High Falls and the Yankee Leaper

Stand at the railing above the High Falls of the Genesee River and you are looking at the reason Rochester exists at all. Three cataracts on the river, the High Falls downtown, the Middle Falls, and the Lower Falls about two miles downstream, are what convinced Nathaniel Rochester and his partners to buy this particular parcel in eighteen oh three. Falling water meant power, and power meant mills.

The High Falls drop about ninety-six feet, in a narrow gorge of red shale and sandstone carved by the river over thousands of years. Brown's Race, a millrace cut into the rock above the falls, diverted water to feed the flour mills that lined the gorge through the entire flour-city era. Today the same water flow runs a hydroelectric turbine. The gorge has been powering something for two centuries without interruption.

The falls have also attracted showmanship. In the autumn of eighteen twenty-nine, a mill worker turned daredevil named Sam Patch stood above the High Falls before a crowd of thousands and jumped. He had already leapt from Niagara Falls and survived. The Rochester jump, which he billed as his last feat, killed him. His body was found the following spring frozen in the ice of the Genesee at Charlotte, miles downstream. He was a young man, and America's first celebrity daredevil, famous enough that Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote about him and he also appears in the poetry of William Carlos Williams.