State Parks

Niagara Falls is the reason the United States has state parks. In the 1800s, the land along the American side of the falls was crowded with mills, hotels, souvenir stands and fences. Visitors paid just to look at the water through a gap. A campaign to free the view led New York to create the Niagara Reservation in 1885, the first state park in the country.

Frederick Law Olmsted, the designer of Central Park, was a leader in that campaign, and he and Calvert Vaux drew up the plan for the reservation. Their idea was to clear away the clutter and let the scenery speak. Canada built its own park on the other side around the same time.

The falls themselves are really 3. The Horseshoe Falls, the largest, lie mostly on the Canadian side. The American Falls and the smaller Bridal Veil Falls lie on the New York side, split by Luna Island. Together they have drawn visitors since the 1700s, and by the mid-1800s Niagara was the most famous natural sight in America.

Photographers were there from the start, and so were painters and printmakers. This board has a large and varied set. There are views from every angle, from the brink, from below, from the gorge and from the boats that carried passengers into the spray. There are winter scenes with ice piled along the river and frozen mist coating the trees. There are bridges, hotels and power plants, since the falls became a source of electricity in the 1890s.

There are also the daredevils. Jean François Gravelet, known as Blondin, crossed the gorge on a tightrope in 1859. In 1901, a schoolteacher named Annie Edson Taylor became the first person to go over the falls in a barrel and survive. When you look at the older views, notice the shape of the brink. The falls have worn their way upstream over thousands of years, and large rockfalls changed the face of both the American and Horseshoe Falls in the years these pictures were made.