Bennett Elevator as seen from the Atlantic Wharf, just north of Canalside, ca. 1910 – 1919. Photo courtesy of The Buffalo History Museum, used by permission. 7 One hundred and five years after the British burned the fledgling village of Buffalo to the ground on December 20, 1813, the city had successfully rebuilt itself to become one of the most important centers of trade and commerce in the nation. The completion of the Erie Canal in 1825 had positioned Buffalo as transport central for goods moving east and the arrival of thousands of settlers, immigrants and fortune seekers heading west. By 1918, Buffalo was the tenth largest city in the U.S. and was a shipping center, an aircraft producer, and a railway hub with 700 miles of track for 15 railroads. As a commercial and industrial powerhouse, Buffalo had the fourth-busiest harbor in the country, the largest coal distribution facility, a booming flour milling industry, 19 breweries producing a million barrels of beer annually, and a meatpacking industry with 75 acres of stockyards handling more than 15 million head of cattle each year. Tonawanda was one of the largest lumber markets in the U.S. with more than 150 lumber companies, and was also home to Wurlitzer, one of the world’s largest musical instrument manufacturing plants. Meanwhile, the Lackawanna Steel plant was the biggest independent steel mill in the nation. The city had 20 miles of waterfront with 12 miles of wharves and the Buffalo River continued to be straightened, widened, and deepened to accommodate even more water traffic. As the world’s greatest grain port, over 300 million bushels were handled every year in the mammoth grain elevators. Dozens of these chalk-grey towers stored the largest grain capacity in any city in the world. The average annual cargo of the port was nearly 20 million tons, half that of London. Every day, crates and boxes of merchandise were piled high on the docks with hundreds of men sorting and hauling the commerce of the busy port. In the harbor, the longest inland breakwall in the world sheltered one of the finest harbors in the Great Lakes region. Behind it, hundreds of lake freighters and steamers found protection during their stay each winter. While President Woodrow Wilson issued his Fourteen Points for peace negotiations to end World War I in a speech to Congress in January 1918, Buffalo was busy forging steel, producing trucks, and building airplanes. In fact, Buffalo’s industrial might was at the very heart of the war effort and the 31-acre Curtiss Aeroplane & Motor Corporation factory at 2050 Elmwood Avenue made the city the airplane center of the world. The Curtiss Buffalo1918