[View of Niagara Falls]

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Niagara Falls has drawn visitors for more than a century, and this view, dated around 1900, captures the cascade in the era when the falls were becoming a major tourist destination. The catalog record is thin, carrying only a title, a date, and a caption card with geographic tracings for New York, so the picture's exact vantage point and photographer are not documented here. Photographs of the falls from this period were often sold as stereographs and postcards, which helped fix the cataract in the public imagination as a symbol of American natural wonder. The falls sit on the border between New York and Ontario, and by the turn of the century their power was being harnessed for hydroelectric generation, a change that would soon alter the flow over the crest.

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