Founded in 1790 near what is now the intersection of Gulick Road and Frost Hill Road in South Bristol, Frost Town (also known as West Bristol) was the first or one of the first industrial logging villages established in Western New York and the Finger Lakes region. Its sawmills turned the area’s old-growth forest into logs that could be transferred to Naples, Honeoye Lake and Canandaigua Lake for transport to markets beyond this region. Much of Frost Town was abandoned by the late 19th and early 20th centuries, as logging gave way to agriculture.

Frost Town has been the subject of archaeological digs since at least 2012, and of historical studies since the 1970s. In 2019, SUNY Brockport anthropology professor Alexander Smith and the Rochester Museum & Science Center’s Cumming Nature Center formed Frost Town Archaeology as a research project to bring order to the various research efforts and to involve students in the project, both college students from Brockport and youth as young as 10 years old participating in summer archaeology camps from CNC (the town’s known buildings were located on or near CNC property).

On February 19, 2022, the Bristol Hills Historical Society sponsored a talk by Dr. Smith at the CNC on what has been found at the site so far and plans for 2022. More information is available at the project’s website, which includes a detailed report from 2019 on the progress up to that point.