
As do some other parks in the region, such as Fillmore Glen State Park, Robert H. Treman State Park, and Buttermilk Falls State Park, the park features a semi-natural swimming pool, created by a small dam constructed in the lower reaches of the stream.
Stony Brook became a summer tourist spot in the late 19th century, following the construction of a railroad in 1883. The resort fell into decline by the 1920s. New York state resurrected the area by buying the land and establishing the state park in 1928.
Stony Brook was enhanced in the 1930s by improvements constructed by the Civilian Conservation Corps and the Works Progress Administration. The footprint of these government programs is evident throughout the park in the form of hiking paths, bridges, picnic areas, and buildings.
Initially 250 acres (1.0 km2), the park is now 577 acres (2.34 km2). It offers two stream-fed swimming pools, picnic tables and pavilions, a playground, a nature trail, hiking, fishing and bow-hunting (deer), a campground with tent and trailer sites, and cross-country skiing.
Famous quotes containing the words stony, brook, state and/or park:
“With love’s light wings did I o’erperch these walls,
For stony limits cannot hold love out,
And what love can do, that dares love attempt.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“The only house
Beyond where they were was a shattered seedpod.
And below roared a brook hidden in trees,
The sound of which was silence for the place.”
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)
“Cole’s Hill was the scene of the secret night burials of those who died during the first year of the settlement. Corn was planted over their graves so that the Indians should not know how many of their number had perished.”
—For the State of Massachusetts, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)
“The label of liberalism is hardly a sentence to public igominy: otherwise Bruce Springsteen would still be rehabilitating used Cadillacs in Asbury Park and Jane Fonda, for all we know, would be just another overweight housewife.”
—Barbara Ehrenreich (b. 1941)