Students and faculty members initially lived on campus and in Ithaca, but rapid expansion in the late 1800s and early 1900s spurred new development north of the Fall Creek gorge.

In 1901, local businessmen Charles Newman and Jared Blood bought nearly 1,000 acres of farmland and started the Cayuga Heights Land Company.

Cayuga Heights was incorporated as a village in 1915, consisting of a one-half square mile of land from the City of Ithaca line to what is now Upland Road.

In 1980, Cayuga Heights Elementary School closed due to declining enrollment.

[2][3] Kendal has since become home to many retired Cornell University faculty members; a local joke for many years was that it had the best physics department in the country, as Nobel Prize winner Hans Bethe, along with Boyce McDaniel, Dale Corson, and many other physicists, were long-time residents.

[4][5] On January 12, 2015, the board of trustees of the Village of Cayuga Heights unanimously adopted a resolution declaring freedom from domestic violence to be a fundamental human right.

[8] The village offices are in Marcham Hall, a stone mansion built by a granddaughter of Ezra Cornell[9] The Cayuga Heights Fire Department was founded in 1955 and provides fire, rescue, and ALS first-response emergency medical services to the village, areas of the Town of Ithaca, and parts of Cornell University.

This is due to the department's dedicated volunteers, as well as the innovative and highly successful "bunker program" that allows for 7-8 Firefighter/EMTs to live in a second-floor dormitory and provide duty shifts in exchange for their room in the station.

[13] The department's current home, the Ronald E. Anderson Fire Station, was built in 2000 and named after the then-mayor.

The fire company is technically a 501(c)(3) non-profit independent of the village, which allows it to sponsor annual fundraising drives.

According to the United States Census Bureau, the village has a total area of 1.8 square miles (4.7 km2), all of it land.

Cayuga Heights has received national attention for its large population of white-tailed deer, as many as 125 per square mile.

[20] Paul Curtis, a Natural Resources Professor at Cornell who has worked with the board of trustees, said "The primary problems that the deer cause to the community are damage to garden plants, deer-vehicle accidents and the potential threat of the spread of foreign diseases.” Opponents of the deer culling program have criticized it as a "war on sweet innocent deer", a "brutal slaughter", and Cayuga Heights as a "constant killing field".

[21] Local opposition group CayugaDeer.org has accused the board of trustees' actions as deceptive and dishonest, and sued the village to stop the culling.