On a summer day in 1791, beneath a waterfall in New Jersey, a practical question was being asked that no one in America had yet answered: could a wild river be turned into a machine powerful enough to run an entire city? The man who had been asked to solve it, Pierre Charles L’Enfant, had just drawn the plan for the capital of the United States, a city of grand avenues and sweeping circles. Now, standing before the Great Falls of the Passaic River, where seventy-seven feet of water dropped straight down a wall of black volcanic rock, he faced a stranger job. Alexander Hamilton, the first Secretary of the Treasury, had asked him to decide precisely where all that falling power should go.
L’Enfant’s answer was brilliant and impractical. He designed a magnificent, multi-tiered system of channels that would command the full hydraulic potential of the river and distribute it in style across a future city. On paper, it was a masterpiece. In the judgment of the men paying for it, it was too elaborate and far too costly.
The very grandeur that made L’Enfant the right man to imagine the system made him the wrong man to deliver it on a budget. The Society for Establishing Useful Manufacturers, known simply as the S. U. M.
, had been founded in December 1791 by Hamilton and a group of investors with the goal of building America’s first planned industrial city from nothing. They chose the Great Falls as their engine. The city that grew around it would be named Paterson, after the governor of New Jersey. But a young corporation struggling to raise money could not afford L’Enfant’s imagination.
By 1793, the society let him go, the same way he had just been pushed out of Washington, where his refusal to compromise his design had led to his dismissal from the capital project in early 1792. L’Enfant would die in 1825, largely forgotten and nearly penniless, his estate reportedly worth about forty-six dollars. The visionary was gone, but the waterfall and the promise remained. This is where Peter Colt stepped into the story.
A former treasurer of the state of Connecticut, Colt was a careful moneyman rather than a dreamer. In 1793, the directors made him superintendent of all the society’s operations and handed him L’Enfant’s beautiful, unbuildable design with instructions to turn it into something a struggling company could actually pay for. Colt did not throw the grand plan out. He adapted it, keeping the core logic of distributing the falls’s power while stripping away the expense.
Above the falls, crews built a low wooden dam to raise the water and turn part of it aside. The diverted water ran into a holding basin, then into a single raceway that carried it along the hillside to a mill, where it dropped onto a water wheel and turned it. After doing its work, a drainage channel carried the water back down to the river below the falls. By 1794, Colt had it running.
America’s first planned industrial city had its first turning wheel. The genius of the system, however, was not any single dam or wheel. It was the tiers. A lazy design would take water from above the falls, run it to one mill, and spend the entire seventy-seven-foot drop at once.
Paterson did something far more clever. It spent the drop in stages. Water was pulled from above the falls into an upper raceway that ran along the high ground and fed mills up there. Those mills did not send their spent water back to the river.
They dropped it down into a middle raceway running along a lower shelf of land, where it powered a second row of mills. Those mills dropped it down again into a lower raceway near the river, where it turned yet another set of wheels before finally falling back into the Passaic. The same water was made to work three times on its way down the hill. One waterfall, split by hand and careful surveying into three descending streets of moving water, each one a row of factories deep.
A visitor in the 1800s described it almost as poetry: a dam turns the stream through a canal into a basin, and from that basin supplies in succession three canals on separate planes, each below the other. All of this had to be cut by hand into some of the hardest rock on the eastern seaboard. The Great Falls pours over a cliff of basalt, dark, dense volcanic rock, the cooled remains of ancient lava flows. It is brutally hard to cut.
Crews drilled holes by hand, one man holding an iron drill steel to the stone while another swung a hammer, turning the steel a fraction after each blow. They packed the holes with black powder, because dynamite did not yet exist, and blasted the rock loose a bite at a time. They cleared the broken stone by hand and by cart. Where channel walls needed to be raised and squared, they laid them up in dressed stone block by block.
There was no electricity, no power shovels, no engines of any kind. The power the men were building had not yet been invented in the form we know. The system that would eventually pour out two thousand horsepower was carved entirely by muscle, hammer, powder, and patience. Getting the fall of a channel exactly right in hard basalt with nothing but hand tools and a mason’s level was slow, skilled, and unforgiving.
Cut the grade too steep and the water races through uselessly, starving the mills downstream. Cut it too shallow and the water will not reach the far factories at all. The single mill and channel of the 1790s were only the beginning. The S.
U. M. nearly did not survive its own start. As a manufacturing corporation, it struggled badly, and its early attempts to run its own mills lost money.
By the end of the decade, the directors made a decision that saved the enterprise. They got out of the business of making cloth themselves. Instead, the society became something like a landlord and a utility. It owned the water and the water rights, built and maintained the raceways, and sold water power to private manufacturers who came and built their own mills along the channels.
The society stopped trying to be a factory and became the power company. That decision turned Paterson into a magnet. In the 1790s, the settlement held maybe five hundred people. By 1820, it was more than five thousand.
As early as 1815, thirteen water-powered cotton mills ran beside the falls, employing more than two thousand workers. Every one of them rented a measured share of the water the hand-cut channels delivered. As demand grew, the system had to grow with it. Across the first quarter of the new century, from about 1800 to 1827, the society extended the raceways, building a middle and a lower level, each serving new factories.
Then, in the late 1820s, a second Colt entered the story. Peter Colt’s son, John, became the society’s hydraulic engineer during the years of the town’s fastest growth. Around 1828, crews raised the embankment that separated the holding reservoir from the Passaic and routed a new upper raceway around the tip of the rocks so water could be carried along the high ground and dropped cleanly into a tail race below. This locked the three tiers into their final relationship: upper feeding, middle feeding, lower.
After the rebuild, the whole system finally worked as one deliberate machine. But the river was not finished testing them. By the 1830s, the reservoir was giving the engineers trouble. Water was seeping through the earthen dam, wasting the resource the whole town ran on.
In 1838, the society made its boldest move yet. The engineers abandoned the leaking reservoir entirely, filled it in, and sold the land. In its place, crews cut a brand new channel directly into the rocky edge of the river, built a masonry dam downstream to turn the Passaic into the new channel, and ran the water along a course laid on top of the old embankment. It was open heart surgery on a working power system, done with hand tools and cut stone.
When it was finished, the raceways were fed more reliably than ever. We know the visionaries by name, L’Enfant and the two Colts. But the masons who squared the stone, the drillers who held the steel against the basalt, the laborers who hauled the broken rock and packed the powder, they are gone from the written record. Paterson drew wave after wave of immigrant labor across these years.
The account books tracked the square feet of water sold and the horsepower delivered. They did not write down the name of the man who cut the channel that carried it. By the record of 1876, the society was running one hundred square feet of water across its three raceways, rated at seventeen horsepower per square foot, estimating the total power of the system at more than two thousand horsepower, with over eighteen hundred already leased and turning wheels. A wild waterfall had been carved into stone channels and turned into a thing you could rent by the exact foot.
What that anonymous work powered is almost hard to believe for one waterfall in New Jersey. The water turned Paterson into the cradle of American industry. It ran the early cotton mills, then the silk mills that made the city famous around the world as the Silk City, with more than three hundred silk factories and over eighteen thousand silk workers in the peak years before the First World War. It powered the locomotive works of Thomas Rogers and the companies that followed, and by the third quarter of the 1800s, nearly eighty percent of all steam locomotives built in America came out of Paterson.
A great many of the engines that opened the American West were Paterson machines. In a gun mill along these raceways, Samuel Colt built the first practical repeating revolver. A little later, an Irish immigrant school teacher named John Holland built one of the first workable submarines and tested it in the Passaic itself. And in 1927, when Charles Lindbergh flew alone from New York to Paris, the engine bolted to the nose of the Spirit of St.
Louis was built in Paterson, in a line of industry that ran straight back through the mills to the falls. At the peak, more than forty thousand people worked in the mills this water turned. The Society for Establishing Useful Manufacturers operated until 1945, when it finally sold everything to the city of Paterson. A hydroelectric station built beside the falls between 1912 and 1914 generated power into the late 1960s, and through it all, the old hand-cut raceways kept carrying water.
They were nearly lost in the middle of the twentieth century when a plan for a six-lane elevated highway threatened to erase the historic district, but an act of civic will saved them. In 1976, the entire Great Falls District became the first national historic district in the country, and in 2011, it became a national historical park. The channels the Colts’ crews cut into the basalt are now something a family can walk beside on a Sunday. The mills are mostly quiet now.
The looms are gone. The locomotive shops are museums. But the raceways are still there, still holding the exact shape of a decision made two centuries ago. And that brings the story back to L’Enfant, the man who was fired for dreaming too big.
The society let him go because his multi-tiered system was too grand, too expensive. Peter Colt built the cheap, sensible version instead. But over the next forty years, the town grew the modest system back toward exactly the kind of full, multi-tiered, integrated water-power network that L’Enfant had drawn at the start. The grandeur he was dismissed for turned out to be the thing Paterson needed all along.
He was not too ambitious. He was too early. The man who died with forty-six dollars to his name saw the future of that waterfall more clearly than the men who paid him. Both men are in that water, the practical one who got it built and the visionary who saw the whole machine from the beginning.
The stone raceways can be read either way.