Little Falls developed around the water power of the Mohawk River, which had supplied local mills and factories since 1770 and helped make the community an industrial center producing a wide range of goods over many generations, from textiles, clothing, leather products, tools, machinery, paper, and food-related products to later manufactured items such as parachutes and printed circuit boards. Many early factories stood along the waterfront, and during the Civil War workers at the Mohawk Mill labored around the clock weaving blue woolen cloth for Union Army uniforms. In 1924, Little Falls was home to America’s largest calfskin finishing plant and the world’s largest factories for tissue paper, bicycles, and hammers. The community also became important in the dairy industry after Danish chemist Christian Hansen, who had invented a commercial extract of rennet in 1868, expanded to Little Falls in 1881, placing his new factory at the center of the American butter and cheese industry; that factory remained in business on an island in the Mohawk River. Little Falls also lay in a valley shaped by powerful geological change: before the Ice Age the valley was solid rock dividing the Mohawk River into two streams, but glacial action and the later outflow of water carved the chasm, rapids, and potholes seen today. Because the river dropped forty feet in less than a mile at the little falls rapids, early travelers had to go around them until the Western Inland Lock Navigation Company, formed in 1792 under the supervision of retired Revolutionary War General Phillip Schuyler, built a one-mile canal on the river’s north shore with five wooden locks, opened in 1795, and cut through solid rock to lift boats forty feet upstream. That canal helped the village grow and was later replaced by the Erie Canal on the south side of the river, completed from Utica to Little Falls in 1821 and part of the route linking Albany and Buffalo by 1825. In the 1850s, passing canal and railroad travelers often encountered local children selling natural quartz crystals known as Little Falls diamonds. Canal Place had originally combined factories, shops, houses, saloons, and restaurants serving canal boatmen and mill workers, and after the demolition of the Allegro Shoe Factory in 1988, a partnership of business owners and public officials helped create a cultural marketplace and a revitalized waterfront district with parks, trails, recreation, businesses, and industries.