Johnson-Seymour Millrace - Bring it Back!

The Johnson-Seymour Millrace

(Historical Background / Explanation of Importance)

(written by Petr Chudoba)

While Brown’s Race became quite well known during the 1990s, a little-noticed feature in Rochester is the Johnson-Seymour Millrace beneath the Rundel Library. Other than the series of arches beneath the library, where the water is carried back into the river, the public has rarely had the opportunity to see evidence of this millrace. And, sad to say, construction crews have inadvertently filled in a major portion of the raceway with debris during their projects. Let’s go back and see how it began and why it’s so important that we bring this back for public enjoyment.

In the Beginning: The year was 1817, the year that Rochesterville was incorporated as a village. Settlers (all 1,049 of them!) were confident because of the village’s central location in a rich agricultural region and the abundant waterpower that they had available to them. Merchants and millers participated in brisk commerce, processing frontier products that had been carried downriver on the Genesee and sending the finished goods – flour, leather, shingles and staves – aboard schooners and sloops to eager buyers in Montreal.

More immigrants were arriving daily. Among them was Elisha Johnson, a surveyor, promoter and practicing engineer from Canandaigua. With the financial backing of Orson Seymour and several friends in the Ontario County seat, Johnson paid Enos Stone $10,000 for eighty acres of land bordering the east bank of the Genesee River. This plot extended beyond Chestnut Street and north to North Avenue, thus encompassing a sizable portion of what is now the eastern half of downtown. Johnson laid the forested parcel out into village lots and mill sites with a gridiron street plan. His Main Street led down to the bridge where it joined with Buffalo Street [now West Main Street] on the other side.

Johnson must have been rather well off. In the same year of his high-priced purchase, he set out both to build a low dam (approximately 18 inches high) across the river, near the old fording-place, and to construct a millrace from the eastern end of the dam to the Main Street bridge. These two projects set him back another $12,000.

Colonel Rochester readily consented when Johnson proposed the construction of the new barrier above the rapids – once it included a minor modification. Johnson’s plan, calling for a wing dam to assure a steady supply of water for his eastside raceway, was revised to extend the dam across the river so it would serve both the east and west millraces at the Upper Falls.

One Explosive Fourth of July: That summer (1817), Johnson invited the settlers from both sides of the Genesee to a Fourth-of-July picnic on the bluff overlooking the river. Whether the construction of his millrace began on that day or not is open to question, but at any rate, excavation on that day helped the settlers to celebrate the holiday in a manner that none of them would ever forget. Edwin Scrantom, who was present at the event, wrote:

“Elisha Johnson sat at one end of the table, and Enos Stone at the other, the table being placed in a long '‘bough-house'’ which was built on the bank of the river. Green posts from the forest, with crotches at the top, were fastened in the ground. Upon these, were laid poles and smaller poles set across them upon which green boughs of all sorts of wildwood were strewn profusely, and hung over the sides. Under this were tables of rough boards, where the dinner was to be served, and where it was afterward eaten with great relish and satisfaction. The women who prepared and served this meal to their husbands and children were – Mesdames Enos Stone, Oliver Culver, Moses Hall, Isaac W. Stone, Elisha Ely, Hamlet Scrantom, Elisha Johnson, Ira West, and Daniel Mack, all of them in the prime of life. The day was fine, and not an accident occurred to mar the general joy. Rev. Comfort Williams said grace, and then amid jokes and merriment, the good cheer was partaken of. Then came the toasts that were honored by the firing of ordinance, as they were drunk. This ordinance was none other than twenty blasts which had been put down in the race by direction of Mr. Johnson, the day before, and which were ready to go off. The first toast was ‘Our Country, prosperity attend it!’ Then two of the blasts were touched off, making the woods resound, added to which was a cheer, three times over. Then followed other toasts, the blasts doing honor to them until all were ended. The people were wild with joy and every man shook hands with his fellow pioneer and wished him God-speed. Johnson was complimented for his tact in furnishing the raceway artillery, which, while it spoke loud, lifted the solid rock in the waterway he was building, doing good service. The night that followed that Fourth of July was more than usually still. The barking of the fox, the howling of the wolf, the owl’s hoot, the usual accompaniments of the night, were not heard; the great guns of the raceway had awed them all into silence.”

The Johnson-Seymour Race was blasted through solid rock and considerable black powder was used, the excavated rock being thrown into the river. When it was completed, the millrace was 330 to 385 yards in length, about sixty feet wide and four feet deep.[1] Before the year had ended, William Atkinson had already built a flourmill on it. This mill was called the Yellow Mill, and was planned for three run of stones. It stood on what would later be known as South Water Street. Johnson and Atkinson (and many others) celebrated the turning of the first water into the flume and onto the wheels as an event of great importance to the village and surrounding country.

Two other events in 1817 overshadowed these developments. Johnson welcomed the incorporation of Rochesterville on the western bank of the Genesee River that year and his eastside associates as an asset, and they also supported Colonel Rochester’s leadership in a campaign for a separate county. More important for all concerned was the state’s decision that year to build the Erie Canal and to cross the Genesee River between the small Upper Falls (i.e., the aforementioned rapids) and the Main Street Bridge, as Johnson’s personal map had already designated it.

Unfortunately, it was not smooth sailing from that point on. Early in November 1817, the skies were, shall we say, a bit more than overcast. Several days of heavy rain up the valley produced swollen streams and converted the Genesee River into a rushing torrent that swept down ominously upon Rochester. Although the villagers immediately erected an embankment along the raceway in an effort to secure the lowlands at the western end of the bridge from the deluge, several buildings were quickly carried away. The Red Mill of Ely and Bissell was damaged, John C. Rochester’s sawmill undermined, the head of Johnson’s raceway torn out, and a flood of several inches depth spread over the flats back of the principal stores. The floodwaters turned the low lands north of Buffalo [West Main] Street into stagnant marshes. Fortunately, the low western end of the bridge was saved. Although the damage proved to be less than at first expected, blame was still placed on Johnson’s dam.

Colonel Rochester approved reconstruction of the dam and obligingly signed a note enabling the Ely brothers to raise funds for expansion. But when a suit by the Elys against Johnson for damages was widened – on the advice of Elisha B. Strong – to include Rochester and his partners, the aged colonel’s forbearance snapped, as an exchange of letters between the two men demonstrated.

An 1820 Fenn map showed an oil mill, saw mill, paper mill and flour mill along the Johnson-Seymour Millrace. These were the beginnings of Canaltown, the southeast quadrant of Rochester in the 1820s. Several newly arrived settlers soon erected small shacks adjoining Stone’s house on the bluff, where Johnson had laid out River Street to cross his Main Street. Two newcomers, Gilman & Sibley, opened a paper mill adjoining Atkinson’s flour mill, while still another leased Stone’s sawmill nearby. Construction of the canal eastward from Rochester commenced in 1819, attracting an influx of workers, and spurred the building of modest houses in several parts of Johnson’s tract, now popularly called East Rochester.

The early 1820s were crucial years for Canaltown. Hervey Ely, having suffered losses from flood damage to his mill on the western side, moved over and erected a frame mill adjoining Atkinson’s Yellow Mill on the Johnson-Seymour Millrace in 1822. On October 29, 1822 Atkinson and Ely packed several barrels of flour for the first shipment eastward on the Erie Canal, which had opened to Little Falls earlier that month. The birth of the Flour City had begun.

An influx of stone masons and other workers enabled the state to complete the construction of the aqueduct late in 1823. The entire town gathered early in October to celebrate the completion of the aqueduct, which firmly linked the east and western sides into one community. The easternmost of its eleven arches provided a passage for the Johnson-Seymour Millrace under the canal to supply power to the mills on its northern side. With this source of energy assured, Johnson was ready to see his east-bank community incorporated by the village of Rochester. He not only accepted election to its board of trustees but also became its chairman in due course.

The Telegraph boasted early the next May (1823) that Rochester had shipped 10,450 barrels of flour during the first ten days alone of the first canal season. The village, which had suddenly grown to 5,273 during the bustling years of the canal’s construction, developed rapidly into the Flour City of the world, attaining a population of 12,252 before the first city charter was adopted in 1834. By the mid-1850s, it would mushroom to 43,000!

The construction of an improved Main Street bridge in 1824 brought the eastside settlement even more actively into the life of the humming little mill town. This was a mixed blessing, however, for with increased activity came new hazards. Occasional fires had destroyed single buildings in earlier years, but in 1825 a fire that started in Elisha Johnson’s shop spread to an adjoining sawmill on his raceway and threatened the nearby flour mills as well. One of these frame mills went up in flames a year or two later as did several of the cottages on River Street, but such setbacks only cleared the way for more substantial stone structures.

The Johnson-Seymour Millrace was constructed so near the brink of the river that there was hardly sufficient ground for the mills, very soon erected on it, without extending them in part over the raceway. Subsequently, Johnson took the contract for building the new bridge over the river on Main and Buffalo Streets. In doing so, he located the eastern abutment some considerable distance further out into the channel of the river.

Horatio N. Curtis, who had purchased the lot at the southeast corner of the new Main Street bridge, built a frame mill out to rest on an extension of the eastern abutment of that bridge. This action, which infringed on the river bed, aroused protests from property owners on the western side, but set a precedent for the village trustees who proceed to construct a public market out on a platform suspended on a northern extension of the western pier.

Thereafter, additions to the existing mills, and new ones, were built out on a line with the face of the new abutment, such line continuing to the west face of the eastern abutment of the old canal aqueduct. Such encroachments were great at the bridge and by a diminishing extent until the eastern abutment of the aqueduct was reached. North of the bridge the same, or greater, encroachment was made to the Andrews Street bridge; indeed the first building north of Main Street projecting several feet west of the face of the bridge abutment, seriously obstructing the flow of the water. South of the aqueduct, the retaining wall of the millrace was placed several feet out into the channel of the river to afford space for the Erie Canal when it was constructed and to widen the millrace.

With two runs of stones in the Curtis Mill, three in the Yellow Mill, and four in Ely’s eastside mill, the Johnson-Seymour Millrace offered a respectable competition to the mills on Colonel Rochester’s millrace across the river and those springing up on Brown’s Race at the High Falls. The first village Directory, appearing in 1827, listed only seven mills in full operation and credited the Ely mill with the largest output that year. Three of the earlier mills had already been destroyed by fire, and Hervey Ely determined that year not only to build a new and larger mill of stone, but to locate it in an isolated spot free from the hazard of a fire spreading from adjoining structures. He found such a site at the southeastern corner of the aqueduct[2] where the canal, turning sharply south, bordered him on two sides and afforded easy access to its freight boats. The raceway and the river supplied protection on the other two sides. With such an ideal site, Ely engaged Robert M. Dalzell, the millwright who was completing the large aqueduct mill on the western side, to design and erect a similar one for him on the eastern side.

Hervey Ely was not the only eastside promoter eager to take precautions against fire. Joseph Hall, who in 1828 established a machine shop and furnace for the manufacture of agricultural implements near the aqueduct, erected a three-story stone building to house it. These and other developments prompted the village trustees to choose the name Water Street for the road bordering the Johnson-Seymour Millrace. Two years later, the village ordered property owners along Water Street to provide and maintain a macadam surface. The millers laid plans for covers or bridges over the raceway to secure access to their mills. Sparks from a fire in one of the cottages on River Street (renamed St. Paul Street in honor of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church erected on its northern extension in 1829) threatened the Curtis building at the bridge and destroyed Ely’s frame mill nearby. Ely, who had leased that mill and thus escaped the major loss, now sold the property to Thomas Emerson who engaged Dalzell to erect the four-story Crescent Mill, a stone structure equipped with the latest grinding and sifting machinery.

In 1834, Enos Stone erected his first mercantile building at the corner of Main and South St. Paul Streets. Charles J. Hill acquired and remodeled the Yellow Mill, renaming and repainting it as the White Mill. Joseph Hall built a second stone building of three stories adjoining the Crescent Mill and installed three run of stones in what became known as the Model Mill. The fire hazard was so threatening in this district and throughout the city that Elisha Johnson had submitted a plan for a waterworks company to the legislature, and the city had received authority for its creation in its first charter. Other needs had intervened, however, and although Johnson renewed the agitation during his term as mayor in 1838, no further action was taken.

According to Blake McKelvey, city historian emeritus, “Few districts in the Flour City, as Rochester was then proudly acclaimed, were as substantially built up as Canaltown, and few boasted a wider assortment of functions.” Flour milling still held first place, and no one was surprised in 1846 to hear that Gideon W. Burbank, a newcomer from Orleans County, had paid $20,000 to acquire the Crescent Mill. No one was surprised when a few years later Burbank as well as his neighbor, former Mayor Charles J. Hill, shipped carefully packed barrels of flour to London as Rochester’s exhibit in the first World’s Fair in 1851. Many were delighted a decade later to learn that the Crescent Mill had won recognition abroad. At the request of Count Romanoff, two millwrights were preparing detailed drawings of the workings of the Crescent Mill, which the Count planned to duplicate on his estate in Russia. The count had been visiting Rochester to study the workings of its Western Union telegraph company and who had been taken on a tour of its flourmills.

By 1855, there were at least six flourmills using the waterpower from the Johnson-Seymour Millrace. In 1879 there were sheepskin dressers, a soap and candle mill, a dental and barber chair manufacturer, six flour mills, a brewer, several woodworking shops, and others utilizing 1,300 horsepower of energy from the river.

It was around 1875 that planks supplemented the bridges that boarded the race and the raceway became a street. Soon steel girders and three feet of pavement replaced the planks.

The 1890s ushered in a new generation of promoters throughout the Canaltown district and spurred construction of several new buildings. Following the death of Rufus Keeler in 1875, the Enos Stone block at the corner of Main and South St. Paul had passed to his three children, one of them the first wife of William S. Kimball, the tobacco manufacturer who would bring new leadership to its development. Bracket H. Clark, who had acquired the Curtis block at the eastern end of the bridge in the 1880s, sold it in 1892 to the promoters of the Post Express whose rotary presses apparently introduced a new use for the water power of the old raceway.

The twentieth century, on the other hand, would see a rapid decline in the use of the millrace. The millrace is mentioned briefly in the May 12, 1938 edition of the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle which states that Henry L. Howe, city engineer, and Wendell Bayer, president of the John Siddona Company, yesterday were appointed commissioners to handle water rights in the Johnson and Seymour Race in the Genesee River.

After World War II, the city lost a considerable portion of the raceway. In the September 22, 1948 edition of the Democrat and Chronicle, readers were startled by the following headline: “Historic Raceway To Be Converted As Storage Area.” According to the write-up:

“The area that once turned the wheels of Rochester commerce is going to be used to store the results of that commerce. Security Trust Company is busy converting the old Johnson-Seymour raceway, once a power source for industry, beneath its South Water St. holdings, into a big basement for storage purposes. The newly-created basement, covered by a parking lot, will be connected with the bank building proper at Main E. and N. Water.”

Eight years later, more of the raceway was to disappear. The headline this time read, “Half of ‘Landmark’ Erased: Sand Fills 150-Year-Old Raceway in Heart of City.”

“… as of today half of the old landmark is gone, because the city has filled the raceway. The other half may be filled in next year.

“Since July 25, construction crews have been uprooting the pavement in Water Street North between Main and Mortimer streets and pouring ‘wash sand’ into the raceway. The job was undertaken because the heavy everyday strain of automobile and truck traffic caused the pavement over the raceway to crack.

“According to Ralph Nelson, construction foreman for C. P. Ward Co., the only obstacles to the filling were the electric, gas and water lines than ran across the race. Since the lines couldn’t stand heavy dumping, the fill sand had to be poured in by hose.

“With the disappearance of the Johnson and Seymour race, only Brown’s race, off Platt Street, and the Central Avenue race remain as marks of an era when flour mills and grinding companies occupied the banks of the Genesee River….” (Democrat and Chronicle, October 7, 1956)

If this section of the old millrace had survived, it would have been located under the Rochester Riverside Convention Center and the Holiday Inn.

On March 15, 1976, the Rochester Preservation Board erroneously decided that the brick-line Johnson-Seymour Millrace wasn’t worth being declared a landmark. The board’s action meant that the city could proceed with plans to fill in the millrace as part of a street repair project that spring. A report by the board’s Landmark Committee said that the millrace was in poor condition and offered little architectural symbolism of the days when it played a big role in Rochester’s growth. The millrace also was hard to get to, the committee’s report said. Visitors would have to enter through a utility manhole. On the other hand, the board urged that damage to the millrace be kept at a minimum when street repairs were made so that it could be restored if the money were ever available.

Preservationist Douglas A. Fisher (organizer of Canaltown Associates in 1971), who sought landmark status for the millrace, said he was disappointed by the board’s action. “I’m not surprised,” he said. “The board simply upheld the city’s position. It’s a Pyrrhic victory. We’ll be losing part of a historic landmark”

Fisher proposed putting small shops in the millrace as part of an effort to restore that section of south Water Street. But city engineers opposed the idea, saying that steel girders supporting the street over the millrace were badly eroded. It’s better to fill the millrace, they said, than to spend a lot of money shoring it up.

Times have changed, and so has the surrounding area. I believe that we can realistically offer life to the Johnson-Seymour Millrace and return it to us an important part of our local history.

(Please note: pictures of the Johnson-Seymour Millrace can be found in the booklet Geology and Industrial History of the Rochester Gorge, Part Two, edited by Ruth Rosenberg-Naparsteck, p. 19-22, 24, 26)

[1] On a current map of Rochester, the raceway would run beneath the Rundel Library, beneath the Convention Center, Holiday Inn and Old Rochesterville to the High Falls. Water Street was named because it roofed over the raceway which flowed beneath it.

[2] This would be the location of the Rundel Library building.