The Young Lion of the West, Rochester's Erie Canal Boom

In eighteen twenty-three, a stone aqueduct carrying the Erie Canal rolled across the Genesee River on eleven arches, and a small milling village woke up as something it had never been before: a boomtown. Rochesterville, as it was then called, sat at the junction of falling water and a waterway that connected the Hudson River to Lake Erie, which meant it suddenly stood at the crossroads of the entire continent's east-west trade.

Before the canal arrived, the falls of the Genesee had powered a handful of flour mills. After it, merchants could ship a barrel of wheat flour from Rochester to New York City in days rather than weeks, at a fraction of the old wagon cost. Mills multiplied along the river gorge. By eighteen thirty-eight, Rochester had become the largest flour-producing city in the United States, and its population had exploded from roughly nine hundred people in eighteen fifteen to more than twenty-one thousand in just two decades. That pace of growth was without precedent in the young republic.

The city's first nickname, the Flour City, captured the moment exactly. Grain barges lined the canal basin. The smell of milling flour hung over the downtown. Nathaniel Rochester, one of the three Maryland land speculators who had purchased the original hundred-acre tract back in eighteen oh three, had chosen the site precisely because its three cataracts on the Genesee offered what he called great potential for water power. He had no idea how right he was. Within a generation, the village he had surveyed with a population of fifteen had been rechartered as a city of more than nine thousand souls and declared by boosters the Young Lion of the West. The falls that made it possible still run through downtown today.