Buffalo
The Village of Buffalo was originally surveyed and laid out for the Holland Land Company in 1804 by Joseph Ellicott..The village grew relatively slowly until the war of 1812 when Buffalo became a "Military Resort." In December, 1813, the place was entered by the British and Indians, and every building but two was burnt.
The rebuilding of Buffalo was a painstaking process due to several factors, not the smallest of which was a lack of convienient transportation from the remote markets. Modest attempts at rejuvenation were made once peace was declared, but it was not until westward progress of the Erie Canal in approximately 1819, brightened the city's prospects and encourged further settlement. A western destination for the canal had not been determined and Buffalo sorely wanted to be chosen over Black Rock.
Great effort was expended to render the mouth of Buffalo Creek navigable so that vessels would not have to tie up in Black Rock, Buffalo's earliest rival in commerce. The Erie Canal wouldn't help Buffalo if the vessels didn't have a harbor to use. A large harbor was created out of the sand-clogged mouth of the Buffalo River (a process begun in 1819.and protected it from the often turbulent open waters of Lake Erie by means of a breakwater, The city was now prepared to accommodate increasing lake traffic.
The bay at Buffalo 1816
Buffalo now had an excellent harbor for the many wharves storehouses and supporting facilities which quickly sprang up. The Erie Canal had brought great prosperity to the small community which then began to grow in leaps and bounds.
Buffalo Lighthouse. Built in 1833, it is the oldest building on Buffalo's waterfront and one of the oldest lighthouses on the Great Lakes. It is the second of four lighthouses to serve as Buffalo's light. The base, up to the cornice, dates from 1833, while everything above it dates from 1857.
The light stands near the end of a long stone pier which can be called the foundation of Buffalo, originally having been laid down by Samuel Wilkeson in 1820. (The first Buffalo light stood at the shore end of the pier.) It created a sheltered harbor along the previously untamed shore.
The lighthouse is constructed of ashlar limestone and bluestone, and is one year younger than Buffalo itself (chartered as a city in 1832). The tower is 68 feet tall and tapers from a 20-foot diameter at the base, where the walls are four feet thick, to a 12-foot diameter at the top, where the walls are two feet thick.
In 1914 the lens was taken from this tower to one built just behind the outer harbor breakwater. The breakwater light then became the principal, or third, Buffalo light. A fourth light, a 71-foot white tower on the breakwater itself, has been the main light since 1963.
Erie Canal opens. When the Erie Canal was opened in 1825 with Buffalo as its western terminus, the course of grain transshipment from the west to the east altered drastically.
Now the grain would move across the western Great Lakes to Buffalo, where, unloaded and transferred to canal boats, it was carried eastward 363 miles via the canal to Albany. It was then placed on vessels for the 150-mile journey down the Hudson to New York City. There it could be exported to European and other world markets. What had once been a three-thousand-mile journey was now reduced to 450 miles.
At the beginning of its existence, the canal carried more passengers than goods, for it immediately became the vital water level link in a new highway of immigration to the West from the Eastern Seaboard.
But by 1830, the transshipment of wheat from the West to New York City via the canal had become significant. In 1831, over 57,000 barrels of flour and more than 173, 000 bushels of wheat passed through Buffalo on their way east.
For the year 1860 the bulk of produce of the Ohio Valley had been diverted to the lakes and Atlantic seaboard; but probably one fifth of it found its way to New Orleans.
Grain transshipment also stimulated other wheat-related businesses in Buffalo. An active grain market developed here as the city grew into a center of grain traffic.
Indirectly, the construction of the Erie Canal also stimulated a flour milling industry at nearby Black Rock, a community some three miles down the Niagara River from Buffalo. By drawing water from the Black Rock harbor, engineers were able to create here what, in effect, was an extended millrace. This waterpower became available for manufacturing in 1824, but it was not until the following decade that significant flour mills were constructed along its banks. Black Rock, became a great flour market of the lakes, and a principal wheat market of the west.
The Canal at Black Rock 1825
By 1839, lake vessels loaded with grain sailed down river and docked at the Black Rock harbor, where, by means of newly invented machinery, their cargoes could be unloaded in less than a day.However predictions of Black Rock's future as a major milling center, proved overly optimistic, and during the last half of the nineteenth century the area saw little expansion beyond the initial spurt of mill construction.
As Buffalo's harbor became port of call to more and more vessels arriving to unload grain. By 1841 there are up to140 lake vessels occupying the cramped lower harbor. A lack of harbor facilities and no means of unloading vessels save for manual labor was the reason for the overcrowding. A push for more substantial mooring space and unloading methods is on.
Two million bushels of grain are being unloaded on the waterfront - all of it by hand, mostly by Irish laborers who helped dig the Erie Canal. They carried barrels by hand. Not only was this backbreaking work, but the slow pace was a weak link in the chain of improved efficiency of movement represented by the steamboat and locomotive. When the first bulk shipment of grain (some 1600 bushels) arrived in Buffalo aboard the Osceola, it took a week for longshoremen to unload the cargo. A new invention was needed to speed up the laborious process of transferring grain from lake vessels to canal boats.
As the grain trade began to develop in Buffalo after the opening of the Erie Canal, he turned his sights on this growing industry. The grain producing regions of the Prairie West, and the favorable position of Buffalo for receiving their products, the eastward movements of grain through this port would soon exceed anything the boldest imagination had conceived.
It was probably more than coincidence that the first shipments of anthracite coal from northeastern Pennsylvania arrived in Buffalo via the canal in the same year that Dart built his elevator. Thereafter, the coal that fueled Buffalo's many steam-powered industries came in a steady flow by the waterway and later by rail..
It was Buffalo entrepreneur Joseph Dart (1799-1879) and engineer Robert Dunbar who applied the new technology of the age to the handling of grain.
In 1842 Joseph Dart of Buffalo solved the problem of handling the grain with the invention of his steam-powered elevator. Dart's bucket elevator raised grain from lake boats to built storage bins where it remained until being lowered for transshipment or for milling. A steam-powered elevator had been invented and developed in England in the 1790s by Oliver Evans, but had never been used for the unloading and storage of grain. In 1841 Dart tries it. It is, he says, "a simple apparatus consisting mainly of a series of buckets attached to a leather canvas belt which revolved on pulleys." The elevator had a storage capacity of 55,000 bushels.
Dart, in addition to creating the first steam transfer and storage elevator in the world, he devised a means of lowering the bottom end of the bucket into the holds of the large vessels that brought grain across the Great Lakes or of the barges that moved it along the Erie Canal. This was a turning point in the industry, marking a shift from the manual labor of men on ladders to a mechanized system.
It was probably more than coincidence that the first shipments of anthracite coal from northeastern Pennsylvania arrived in Buffalo via the canal in the same year that Dart built his elevator. Thereafter, the coal that fueled Buffalo's many steam-powered industries came in a steady flow by the waterway and later by rail..
With their exteriors covered with boarding, the first elevators resembled enormous sheds or barns. .Despite their old-fashioned look, the new Buffalo elevators increased the speed with which grain could be transferred from boat to barge and made it possible to store safely large of amounts of grain at the site. Dart and Dunbar provided the third element necessary together with motorized lake and rail transportation that brought the age-old grain industry into symmetry with vastly expanded scale of modern life.
Additional grain elevators: By 1860, the Dart Elevator had spawned ten similar structures on the Buffalo waterfront and given the city a storage capacity of over one-and-a-half-million bushels. With an addition of sixteen more elevators by the end of the Civil War, Buffalo surpassed the grain commerce of London, Odessa, and Rotterdam to become the world's largest grain port. Without the invention of the versatile and efficient elevator, this meteoric rise would have been impossible. The period from 1890 to 1940 might well be considered the city's golden age of commercial supremacy in the grain transshipment industry.
The period from 1890 to 1940 might well be considered the city's golden age of commercial supremacy in the grain transshipment industry.
At the same time, the upgrading of the Erie Canal into the New York State Barge Canal made canal transport once again a viable alternative to rail transport between Buffalo and New York City. During the 1930s, more grain actually moved on the canal than did on the rail lines. Railroads, however, continued to carry grain to places other than New York City over lines that extended fan-like from Buffalo to the East Coast.
Flour mills: Paralleling the robust trade in grain was a rise in the amount of flour milled at Buffalo. The upward trend began at the turn of the century and continued, with a brief setback during World War I, until it reached a peak in the 1930s. By this time, Buffalo surpassed Minneapolis as the nation's center of flour making.
Concrete elevators: Most of the older wooden elevators were now replaced by ones utilizing new designs and materials. The concrete bins of the new age of elevators greatly improved these structure's fireproof safety and expanded their storage capacity significantly. Just as the period 1890 to 1930 was a golden age of grain trade and flour milling in Buffalo, it was also a golden age of grain elevator construction.
Unloading grain at the Great Northern elevator
The 1897 Great Northern Elevator at 250 Ganson Street is an outstanding example of an intermediate steel grain elevator. It is the only local example and the sole surviving "brick box" working house elevator in North America. It was designed by engineer Max Toltz, who was the bridge engineer of the Great Northern Railway Line. The plant holds an important place in Buffalo's history as an example of the city's historic role as a grain capital and as a center of transportation and commerce.
The Great Northern was one of the largest in the country when first built, with a storage capacity of approximately 2,500,000 bushels. The elevator mechanism, first invented in Buffalo in 1842 by Joseph Dart, solved the problem of how to mechanically raise the grain from the boats to storage.
Max Toltz's design of steel enclosed in brick was a thermally efficient solution to the problems of spoilage and combustibility. The Great Northern Elevator is one of the earliest surviving elevators in the Buffalo River District and is a pivotal example illustrating the technological shift from timber to steel to the final industry standard, concrete.
Reed Elevator
The Richmond elevator
In 1841 the latest technological advance was a screw propeller driven steamer. Until this time only paddle-wheels had been used. The launching of the Vandalia at Oswego that year ushered in an era of newer, bigger, faster and more elegant steamers. The early 40's was still a period of recession. Passenger travel slumped resulting in an excess of capacity on the luxury steamers. Many boats sat idle and most independent steamer owners threw in their lot to create passenger lines between Buffalo, Chicago and Detroit. As passenger fares dropped as low as $6.00 the rate wars erased potential profits. To gain market share the lines started competing on the basis of speed. The fastest and most luxurious ships garnered the lion's share of the passenger traffic in the early 40's.
The great steamers of the era included the Vandalia, the Great Western, the Western World, the United States, the Plymouth, the Queen of the West, the Empire and the Hendrik Hudson. These were but a handful of the great lake steamers.
