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. Read the rest of this entry »
