A Walking Tour of Rochester, New York
Ebenezer "Indian" Allen was the first settler in this area. He had obtained a grant of 100 acres at a gaping cataract on the Genesee River with the provision that he build a mill. Allen built his mill in 1789 but nobody was in a hurry to make use of it, let alone settle nearby. No one wanted to deal with the "Genesee Fever" that was almost certain to come due to the mosquitoes infesting the dismal swamp around the falls. The rattlesnakes didn't help either. Allen had moved on by 1792.
Title for the land subsequently passed through several owners, none who did anything to develop it. Finally the property came into the hands of three Maryland men and in 1811 one of them, Colonel Nathaniel Rochester, began offering lots for sale. This time a few settlers trickled in; there was a tavern by 1815, a newspaper in 1816 and the next year the village was incorporated as Rochesterville.
It was only one of eight similar settlements scattered along the final eight miles of the Genesee River's run to Lake Ontario, and far from the most promising. Carthage had built a great bridge across the river in 1819 that drew travelers and trade but after 15 months it buckled and collapsed. And about the same time the Erie Canal was routed through Rochester, along today's Broad Street, and that dealt a death blow to its rivals. Rochester was named the county seat of the new Monroe County in 1821, soon absorbed the surrounding communities and was off and running.
The awesome power of the Upper Falls of the Genesee had begun to be harnessed as well, most efficiently by the Brown Brothers, and Rochester was a genuine boomtown. The local mills were churning out flour in quantities that had never been seen before. Local millers were grinding upwards of 25,000 bushels of wheat daily. The first ten days the Erie Canal was open east to the Hudson, 40,000 barrels of flour floated down to Albany and New York City from the new Flour City. By 1838 Rochester was the largest flour-producing city in the world.
About that time a new, less obvious, industry was sprouting in town - the seed and nursery business. It would become so prominent that Rochester was being called the Flower City even before the bulk of the flour-milling business was departing for the wheat fields of the midwest. An added benefit of the nursery business was the early development of the city parks.
With the foundation laid by flour and flowers, Rochester became one of America's great industrial cities. George Eastman's Kodak film and cameras and John Jacob Bausch and Henry Lomb's optical products were foremost among Rochester goods but there were shoes and machine tools and horseless carriages and mail chutes as well.
The population would peak in 1950 with more than 330,000 but our walking tour will begin near the site of Ebenezer Allen's first mill when nobody wanted to live here, on the site where Hamlet Scrantom built the first house in the village, on the spot that was for more than 100 years the center of Rochester life...
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