Native American headdress at
Historical Society of the Tonawandas Museum.

Historical Society of the Tonawandas has

Vertical document files
Archival photographs
Original historical items

Tonawanda
North Tonawanda
The Erie Canal
Buffalo
Western New York State

Easily accessible to museum Research Assistants, ready to help you, through an indexed computer database. (This is not currently on the Web.)

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Before the lumber barons...

The first inhabitants of what later became Tonawanda, North Tonawanda, the Erie Canal, Buffalo, and Western NY, were the Seneca, along with the other Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Nations. The primary resettling into this area came as a direct result of being driven out of lands to the south and east, during the American Revolutionary War. On September 15, 1797, at the Treaty of Big Tree, the Seneca sold their lands west of the Genesee River, retaining ten reservations for themselves. This sale opened up the rest of Western New York for settlement by European Americans. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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