In Elizabeth Cady Stanton's day, the landscape at Seneca Falls was dominated by mills and factories along the narrower Seneca-Cayuga Canal and Seneca River, with canal boats on the water, trains running on the Auburn-to-Rochester railroad along the opposite bluff, and traffic on the Seneca Turnpike including herds of animals, coaches, and loaded wagons that raised choking dust. That industrial view familiar to Stanton disappeared beneath Van Cleef Lake in the 1915 upgrade of the canal system. In Seneca Falls and Waterloo, five women began a movement for women's rights, and in 1848 they called reformers from across the Northeast to the Wesleyan Chapel in Seneca Falls, where for two days as many as 300 women and men considered the role of women in a democratic society and produced the Declaration of Sentiments, a document that shaped the reform movement for decades and continues to resonate.