History, Natural History & the Arts
Over the last three-plus decades, Bill Kauffman has written about and interviewed upstate New York novelists, politicians, and civic activists who have given the region much of its interest to the author.
Upstaters: Poets, Pols, Prophets and Bush-League Heroes of Upstate New York (SUNY Press, 2026) collects these into a single volume. [Read more…] about Upstaters: Poets, Pols, Prophets & Bush-League Heroes
George Morton Wolfe (1885-1966) was a prolific Buffalo, NY architect who specialized in commercial and industrial architecture. Born in 1886 in Middletown, Connecticut, Wolfe spent two years at Hartford Technical High School in Hartford, Connecticut, before settling in Buffalo in 1903.
In the first stage of his career, Wolfe worked as a draftsman in the contracting business of S.H. Woodruff. In 1908, he started his own architectural and engineering practice specializing in “factory, warehouse, and commercial building construction in their many forms.” [Read more…] about George Morton Wolfe: A Wide-Ranging Buffalo Architect
On December 10, 1813, two New Yorkers raged at each other in the entryway of Joseph McCarthy’s store on Queen Street in the Upper Canada village of Newark, known today as Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario.
Soldiers held back a crowd as the ranking officer in charge of the American troops occupying nearby Fort George, Brigadier-General George McClure (1771-1851) cursed a Buffalo physician and militia captain, the forty-four-year-old Dr. Cyrenius Chapin (1769-1838). Both were part of the New York State militia assigned by the United States regular army to occupy Canada’s Fort George. [Read more…] about The Burning of Buffalo during the War of 1812
As the presence of salt in New York was first made manifest through saline mineral springs it is proper to begin this discussion with the history of their discovery and utilization. The most important of these are in Onondaga County at Syracuse.
About the middle of the seventeenth century several of the Jesuit missionaries during their journeys among the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois), in what is now the State of New York, heard local salt springs and related these experiences in the Relations of the Jesuit fathers. [Read more…] about Drilling For Salt: Salt Springs & New York’s Salt Industry Origins
When rumbles of impending Civil War rolled through the North, New Yorkers were roused to volunteer even before Fort Sumter was taken and the President rallied troops.
After Sumter fell and Lincoln issued his proclamation, more New Yorkers offered their service to the Union. Likewise, men in other states sought to join the Union army both before and after the proclamation.
After the war, some of those early, quick volunteers also battled to be named the first volunteer for the Union. Months, years, and decades after the war, numerous claims and accolades for who had been the first volunteer began emerging across the North. [Read more…] about First To Volunteer: The Conflicting Civil War Claims
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