We who live so close to Niagara Falls tend to take our natural wonder for granted and maybe even don’t feel the awe and inspiration that new visitors experience when they get their first glimpse of the Great Cataract.
Millions of people have made the trip in the last 200-plus years since improvements in travel allowed the Falls to be more accessible to the general public. It’s almost certain that the vast majority of those visitors left some sort of a record of their impressions upon seeing Niagara for the first time, but only a small percentage of those records have survived outside of family collections and those that have come down to us are primarily from people who were well-known at the time or became famous later on.
In the 19th century, a visit to Niagara Falls was akin to taking the Great Tour of Europe for those families wealthy enough to afford it. Some people would stay days or weeks at a time. Two of those visitors, who have left a written account of their stay at Niagara Falls, were Fanny Appleton and her husband, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Although this in itself is not extraordinary, what is unusual is that even though they did not visit the Falls at the same time (their trips were almost 30 years apart), the reason for each of their visits was the same.
Frances “Fanny” Appleton was the first of the two to visit Niagara. She was born in 1819 in Boston, Mass., to Nathan Appleton, a wealthy industrialist and Congressman. She was one of four surviving children when her mother died of tuberculosis in February 1833. Four months later, Fanny’s father took his children and his daughter’s best friend, Emmeline, to stay for several days at Niagara Falls.
Fanny was not quite 14 years old but her journal entries show that she was quite observant and somewhat outspoken in her opinions. When the family arrived in Buffalo (probably on the Erie Canal), Fanny was dismayed to find it raining and the roads very, bad but she liked the coachman, “quite an original character,” and was surprised at “the immense number of islands succeeding each other continually” in the Niagara River between Buffalo and Niagara Falls (many of those islands have since disappeared). After riding alongside the Niagara River and anticipating their first sight and sound of the waterfalls, they finally arrived, but again were dismayed.
“We arrived at the village & the hotel, large & commodious but most provokingly situated only overlooking plenty of mills of all descriptions and factories & houses, but no falls were to be seen, and we were woefully disappointed, expecting certainly to behold this grand object of our search, from the piazza.”
From her description, it appears that the family stayed at the Cataract House (a c.1840 map of Niagara Falls shows a row of mills between the hotel and the upper rapids of the American channel). They were not only disgusted with the view but also with their rooms and “regretted beyond measure that we had not crossed to the British side.” After dinner they walked “a few steps” from the hotel to the “long wooden bridge” leading to Goat Island. Crossing Bath Island, once again their senses were “sadly provoked by the appearance of mills & artificial water-works. Factories at Niagara! What profanation, what sacrilege!”
However, upon finally reaching Goat Island, she described it as “the most lovely spot in creation.” When they at last beheld the three Falls, for Fanny it was “the whole wondrous scene…that exquisite combination of perfect loveliness, that emerald green, that snowy foam & wreathing mist, that mixture of sublimity & beauty, of grandeur and picturesque loveliness.” She wrote that she and her friend Emmeline felt like “heroines” and “we did not faint, or scream, or tremble, like the sensitive Mrs. Trollope, but we looked in silent admiration” and wondered how anyone “could ever be disappointed with a scene like this.”
The Appleton family remained in Niagara Falls for four days, not a long enough time for Fanny who enjoyed making several sketches from both the American and the “British” side. She and Emmeline, as 13-year-old girls are apt to do, created a scenario that one of their fellow guests at the hotel was an insane man who was following them and staring at Emmeline “most outrageously.” They later found out he was a just minister who was “on the look out for converts.”
The family returned home and three years later, Fanny met her future husband, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, although they did not marry for another seven years (Henry was a recent widower when he met Fanny in 1836). Fanny was the reason he would visit Niagara Falls in 1862.
NEXT WEEK: The Longfellows’ 1862 visit to Niagara Falls.
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Ann Marie Linnabery is the assistant director of the History Center of Niagara.
