Paterson Great Falls National Historical Park
The Great Falls: The River That Powered a Nation
Listen at the stop, then read the transcript and follow the sources behind the story.
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Transcript
Stand here and the first question is simple: why was a city built around this waterfall?
The answer is power.
Long before factories arrived, the Passaic River was a powerful natural feature. In the late eighteenth century, Alexander Hamilton and the Society for Establishing Useful Manufactures recognized that the Great Falls could provide the energy needed for a planned industrial city.
Paterson became one of America's earliest attempts to deliberately create an industrial centre.
The waterfall is beautiful, but its historical importance is not only visual. It is infrastructure. The river was transformed into an engine for manufacturing.