The Charlie Major Trail Doesn't End at a Parking Lot. It Ends at a Working Distillery.

Most write-ups about the Charlie Major Nature Trail describe it the same way: an easy, flat walk along Skaneateles Creek, dogs welcome, kids in strollers welcome, over in about half an hour. All of that is true. What most of those write-ups leave out is where the trail actually starts, or ends, depending on which direction you're walking.

At the Mill Road end, the path runs right up against a converted mill building at 4022 Mill Road that has been making alcohol, on and off, since 1840. Not craft-beverage-tourism alcohol. The actual same site. Today that building holds Skaneateles Brewery and Last Shot Distillery, two small operations sharing one taproom under one roof. Before that, from 1840 to 1864, it was the Earll & Kellogg Distillery, until the company converted the property to a paper mill and production stopped. A hike that most people treat as a nature break turns out to be a walk down the same industrial corridor that's been running for close to 190 years, minus a Prohibition-era gap.

That's the part worth knowing if you live here and treat this trail as a routine rather than a tourist stop.

What the trail actually is

The Charlie Major Nature Trail runs a little over a mile between Mill Road, just north of Old Seneca Turnpike, and Crow Hill Road in Mottville. It follows the old railroad bed of the Skaneateles Short Line, which means the surface is packed gravel and dirt, mostly flat, and easy enough for a stroller or a scooter. AllTrails clocks the full out-and-back at roughly 1.5 miles and about half an hour total, while the Town of Skaneateles's own measurement puts the one-way distance at just over a mile, so the exact number depends on who's counting and whether they mean one-way or round trip.

Along the way you cross Skaneateles Creek three times over wooden bridges, and you pass the remains of old dams and millworks that once ran on that same creek. At the Mottville end, near the Crow Hill Road bridge, there's a small picnic area and a playground, which makes that side the better bet if you're bringing kids. Dogs are allowed on leash the entire length. There are no restrooms, so plan accordingly.

None of this is exotic. It's the kind of trail you walk after work because it's close, it's shaded most of the way, and it doesn't ask much of you. The interesting part isn't the walk itself. It's what the walk is retracing.

The railroad the trail is built on

The path exists because a railroad used to run there. The Skaneateles Short Line, under a few different corporate names, operated between 1840 and 1981, carrying freight for the paper mills, grist mills, distilleries, and woodworking mills that lined the creek, and carrying passengers from the New York Central line at Skaneateles Junction into the village, where they could catch a steamboat out onto the lake. The rail line stopped carrying passengers in 1932 and freight in 1981. What's left are the bridge foundations, dam remnants, and old millwork buildings you pass on the trail today.

The line existed to move goods made along this exact stretch of creek. One of those goods, for about 25 years in the mid-1800s, was distilled spirits, made at the site that is now 4022 Mill Road.

Same building, new names

Here's the part that turns a nature walk into a small piece of local continuity. The Earll & Kellogg Distillery operated on that Mill Road site from 1840 until 1864, when the company shifted the property to papermaking instead. For more than 150 years after that, the building did other things. Then, in December 2015, Last Shot Distillery opened in the same structure, run by co-owners Chris Uyehara, a longtime Skaneateles resident who spent 37 years as a chef before switching to distilling, and John Menapace, whose background in engineering and contracting made him the right partner to take on an old industrial building. Their whiskey was the first legally barreled in Onondaga County since Prohibition.

A few years later, Skaneateles Brewery moved into the same building and opened its taproom, describing itself as a small farm brewery that draws on the same creek water that powered the original 1840s operation. The two businesses now share walls, share a parking lot, and share the trail running past their door. Visitors on Tripadvisor have described stumbling onto Last Shot mid-hike after spotting a sign from the trail, which is more or less how the connection is supposed to work.

Here's the same site across nearly two centuries:

Nobody planned this as a continuity story. It's just what happens when a mill building sits on good water for a long time. But it means the walk you take on a Wednesday evening is passing through the same working history the whole way, not just at the end.

How to actually walk it

If you're doing this as a resident and not a visitor, direction matters more than distance. Park at the Mill Road lot and walk south toward Mottville if you want the payoff at the start, so you're fresh when you reach the taproom before turning back. Park at Crow Hill Road in Mottville and walk north if you'd rather earn the stop, and if you've got kids, the Mottville side also has the playground and picnic spot for before or after.

Timing takes some coordination, because both businesses keep the same odd schedule: closed Monday and Tuesday, open Wednesday through Sunday, with Skaneateles Brewery running 3:30 to 8 p.m. on weekdays and noon to 8 on Saturday, and Last Shot on a similar afternoon-into-evening pattern. Weekend afternoons bring food trucks to the brewery lot, since neither business serves a full menu on its own. If you're walking the trail on a Monday because that's when your schedule allows it, you'll get the ruins and the creek but not the tasting room, so plan the walk around the taproom hours rather than the other way around.

The whole loop, plus a stop, fits into an hour and a half without feeling rushed. It's close enough to the village that Skaneateles Brewery describes itself as a five-minute drive or an easy bike ride from downtown, which means this isn't a special-occasion drive out of town. It's a short detour off Mill Road that most people who've lived here for years have never actually connected to the distillery history behind it.

That's usually how the best local routines work. Nobody advertises them as a story. You just notice, walking a trail you've walked a dozen times, that the building at the end of it has been doing roughly the same thing since before the Civil War.

Molly Elliott has walked these same creek paths for most of her life, in a family that's called Skaneateles home for five generations. If you're curious about more of what makes this town run day to day, or you'd like a longtime local's perspective when the time comes to think about a move here, Molly Elliott would love to hear from you. Let's Connect.