Lackawanna

When Erie County was first settled, the area we now refer to as the City of Lackawanna, was still in the possession of the Seneca Indians. Being the strongest of the six Iroquois nations, they had eliminated all other tribes from this area by 1655. The Seneca used the district only for trapping and hunting during the summer months. Around 1780, the British helped the Seneca establish log cabin villages on Buffalo Creek and supplied them with clothing, agricultural equipment and seeds. An Indian settlement stood on the banks of Smokes Creek which still passes through Lackawanna. The creek was named for a local chief known as “Old Smoke.” A ridge of high ground separated the watersheds of Smokes Creek from that of Buffalo Creek. A road built along this high ground came to be known as Ridge Road. After the American Revolutionary War, people from New England began to move westward to the Genesee River and to Lewiston, NY, near Niagara Falls. In 1790 a road was opened, and used by the stage coach, extending along high ground from Batavia to Black Rock. Under colonial charters, Massachusetts and New York could set up a claim to central and Western New York westward. The Massachusetts land was sold in 1789 to survey and divide the land into townships. These were subdivided for sale, reserving an area at Buffalo Creek as an Indian Reservation. On April 2, 1821, Niagara County was divided into Erie and Niagara counties. As time went on more towns were formed. Nearly all the new settlers came from New England or Germany. Most of them were truck farmers or florists. By 1826 the Indians had begun to sell some of their land and the first treaty for the sale of the entire Reservation was agreed upon in 1838. The Council House was burned by those who opposed the sale but the white men built a new one near East Hamburg Road. In 1842 a compromise was finally made and the Buffalo Creek and Tonawanda Reservations were sold to the Ogden Land Company permitting the Seneca to retain the Cattaraugus and Allegany Reservations, to which they withdrew. The whites moved in and on October 16th, 1851, the Town of “Seneca” was formed by the Erie County Board of Supervisors from a division of Hamburg and Cheektowaga. The following spring the name was changed to West Seneca to avoid confusion with the Town of Seneca lying farther east. West Seneca was an area of irregular shape just south of Buffalo. The twenty-seven square miles of level gravelly loam soil was drained by three creeks running east and west. It was this latter area that was called West Seneca or Limestone Hill because of a limestone ridge that ran through part of it. It was made up of the homes of Buffalo businessmen, nurseries and truck farms located along the Ridge (a former Indian Trail) and the Lake Shore. Through the center of the area passed a highway which had been built across the Indian Reservation from Buffalo to White Corners, now the Village of Hamburg. This old plank road was known as White’s Corners Road and is today South Park Avenue. At the intersection of Ridge Road and White’s Corners Road, a small Roman Catholic Church was built about 1850. The church had a visiting pastor until 1857 when the Reverend Thomas F. Hines was assigned to the parish as its pastor and as superintendent of the newly completed St. Joseph’s orphan Boys Asylum. It stood on the site of the present beautiful marble shrine of Our lady of Victory. These buildings formed the nucleus for what was later to become the nationally known Our Lady of Victory Institutions and Basilica. St. Joseph’s Protectory was built in 1864. In 1876 the Reverend Nelson H. Baker came to Limestone Hill as an assistant to Father Hines. Six years later Father Baker was made pastor and given full charge of the orphanage. Under his leadership more buildings were added from time to time – a boy’s school in 1882, a working boy’s home in Buffalo in 1898, the infant’s home in 1907, a maternity home in 1915, Our Lady of Victory Hospi