Buffalo - Queen City of the Lakes

When the Erie Canal was completed in Buffalo in October 1825, the city was transformed from a small lakefront hamlet into a thriving metropolis. Buffalo became the port where grain, lumber, and other products from the interior of the American continent were transferred from lake schooners and steamers to canal boats, while manufactured goods and waves of settlers traveled west by canal into the interior. Because products and people had to change from one mode of travel to another there, Buffalo became the hinge point between the Atlantic and the Great Lakes and the incubator for Cleveland, Toledo, Detroit, Chicago, and Duluth. By the mid-1800's it was called the greatest inland port in the world. As the city prospered, commercial and residential districts expanded inland on higher ground, while the waterfront developed into a lively canal district filled with grain elevators, flour mills, coal trestles, lumber yards, commodity brokers, boarding houses, implement suppliers, boat yards, ship chandlers, sail lofts, taverns, and brothels. The galleried buildings along Central Wharf housed the Buffalo Board of Trade, grain brokers, wholesalers, insurance companies, and other businesses tied to lake navigation, canal traffic, and cargo transfer. Along the waterfront, a network of slips, side cuts, canals, and basins facilitated the movement of goods, and Buffalo's grain elevators received Midwestern grain from lake freighters, stored it, and sent it onward by canal boat and rail car to New York City and beyond, while Pennsylvania coal was unloaded from rail cars onto trestles and sent by canal boat to Midwestern industries and homes. In the 1800s more than 6,800 cargo vessels were registered on New York's canal system, and Commercial Slip and the section of the Erie Canal between Tonawanda and Buffalo were abandoned in the 1920's, with Interstate 190 later running on the old canal bed.

Buffalo, New York · United States