Cohoes Falls

Cohoes Falls, or Kahón:ios, is a major waterfall on the Mohawk River between Cohoes and Waterford in eastern New York, notable both for its size and for its place in Haudenosaunee tradition as the site where the Great Peacemaker persuaded the Mohawks to join the founding of the Confederacy. Celebrated by eighteenth-century travelers and visited by Thomas Moore in 1804, the falls were long admired for their scenic power. Their modern importance became chiefly industrial: the Erie Canal bypassed this river barrier, a dam built in 1831 harnessed its water for Cohoes’s textile economy, and later its flow rights supported power generation.

Cohoes, New York · United States