What the Public Actually Gets to See of Geneseo's Hunt Season

At 7 a.m. on the last Saturday in September, Main Street in Geneseo stops being a street and becomes a viewing gallery. People bring lawn chairs. Kids climb onto shoulders. And for about an hour, horses and hounds move through the middle of town in a procession that has opened hunting season here since 1876.

If you have lived in Geneseo for any length of time, you already know the shape of this morning. What most people do not know is how little of the actual hunt they are watching, and how much of what looks like "hunt season" later in the fall has almost nothing to do with hunting at all.

Who Actually Gets to Ride

The parade down Main Street is free and open to anyone who wants to stand on a curb. What happens right after it is not. The Genesee Valley Hunt spells out the terms of that first ride of the season in plain language: the meet is "reserved for Supporting Contributors of good standing. No cappers are allowed." A capper, in hunt terms, is someone who pays a one-time fee to ride for a single outing without joining. Opening Day does not take cappers. You either support the hunt financially year-round or you watch from the sidewalk.

This year's parade, set for September 26, continues a count the Livingston County News has tracked closely over the years. The paper put the 2018 parade at the hunt's 142nd season and the 2024 parade, held that September 28, at the 148th. Add two more years to that second figure and 2026 lands on the 150th season, a run stretching back to 1876. The dogs themselves are a newer addition to the spectacle than the hunt itself. They were pulled from the parade for a stretch and only reinstated in 1976, timed to the town's bicentennial year. The route hasn't changed in decades: riders and hounds start at the Wadsworth Homestead on South Street, move down Main to Hartford House at the north end, then turn off into the countryside. Past parades have drawn as many as 80 to 90 mounted riders alongside the pack, which nobody involved is supposed to call dogs.

One longtime spectator who has come back year after year put it simply to a reporter: "I just like to see the horses and the hounds." That is more or less all any resident gets to do. Once the parade clears the far end of Main Street, the actual hunting, hounds working a scent across open farmland with mounted riders following, moves onto private land in the valley and stays there. There is no public viewing area for a hunt in progress. If you want to see hounds and horses working, this hour on Main Street is close to your only chance.

What Everybody Assumes About the Big Day in October Is Wrong

Two weeks later, on October 10, Geneseo hosts an event that looks, from a distance, like the payoff for everything the September parade set in motion. The Genesee Valley Hunt Races draw a crowd that dwarfs the parade. Local coverage of a recent running put attendance near 35,000 at Seven Nations Farm on Nations Road, north of the village. There is a purse north of $30,000, a card of races that includes a timber steeplechase over eighteen fences, terrier races, wiener dog races, pony rides, and tailgating. The event traces back to a farmers' flat race first run in 1892, and by the county's own account, only World War II and a single season of mud too heavy for parking have ever interrupted it.

Here is the part that surprises people who assume the biggest hunt-related event of the year must be the hunt in action. It is not. The event's own FAQ answers the question directly: is there hunting at the Genesee Valley Hunt Races? "No, the main event consists of flat and steeplechase horse racing as well as canine sport demonstrations." The Parade of the Genesee Valley Hunt hounds does make an appearance at the races, but as a ceremonial pass-through, not a working pack. Nobody is hunting anything that day. It grew from that 1892 farmers' race into one of the first sanctioned steeplechases in the country, and Livingston County still describes it as the only event in New York State where spectators can watch sanctioned steeplechase racing over timber jumps. The county's own tally after the 2023 running put the day's economic impact at more than $200,000 locally, with over $60,000 raised for area charities.

So the mechanics of the season run backward from what most newcomers expect. The small, early, members-only morning in September is the one moment with actual hunting content, visible for exactly as long as the parade takes to pass. The huge, ticketed, 35,000-person day in October, the one that looks like the main event, is a horse race with a hound parade attached. If you moved here expecting the fall calendar to build toward a public hunt spectacle, the spectacle you get is real, but it is not hunting.

What Else Is Moving Through the Village Right Now

The hunt calendar does not arrive in a vacuum. It lands on top of a summer that is already winding down in specific, dateable ways.

The Wadsworth Homestead, described by local reporters as the oldest continually owned National Historic Landmark in Western New York, held by the same family across seven generations since 1804, has hosted the Geneseo Jam Fund's free Sunset Concert Series on its lawn all summer. The most recent show, Prime Time Funk & Cinnamon Jones, played there on August 6, and the free Thursday-night series is winding toward its last dates of the season on the same lawn that will host mounted riders in a few weeks.

Meanwhile, the Thursday farmers market on Center Street keeps its regular hours straight through the parade and into the races weekend:

• Thursdays, 3:00 to 6:30 p.m., on Center Street
• Running weekly into October, per the market's listing with Livingston County tourism
• Overlapping directly with both the September 26 parade and the October 10 race day, so the market does not pause for either

That overlap matters more than it sounds. It means the ordinary rhythm of the village, produce stands, baked goods, the regular Thursday crowd, keeps running underneath a calendar that also includes a 150-year-old equestrian tradition and a 35,000-person race day. Geneseo does not clear its normal week to make room for the hunt season. It just adds the hunt season on top.

The View From Main Street

What this adds up to is a version of local tradition that is more layered than it looks from a car window. The public face of Geneseo's hunt season, the parade everyone can watch and talk about, is genuinely rare: a few minutes of an actual working hunt, visible once a year, gated by membership the moment it turns off Main Street. The event most visitors and even some newer residents assume is the season's centerpiece is something else entirely, a race meet with no hunting in it, however good the tailgating.

None of that changes what the season feels like on the ground. Chairs still come out before 7 a.m. Kids still get lifted onto shoulders. The market still sets up on Center Street the following Thursday like nothing happened. That layering, old tradition, newer public spectacle, and an unbothered weekly market running through all of it, is part of what makes Geneseo function the way it does as a place people stay.

If you are watching this village from the outside and wondering what it actually feels like to live here through a fall like this one, that is a longer conversation. Justine Fox has spent more than a decade working Geneseo and the surrounding Finger Lakes towns and is always glad to talk through what a specific street, or a specific season, actually looks like day to day. Request Your Free Home Valuation when you are ready to talk numbers, or just reach out with questions about the village itself.