Past as Prologue

In 1978, Love Canal resident Anne Hillis sarcastically explained the “recipe” for the chemical disaster taking shape in her neighborhood: take “approximately 16 acres” of land, add “22,000 tons of toxic wastes, mix with spring water, snow, etc …” Then, she wrote, add “human beings.” The “yield” would be “miscarriage … birth defects … suicide and death.” For people wondering just how the chemicals ended up in Love Canal in the first place, Hillis wrote that the whole saga began not in the recent past but in “the late 1800s, [when] a canal had been dug” by a starry-eyed industrialist who then abandoned the altered landscape. The groove of earth he left behind was “filled in with chemicals in the … 1940s,” covered over and forgotten. Only later would “these chemicals” migrate from the dump into the local environment. For Hillis, as for other residents, Love Canal’s troubled environmental present was a product of its toxic past. But how far back did that troubled past go? New York State health officials asserted that the “seeds” of Love Canal were sown in Niagara’s “highly industrialized” history, which stretched from the late 19th century onward. Similarly, the Niagara Gazette created a “Love Canal Chronology” that began in 1894, when entrepreneur William Love began excavating a power canal that never materialized but whose remains formed a perfect burial pit later on. An activist group pushed Love Canal’s chronology back further. Although “Love Canal became a household word in 1978,” the group claimed, “the idea for the place that was to carry the name originated in 1836,” when an engineer stamped out the route of an artificial river that would be even grander than the Erie Canal. No matter how far back they went, all of these commentators saw history as a key lens through which to view the modern Love Canal disaster. Yet few traced the area’s toxic history back to colonial times.