THE DAY NIAGARA FALLS STOOD STILL

THE DAY NIAGARA FALLS STOOD STILL

Ever since records have been kept about the history of Niagara Falls, there was only one time when the Falls were completely silenced and the flow of water stopped.

On 29th March 1848, Niagara Falls ran dry.
A south-west gale blowing off Lake Erie caused ice to jam, and dam up at the mouth of the Niagara River. This caused the water flow to be severely restricted.

The water over the Horseshoe Falls and American Falls was reduced to a trickle, for approximately thirty to forty hours.

The roar of the Falls fell silent….

One of the first residents to notice the deafening silence was farmer, Jed Porter of Niagara Falls, New York.

During the late evening of March 29th, he left home for a stroll along the river near the American Falls and realized the thundering roar of the Falls was absent.

A closer examination revealed the amount of the water flowing over the Falls had been greatly diminished.

Residents awoke on the morning of March 30th to an eerie silence, and realized something was seriously wrong.

People were drawn to the Falls, to find that the water flow of the Niagara River had been reduced to a mere trickle.

By the morning of March 31st, more than 5,000 people had gathered along the banks of the river.
All the mills and factories that depended on the water power were stilled.

The river bed was quickly drying.
Fish and turtles were left floundering on now dry land. A number of people made their way into the gorge to the riverbed.
Here they saw objects that had been laying on the river’s bottom, and had been hidden for hundreds of years.

People scrambled to pick up souvenirs, including bayonets, guns barrels, muskets, tomahawks and other artifacts of the War of 1812.

Other spectators were able to walk out onto the river bed that had only hours earlier been a torrent of rapids.

The silence of the mighty Falls became a tourist and media event.
People on foot, on horseback or by horse and buggy, crossed the width of the Niagara River.

It was a historical event that had never occurred before, and has never happened since.

However, the sudden silencing of the roar of the Falls had caused much anxiety and fear amongst the residents and visitors.
Some even believed that this event was the beginning of a doomsday scenario.

On the morning of March 31st the Falls still remained silent.
Many thousands of people attended special church services, on both sides of the border, to pray for their salvation of impending doom.

With each passing hour, the level of fear and anxiety among the residents grew.
Then on the night of March 31st, a loud low pitched growl was heard coming from upstream.

The ground rumbled beneath their feet, announcing the return of the normal flow of water along the Niagara River.

A wall of water surged forward at surprising speed, covering again what had been exposed for a brief historic moment in time.

The return of the roar of the Falls, reassured the residents that all was going to be alright, and that they could now breathe a huge sigh of relief and return to their normal activities……

? Horseshoe Falls from Canadian side c.1900.
Library of Congress.