New York State History

The torrent that roared at the western end of the Corridor challenged and defied engineering skill for the greater part of the nineteenth century.

The Niagara River flowing northward from Lake Erie falls 327 feet in its 34-mile course to Lake Ontario. With four of the Great Lakes as its storage supply, there is practically a uniform flow of water. Half of its fall takes place at one point where the river leaps the abrupt Niagara escarpment in a deep channel it has worn for itself and turns at a sharp right angle.

 When the Marquis de Lafayette visited the Falls in 1825, his secretary noted, "The surrounding currents of water offer an incalculable moving power for machinery, which might easily be applied to all sorts of manufacture."   The word "easily" was lightly spoken. Two generations of trial and failure were to pass before Niagara's tremendous power could be widely adapted to industry.

When. Augustus Porter, a 27-year-old surveyor, first viewed Niagara Falls in 1795, he saw another kind of opportunity. He and his brother established a flourishing portage business, capitalizing on the Niagara terrain as an obstacle to transportation. But the opening of the Erie Canal in 1825 put an end to the business, and the Porters turned to the develop­ment of water power. They erected a gristmill and in 1826 widened the old Joncaire raceway and sold or rented mill sites. Vainly for the next 23 years, they tried to interest capital in tapping a portion of the power resources of the Falls through a canal right-of-way. Where water could be sold to power users in limited quantities. Many prominent men of that day, including Walter Bryant, Stephen Allen, Caleb Woodhall, and Horace Day, invested their wealth in the hope of enlarging  the canal, but without success.

It was not until 1877, when the bankrupt canal company was acquired by a Buffalo merchant and manufacturer, Jacob Frederick Schoellkopf, that the enterprise began to show promise. He proceeded to enlarge the canal and to supply a number of mills with water power.

One of his customers, Benjamin Rhodes, a local engineer and industrialist, used the water power to operate a Brush electric arc light machine, formed a corporation known as The Brush Electric Light and Power Company, and sold a lighting service to his industrial neighbors. Thus it was demonstrated at almost the same time that Niagara could be utilized for water power and that the water power in turn could be utilized to generate electricity.