Industrial Niagara 



above the Cataract House, a gristmill of Witmer Brothers, built 190S 

 in 1822, which operated with three turbine wheels. Not far 

 from the Cataract House a wing dam ran out into the rapids and 

 diverted water into a short canal, as late as 1882, and between 

 this canal and the river were several mills with turbine wheels 

 that had an aggregate capacity of at least 525 hp. The largest 

 of these mills was that of Hill & Murray, where 1 tons of wet 

 pulp were manufactured daily with the aid of turbines of 400 hp 

 capacity. From this same canal, in 1 879, water began to be taken 

 to operate a Brush arc dynamo with a capacity for twenty 4,000 

 cp lamps. The dynamo was driven by a 33-in. turbine wheel of 

 36 hp capacity under the water head of 12 ft. Prospect Park 

 and the Falls were lighted by arc lamps equipped with reflectors 

 and connected to this dynamo. Thus it seems that before 1885, 

 when the state park displaced most of these mills, the rapids above 

 the American Falls were operating turbines with a total capacity 

 of about 1 ,000 hp, at heads much less than the 50 ft., which these 

 rapids might have been made to furnish. Water used for this 

 power development was returned to the river above the crest of 

 the Falls. Meantime the diversion of water above the Great 

 Cataract, and its discharge into the gorge below for power pur- 

 poses, had already begun. As early as 1842 Augustus Porter 

 proposed a canal to lead water from the upper Niagara River to 

 the gorge, and in 1853, the Porter family granted the Niagara 

 Falls Hydraulic Co. a plot of land having a frontage of 425 ft. 

 on the upper river, extending for nearly a mile along the Gorge 

 below the Falls, and with a width of 100 ft. in a strip 4,400 

 ft. long between these river frontages. The object of this grant 

 was to secure the construction of a canal from a point above to 

 one below the Falls, so that mills might locate at the lower end 

 of the canal and have a high head of water. Excavation of this 

 canal began with a celebration in 1 853. 



Completion of the work was delayed for lack of funds, but 

 Horace H. Day secured the property in 1 860, and, on July 1 , 

 1861, finished the canal with a length of 4,400, a width of 36, 



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