By this point in September, the splash pad at Veterans Memorial Park has wound down for the year. The ball fields still get use on weekend mornings, the horseshoe pits and bocce court still draw the regulars, and the walk from the parking lot behind Town Hall to the playground is still the version of this park most Henrietta residents know. What a lot of people never do is keep walking past the fields to where the mowed grass ends and a stone dust path picks up. That path is not a park amenity. It is the middle of a trail that runs several miles in each direction, built on a railroad bed, kept up by an all-volunteer nonprofit that has nothing to do with the Town of Henrietta, and connected, eventually, to a trail network that reaches Victor on one end and the Erie Canal on the other.
Here is the part that surprises most people once they hear it: the town did not build this trail, and the town does not maintain it. That work belongs to the Henrietta Foundation, a volunteer group that developed the path along the unused bed of the Lehigh Valley Railroad's north branch and has kept it groomed ever since. That railroad is the same company whose Black Diamond route, laid in 1891 to move coal between Buffalo and New York City, was discontinued in the mid-1970s further south through Mendon and Rush. The Henrietta stretch is that same railroad's north branch, left unused when trains stopped running, and instead of sitting idle it became a stone dust corridor for hikers, runners, cross-country skiers, cyclists, and birders.
A Trail With Two Directions, Not One
Veterans Memorial Park sits roughly in the middle of this trail, which is easy to miss if you only ever think of the park as a destination rather than a junction. Head south from the ball fields and the stone dust path continues to Florendin Drive, crosses Lehigh Station Road onto Nevins Road, and keeps going for about five more miles until it reaches Rochester Junction. That is where the Henrietta Foundation's section ends and the trail system that Monroe County owns and the Mendon Foundation maintains under contract with the county picks up, continuing on through Mendon, Rush, Scottsville, and Caledonia, eventually reaching the 54-acre Lehigh Crossing Park in Victor, where the Lehigh Valley Trail meets the Auburn Trail and the Trolley Trail.
Head the other way instead, starting from the separate trailhead the Foundation maintains on East Henrietta Road just south of Ward Hill Road, and the trail runs north. A mile and a half in, you pass what the Town of Henrietta's own trail page calls a vacant golf course, a reasonable turnaround point if you just want a 45-minute round trip. Keep going and the trail passes the Town of Henrietta's DPW facility, then continues on toward the Erie Canal Path at Kendrick Road, a walk of about nine miles one-way that the town estimates takes roughly two and a half hours on foot.
Here is a rough breakdown of the two directions, both measured from trail access points in Henrietta:
| Direction | Starting Point | Distance | Estimated Time |
|---|---|---|---|
| North | East Henrietta Road trailhead, south of Ward Hill Road | 1.4 miles to the vacant golf course landmark | About 45 minutes round trip |
| North (full stretch) | East Henrietta Road trailhead | 9 miles one-way to the Erie Canal Path at Kendrick Road | About 2.5 hours one-way |
| South | Veterans Memorial Park, 595 Calkins Road | Roughly 5 miles to Rochester Junction | Varies by pace, connects to the county-maintained system beyond |
Who Actually Keeps This Running
The distinction between the Henrietta Foundation's stretch and the county-owned trail to the south is not just a technicality. It explains why the trail through Henrietta looks and feels different from the wider, better-known Lehigh Valley Trail people associate with Mendon and Rush. Monroe County describes its Lehigh Valley Trail Park as a fifteen-mile linear trail beginning at the Genesee River and extending through Rush and Mendon to the Ontario County line, with the trail also reaching north into Henrietta. The Henrietta portion, though, is not run by the county parks department. It is run entirely by volunteers who patrol it, clean it up, and maintain the small garden near the East Henrietta Road parking lot on their own time, without a town budget line behind it. If you have ever wondered why one part of this trail system feels a little more polished than another, that ownership split is the reason.
There is also a quieter piece of continuity worth knowing. The Foundation's own materials note that this stretch already connects to the Erie Canal Towpath in Brighton and to the Black Diamond Trail in Mendon and Rush, and that longer-term plans call for an uninterrupted connection reaching toward Albany, Buffalo, and the Southern Tier. None of that is finished yet, but it means the short walk behind Veterans Memorial Park is part of something that keeps growing rather than a dead-end path that happens to be pretty.
The Practical Stuff, If You're Headed Out This Week
If you are turning off Calkins Road into Veterans Memorial Park for the first time, do not look for a sign. The entrance sits across from the terminus of Hylan Drive with no park marker at the turn, which trips up plenty of people who have lived in Henrietta for years. Once you are in, parking is available both at the park itself and further south where the trail crosses East Henrietta Road, so you can pick your starting point depending on which direction you plan to walk.
Dogs are welcome on this trail if they are leashed, which is worth knowing if you also visit Tinker Nature Park on the other side of town, where dogs are not permitted at all under the town's park rules. That makes Veterans Memorial Park and its connecting trail the more practical option for anyone walking a dog regularly rather than making a special nature center trip.
The surface itself is stone dust, which drains better than pavement after a hard rain and holds up fine through the kind of intermittent September weather Rochester tends to get this time of year. Unlike the splash pad, which is strictly a warm-weather feature, the trail does not take a season off. Early fall, with cooler temperatures and less humidity than midsummer, is arguably the more comfortable stretch of the year to walk the longer legs south toward Rochester Junction or north toward the Erie Canal Path, since neither route offers much shade relief once you're a mile or two in.
A Different Way to Think About the Park You Already Use
None of this changes what Veterans Memorial Park is for most families most of the year: a place with a splash pad, open fields, and easy parking near Town Hall. But the ninety acres behind that playground connect to something bigger than the park itself, maintained by people who are not on any town payroll, built on a rail line that stopped carrying freight decades before most current residents moved to Henrietta. The next time you are dropping off recycling at Town Hall or watching a soccer game on one of the fields, the stone dust path past the outfield fence is worth a second look. It goes farther than it looks like it should, in both directions, and somebody has been quietly keeping it that way for longer than most people realize.
If you are getting to know Henrietta from the inside, whether you have lived here for years or are still learning which paths lead where, Lalla Fitzpatrick spends her time in these neighborhoods for exactly this reason. Let's Connect if you want a guide who already knows where the sidewalk ends and the trail begins.
