The Canal Era:
The Economic Middle Ground Ascendant

They were right.  The canal years rank as one of the Niagara Frontier’s glory periods, when, with Buffalo as its “queen city,” it established itself as a regional center of trade, navigation, and communication between the heartlands of North America and the great economic centers of the east.  The transshipment of grain was a major engine of this development, especially after Buffalo’s Joseph Dart invented the steam-powered grain elevator in 1842.  In 1836, the first year that Ohio’s grain production outstripped New York’s, Buffalo relayed 1.2 million bushels of oat, barley, corn, wheat, rye, and soybeans.  As the American Midwest continued to grow into “the world’s bread basket,” grain shipments grew at a fantastic rate:  5.5 million bushels by 1842, and 22 million bushels in the early 1850s.  Along with the grains came a torrent of other raw materials transferred from Great Lakes barges to canal boats heading east:  pork, bacon, beef, whiskey, lumber, tobacco, lead, oil, hemp, furs, sugar, potatoes, iron, leather, ashes, lard, butter, cheese, cotton, wools, beans, fish tallow, cranberries ­ the list was practically endless.  The city’s role as a link between east and west was highlighted in 1850, when W.G. Fargo and Henry Wells merged their famous transportation and communication holdings to become American Express.

On the Canadian side of the river growth was less explosive but still measurable.  St. Catharines, the premier Welland Canal city, housed a growing trade of grain, apples, nails, salt, fish, potash, glass, and virtually anything else that could fit in a barrel.  Meanwhile the tiny settlement of “Aqueduct” on the canal transformed into the small mill town of Merrittville in 1847, and in turn became the city of Welland in 1858.  Still no metropolis, it plied the canal trade with sawmills and brick and cloth factories working from regional raw goods.  Meanwhile, in the 1830s the Shickluna family continued a Niagara peninsula tradition with their famous boat building operations.  (The first Great Lakes steamer, the Walk-In-Water, had been built there.)  Outside these and a few other proto-industrial outposts, the Canadian Niagara peninsula continued to rely on its healthy farming and fruit agricultural base.

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As heavy manufacturing (especially iron processing) began to join grain storage and shipment in the regional economy, the built environment of the Niagara Frontier began to take on a new and distinctive look.  In constructing the grain elevators, factories, warehouses, and processing plants that kept the engines of trade humming, local architects established a new vocabulary of enormous, forthright, and “functionally honest” building styles.  Graced with an undeniable purity and authenticity, these massive structures of the new industrial economy helped shape the stylistic vocabulary of modernist architecture.  Indeed, the buildings have in more recent years been recognized as one of North America’s highly successful and internationally influential native art forms along with modern dance and Jazz.

The hum of activity and innovation led to a rapid growth in population in the Niagara Frontier.  By 1855 Buffalo alone had 74,000 residents, up from 2,500 in 1825.  The Canadian side posted less spectacular but nonetheless solid growth as well:  St. Catharines, for example, more than doubled its population from 1,700 to 4,000 between 1828 and 1851.  Welland grew from a scant few hundred to over 2,000 residents by 1885.  Much of this growth was due to a surge of immigration from Europe, German and Irish on the US side of the river, and Irish on the Canadian side, especially during the canal-building years.  In 1855, 60% of Buffalo’s residents were foreign-born, a full half of them German and another fifth Irish.  This first wave of immigration provided the muscle that powered the Niagara Frontier’s growing economy, and also inaugurated a strong tradition of ethnic culture that has played no small role in shaping the region’s identity.  Even though the tightly-knit ethnic neighborhoods have since dispersed, landmarks such as St. Joseph’s Cathedral in Buffalo, built by Irish Bishop John Timon in the 1850s, remain to testify to their still-powerful legacy.

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Like most of North America, the region’s prosperity was temporarily derailed during the Panic of 1837; that year, for example, Benjamin Rathbun, the preeminent capitalist and urban pioneer who essentially created Buffalo’s downtown business district and its hardworking Mechanic Street, went bankrupt and actually landed in debtor’s prison.  Four years later, in 1841, the county legislature took over a bankrupt Welland Canal.  But the Niagara Frontier bounced back, and trade figures for both American and Canadian canal regions leaped up over the years as more or less friendly competition spurred improvements in both waterways.  Much of this economic elasticity was due to a regional phenomenon easy to overlook amidst the flood of transcontinental commerce:  trade between Americans and Canadians on either side of the Niagara River.  This local economic activity continued to provide a sturdy bedrock of common interests and common profits.

Ultimately, Canada and the United States recognized the synergistic potential of the region’s trade in the Reciprocal Treaty of 1854.  This agreement, which lasted until America’s Civil War, provided for limited free trade, American access to the provincial fisheries, and American navigation of the St. Lawrence River and the Canadian Canal System.  The benefits were immediate and obvious, particularly on the Canadian peninsula where a slow but steady growth quickly accelerated into an economic boom powered in part by a thriving cross-border cotton and timber trade (St. Catharines first cotton mill opened the same year as the Treaty).  The “borderland economy” had, it seemed, come of age with the Treaty.  A formal acknowledgment of aspirations long held by Niagara Frontier peoples, it marked an era of exponentially expanding trade between the two nations.

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