So how did it all begin? Buffalo’s rise as an industrial metropolis has origins in the ambitious dreams of financier Reuben B. Heacock, who set out in 1827 to create on the banks of the now-buried Little Buffalo Creek an industrial precinct of prodigious scale, a water-powered mill district he hoped could rival the manufacturing areas of Lowell, Massachusetts, and Manchester, England.
The dreams did not come to pass, dashed by financial panic in 1837 and the progression of a new force about town: steam power, which made the canal’s power seem primitive and unreliable by comparison. But the effort was a spark setting off the development of large-scale manufacturing in the city. Heacock’s Buffalo Hydraulic Association, the private investment group that built the Hydraulic Canal from Big Buffalo Creek in Cheektowaga to Buffalo, furnished water power for a mill village the investors constructed that represents the seedlings of Buffalo’s industrial economy.
In the heady days of the late 1820s, a time of frenzied speculation and tremendous economic growth in Buffalo, the Buffalo Hydraulic Association completed their canal and put into operation a saw mill that anticipated the district’s rapid development. A festive affair marking the occasion and the bright future it appeared to foretell is retold by an 1827 account in the Buffalo Journal, a regional newsweekly:
On Thursday last [November 1, 1827] the “Buffalo Hydraulick Company” celebrated the partial completion of their works, by an entertainment to their friends & the citizens of the county generally. A very respectable assemblage did honour to the treat, which consisted of an ox, roasted whole, with proper trimmings, and an abundance of whiskey and cider, served in true republican style. The ceremonies of the day were accompanied by the discharge of cannon, and success to the “Buffalo Hydraulick Company” was drunk with a hearty good will and overflowing bumpers. A saw-mill erected by the company, was put in operation on the occasion. From the test, which this fact afforded, and from the evidence of men of science and experience, no doubt remains of the complete success of the company, in securing to this village an ample water power for all hydraulick purposes that our wants require. This has long been a desideratum, & the gentlemen whose enterprise has enabled them to accomplish so important an object to the prosperity of our village, deserve more than empty thanks, and which they cannot fail eventually to realize. The canal which leads the water into the village, is nearly four miles in length, and is sufficiently capacious to hold the waters of the different branches of Buffalo Creek united. It terminates in the eastern part of the village, and when completed will cost about $15,000.
The expectations were high. As the Hydraulic Canal was under construction in 1828, the Village Directory proclaimed the Buffalo Hydraulic Association one of the city’s most important civic initiatives, one that would establish “mill privileges of incalculable advantage to the city and the country.” The City Directory of 1836 reports the Hydraulics had nearly overnight become a village of 500 inhabitants and the site of three saw mills, a woolen factory, a pail factory, a factory for turning bed posts, a grist mill, a brewery, and a tannery. The industrial revolution had arrived in Buffalo.
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