In 1859, iron magnate William Pryor Letchworth bought his first tract of land here. He wanted to stop the timber barons. They were stripping the Genesee Valley bare. To block a massive hydroelectric dam that would have drowned the deep clay gorges, Letchworth spent decades buying out local mill owners until he owned a thousand acres. He called it Glen Iris. But this wasn't just a rich man's vanity project. He preserved Seneca history, too. Actually, he even relocated the grave of Mary Jemison, a white woman captured by the Seneca who chose to stay with them, to his estate in 1874 to protect her legacy.
Then came the engineers. In 1852, the Erie Railroad erected a colossal timber bridge across the upper falls, a structure containing more than one and a half million board feet of lumber that burned to ash in a spectacular 1875 fire. They rebuilt it in eighty-six days. The iron replacement stood for over a century. During the Great Depression, the Civilian Conservation Corps arrived. Over three thousand young men lived in rustic barracks throughout the park, swinging pickaxes and hauling local shale. They built roads. They laid down miles of stone gutters and built cabins that tourists still rent today. Sweat and muscle.
The Seneca Nation knew this gorge as Sehgahunda, the Vale of Three Falls. For centuries, they controlled these cliffs. Letchworth relocated a traditional Seneca Council House made of hand-hewn logs to his property in 1871 to save it from destruction. The Seneca held a final, historic council fire there in 1872, bringing descendants of famous chiefs like Red Jacket and Cornplanter together one last time. So when the federal government added the park to the National Register in 2003, they weren't just honoring views. They recognized a battleground. A place where indigenous history, industrial ambition, and early environmentalism crashed into each other.
