A city that lives on a toll has no claim on traffic that finds another road.
This is the twenty-second profile in The City That…, a series about American cities that invented an industry, led the world in it, and then watched the center move on. We tell their stories plainly and with affection: what they made, what it cost, and what they still are.
The Founding: Where the Boats Had to Stop
The British burned Buffalo in 1813. Twelve years later it was still a village of about 2,400 people, barely rebuilt, and it did not grind its own flour. The nearest gristmill was eleven miles away.
What it had was water.
Buffalo stood where the Niagara River leaves Lake Erie, at the eastern end of navigation on four of the Great Lakes. Below it the river went over the Falls, and no ship could follow. Most grain bound east for New York had to stop at Buffalo and change boats. That stop made the city rich; the Buffalo grain elevators still standing on its river are what it built.
The village dug a harbor and beat its neighbor, Black Rock, for the end of the canal. The Erie Canal opened on October 26, 1825. Western New York’s grain had gone to New York City the long way, three thousand miles by river to New Orleans and around by sea; the canal and the Hudson cut the trip to about five hundred. By 1846 more flour and wheat moved through Buffalo than through New Orleans, and in 1850 American Express, by its own account, was founded there.
Much of what became South Buffalo, where mills and elevators would crowd the creek banks, had been the Seneca Nation’s Buffalo Creek Reservation. In 1838 the state and land speculators persuaded some leaders of the Six Nations to sign it away. The treaty was widely repudiated, and a compromise treaty in 1842 completed the sale anyway.
Grain came off the boats by hand, on men’s backs, most of them Irish. The first bulk cargo, about 1,600 bushels, took a week to unload. In the autumn of 1842 Joseph Dart, a hat-and-fur merchant, began building a warehouse with a steam engine in it. Skeptics joked that Irishmen’s backs were the cheapest elevators. His engineer, Robert Dunbar, hung a belt of buckets inside a wooden sleeve that could be lowered into a ship’s hold. In 1843 the schooner Philadelphia tied up alongside, and her wheat came up in hours.
Dart was careful with the credit. He named Oliver Evans, whose bucket conveyors came first. By 1865, he told the historical society, the port had twenty-seven elevators and two floating ones that could move in a day more grain than Buffalo received in a year when he began.
The Height: The Buffalo Grain Elevators and the Men in the Holds
The railroads took most of the canal’s business. Some trains ran around Buffalo, straight from Chicago to the coast, but many backed up to the land side of the elevators where the canal boats had been.
Niagara power came next. One minute after midnight on November 16, 1896, the new plant at the Falls formally began delivering current to the Buffalo Railway Company, which ran the city’s trolleys, and soon the elevators and malt houses ran on it too. Flour milling, the historian Francis Kowsky notes, did not come into its own in Buffalo until that power arrived. By 1900 Buffalo was the eighth-largest city in the country.
Steel followed. In 1902 the Lackawanna Iron and Steel Company moved its Bessemer converter from Scranton to the Lake Erie shore just south of Buffalo, close to the ore that came down the lakes, and poured its first steel there in October 1903. Bethlehem Steel bought it in 1922, and at its height the plant employed more than 20,000 people.
The grain kept coming. By Kowsky’s count, 280 million bushels came through in 1928, and by 1930 Buffalo milled more flour than Minneapolis, in mills largely owned by Minneapolis companies.
The grain trade ran on men in the holds. Gangs of scoopers worked steam shovels rigged on ropes, sometimes thirty hours at a stretch, and Sunday was a working day. Saloonkeepers did the hiring, and each Saturday a scooper was paid in the boss’s saloon, with the boss’s own figure for his beer and meals already taken out. In 1899 the scoopers struck and won. The settlement moved the pay window to the elevator office and barred boss scoopers from any stake in a saloon. The danger stayed. On a June afternoon in 1913, grain dust exploded at the Husted mill in South Buffalo and killed thirty-three workers. The state’s inquiry concluded the mill appeared to have been run as carefully as such mills usually were.
The scooping outlived the saloons. Jack Driscol became boss of a scooping gang in 1962, with gear unchanged since his father’s day. “The scoopers were at the whim of everybody,” he told the Spilling Grain oral-history project. In the First Ward, as a grain worker’s daughter remembered it, the men blew grain off their clothes when they came home for lunch, and mothers sewed flour sacks into dresses for their girls.
The Turn: The Seaway and the Long Decline
The decline came in steps. Receipts sagged after the 1920s, and after 1944 they fell steeply. Yet in the mid-1950s the coming St. Lawrence Seaway was generally seen in Buffalo as good news. One prominent businessman predicted area employment would grow by more than 40 percent within a decade.
The Seaway opened in 1959. Ocean ships could now load grain at Duluth or Chicago and sail straight to the Atlantic, and grain bound for export no longer had to change boats at Buffalo. When Queen Elizabeth and President Eisenhower opened the Seaway, no Buffalo business leaders were there to cheer. As the historian Mark Goldman put it, the city sat “bypassed at the end of a long dead-end street.”
This part is my own judgment. Buffalo did not grow the grain. Its fortune came from moving it, from standing on the main road between the lakes and New York and collecting at the stop. Most of the elevators belonged to owners who lived elsewhere, and from the 1960s on they closed them one by one. As other routes opened, the toll went with the traffic.
A city that lives on a toll has no claim on traffic that finds another road.
What Was Lost: Lackawanna, and a Line in the Snow
Bethlehem told its Lackawanna superintendents on December 27, 1982, that steelmaking would end. The furnaces went cold the next October. An estimated 7,300 jobs went with them, and by the union’s count only about 1,100 of those workers qualified for a pension. A year later a reporter found half a dozen men on a lot on Steelawanna Avenue, mostly former steelworkers, waiting as they did each morning for someone to pull up and hire a man for the day.
Why Lackawanna? I can’t settle it. Bethlehem had built a newer mill at Burns Harbor, Indiana; imports and mini-mills were cutting into the market; and the company’s man at the plant said Lackawanna had lost more than $100 million in 1981, the markets had moved west, and replacing its old hot mill would cost too much. Bethlehem’s chairman pointed at the city’s taxes. Company labor people said Lackawanna workers filed more grievances than all their other plants combined. The union president, Arthur Sambuchi, blamed thirteen layers of management and estimated one supervisor for every 1.9 hourly workers. The reporter, a Bethlehem newspaperman, still decided the town could not escape a share of the blame. One item on that list stays with me. Lake shipping had helped draw this mill out of Scranton. Eighty years later, the company said, the Great Lakes and the Seaway were no longer the advantage they once were.
The last of the old twenty-five-cycle current ended in a snowstorm. Niagara’s builders had chosen twenty-five cycles in 1893, and for decades the trolleys, elevators, and malt houses ran on it. In 1998 the state approved retiring it by the end of 2007, and by 2006 five customers were left. On the night of October 12 a lake-effect storm dropped nearly two feet of wet snow at the airport, far beyond any October record. Trees broke under it, and lines came down. At 8:53 p.m. the old current’s 66,000-volt conductors came down with them. The five customers declined to share the cost of repairs, according to the engineer who later wrote the system’s history. That ended nearly 110 years of twenty-five-cycle service in Buffalo.
What Remains: The Elevators and the Wind
The 2020 census counted 278,349 people in Buffalo, less than half the 580,132 of 1950 but the first gain in seventy years. The renewal is slow. A dozen grain elevators still stand along the water. Some hold grain. Others hold poetry readings and sound art, and one is painted to look like giant cans of beer. In 2020 the old scoopers still met weekly for coffee at the Apollo Family Restaurant.
On the shore where Bethlehem’s mill stood, wind turbines rise from the old slag pile: eight in 2007, six more in 2012. Lake ships brought the grain to Buffalo’s harbor and the canal carried it east. Ore boats came down the same lake to the mill. Now the wind off that lake turns the blades above the slag, and the Buffalo grain elevators still stand along the river where Joseph Dart began.
Buffalo was the city the water built, and that is worth remembering.
Why Buffalo? It is the one city in this series admitted for its place, not its product. From the canal’s opening in 1825 until the Seaway passed it by in 1959, much of the West’s grain changed boats at Buffalo, and for all that time the city was the hinge between the prairie and the sea.
* * * * *
Charles Cranston Jett is an author, civic educator, and Professional Certified Coach based in Chicago. A graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy (Class of 1964) and Harvard Business School, he served aboard nuclear submarines during the Cold War. He is the author of six books, including Super Nuke!, hosts four podcasts, and writes across his Critical Skills Blog platform on history, leadership, and the health of the American republic. In his writing he uses AI tools for research, editing, and occasional image creation; the arguments, the voice, and the final judgment are his. He and his wife, Dr. Nancy Church, live at Water Tower Residences, where they co-host the Chicago Salons.