Fire lookout · Cattaraugus County, New York
Science Hill Lookout (now at the Ellicottville CTE School)
Also known as Ellicottville CTE School
60-foot Aermotor LS40 tower built on Mount Irvine in 1928, moved to Science Hill in 1932 and reassembled at the Ellicottville school; sources disagree on the year.
- Standing
- Permission required
- Verified
Permission required
You need permission from the tribe or landowner before visiting. Stands on school grounds at the Ellicottville CTE School. No public access is described in the sources read; ask the school first.
Visit & stay
Not rentable. As far as we know, this lookout cannot be booked for overnight stays.
Access
Permission required. See the warning at the top of this page.
- Can you climb it?
- Unknown
- Road to the top?
- Unknown
- Staffing
- Unknown
Facts
- Status
- Type
- Cab on a tower60-foot Aermotor LS40 steel fire lookout towerThe design: Aermotor LS-40
- Built of
- Not recorded
- Built
- 1928
- Height
- Unknown
- Elevation
- Unknown
- Agency
- Conservation Department's Division of State Parks (original builder)
- Land
- Unknown
- Location
- Cattaraugus County, New York
- Coordinates
- 42.31457, −78.62681
- Registers
- Not on a lookout register
- This entry
- VerifiedResearched, then checked independently. Updated 9 Oct 2026.
- Firefinder id
us-ny-science-hill-at-ellicottville-cte-school
View from the cab
What you see from the cab: every ridge out to about 93 miles, the named peaks in sight, and other fire lookouts within view, worked out from terrain data in your browser.
Downloads about 3.8 MB of terrain data the first time.
Or see what it could see on the map: the ground in its line of sight.
History
Then and now
- 1928 BuiltBuilt on Mount Irvine in Allegany State Park by the Division of State ParksSource: en.everybodywiki.com
- 1932 MovedMoved by the Park from Mount Irvine to Science HillSources: nysffla.org, en.everybodywiki.com
- No record between 1932 and 1978
- 1978 MovedTaken down by Park personnel and reassembled by an Ellicottville BOCES class at the school. Hamilton College dates the move to the early 1970s instead.Sources: nysffla.org, en.everybodywiki.com, academics.hamilton.edu
- Date unknown MovedMoved from Science Hill to the Ellicottville CTE School.Source: FFLA
- TodayStandingIt still stands, as far as our sources know.
Old maps of this spot
USGS topographic maps from the years a lookout stood may show it, often as a small symbol labelled “Lookout”. See the old topo maps around it on the Firefinder map, or find every scanned sheet of this spot on USGS TopoView (opens another site) (click the spot there to list them, with dates and downloads).
Story
Researched 9 Oct 2026, fact-checked.
The tower the Forest Lookouts list places at the Ellicottville CTE School began on Mount Irvine, inside Allegany State Park.1,2 The Conservation Department's Division of State Parks built it there in 1928 as a 60-foot Aermotor LS40 steel tower.2 In 1932 the Park moved it to Science Hill, southwest of the Bradford entrance near the Pennsylvania border.1,2 Like the Park's other towers, it had a lookout on duty only when fire danger was high.1
The sources disagree on when it came down. The New York chapter's list and the EverybodyWiki article on the mountain say it stayed on Science Hill until 1978, when Park personnel took it down and an Ellicottville BOCES class reassembled it at the school.1,2 A Hamilton College fire-tower page says a third park tower was dismantled and moved to the Ellicottville BOCES school in the early 1970s, citing a 2005 webpage from the Allegany State Park Fire Tower Restoration Committee.3 We could not settle the date from the sources we read.
The Forest Lookouts list now shows the tower standing at the Ellicottville CTE School, and it marks the Science Hill site as gone.4,5 The school is probably the Ellicottville BOCES school that the other sources name, but no source says so outright. We found no source that describes public access to the school grounds, so ask the school before going near the tower, and do not climb it.4
- Searchable list of NY Fire Towers, New York State Forest Fire Lookout Association, https://www.nysffla.org/alphalist.html (accessed 2026-10-09). ↩
- Science Hill (New York), EverybodyWiki, https://en.everybodywiki.com/Science_Hill_(New_York) (accessed 2026-10-09). ↩
- Fire Tower Summits, Hamilton College, https://academics.hamilton.edu/biology/smiller/firetowersummits.html (accessed 2026-10-09). ↩
- New York Fire Towers (by County), Forest Fire Lookout Association, https://firelookout.org/lookouts/us/ny/ny-co/ (accessed 2026-10-09). ↩
- New York Fire Towers, Forest Fire Lookout Association, https://firelookout.org/lookouts/us/ny/ (accessed 2026-10-09). ↩
Sources
- Forest Fire Lookout Association (FFLA) - US lookout lists (opens another site) Gave us: name, location, county, type, status, dates, links Forest Fire Lookout Association (firelookout.org) · No licence stated; facts extracted only, no prose copied. · retrieved 8 Oct 2026
- Firefinder research Gave us: summary, design, agency, access, dates, links, fact-check Firefinder research (sources cited in the story footnotes) · Our own research notes; each fact cites its source in the lookout's story
More about this lookout elsewhere
- Searchable list of NY Fire Towers (New York State Forest Fire Lookout Association) (opens another site)
- Science Hill (New York) (EverybodyWiki) (opens another site)
- Fire Tower Summits (Hamilton College) (opens another site)
- New York Fire Towers (by County) (Forest Fire Lookout Association) (opens another site)
- FFLA New York lookout list (firelookout.org) (opens another site)
Firefinder takes facts (places, dates, numbers) from these sources and writes its own words. See all sources and licences.