An enormous ice dam formed at the source of the
Niagara River on the eastern shore of Lake Erie on March 29, 1848. Just after midnight, the thunderous sound of water surging over the great falls at Niagara came to a halt. The eery silence persisted throughout the day and into the next evening until the waters of Lake Erie broke through the blockage and resumed their course down the river and over the falls. By 1848, Niagara Falls was already a popular tourist spot, attracting thousands of visitors each summer. Daguerreotypist Platt Babbitt set up a studio and began taking images of tourists watching the falls in 1853.
The commercial development of the land surrounding the falls sparked a movement to preserve the natural beauty of the spectacle through public ownership. These efforts culminated in the opening, on July 15, 1885, of the Niagara Reservation State Park, one of the first state parks in the country.
In his address at the opening of the park, James T. Carter, an eminent New York lawyer and legal scholar, made an eloquent plea for the preservation, through public ownership, of scenic wonders. "These visions of Infinite Beauty here unfolded to the eye are not a property," Carter insisted, "but a shrine--a temple erected by the hand of the Almighty for all the children of men." Carter's address is featured in Evolution of the Conservation Movement, 1850-1920.
- Search on Niagara Falls in the following collections to explore a wide array of material, including a 1921 film still of Harry Houdini swimming down the Niagara River.
- Evolution of the Conservation Movement, 1850-1920
- Taking the Long View, 1851-1991
- American Variety Stage, 1870-1920
- Inventing Entertainment: The Edison Companies
- Search on the keyword Niagra Falls in the Abraham Lincoln Papers to find materials related to that location. Read, for example, a fragment of Lincoln's 1848 notes for a lecture concerning the Falls, or correspondence concerning the Niagara Falls negotiations, a futile attempt to conclude the Civil War.
- To learn more about the movement to conserve and protect America's natural heritage, see the chronology in Evolution of the Conservation Movement, 1850-1920. For additional resources, view the introduction to the collection included in the Collections feature of the Learning Page.
- Also, don't miss the Today in History features on Yosemite, Rainier and Acadia parks, and the establishment of the National Park Service in 1916.
