Niagara Frontier Heritage Project

12/19/2025

https://www.btpm.org/heritage-moments/2016-03-28/heritage-moments-a-clarence-engineer-and-the-invention-that-saved-millions-of-lives
Another one from the NFHP archives: something upbeat and inspirational for this time of year -- the story of Wilson Greatbatch and the creation of the pacemaker!

One day in 1956, Wilson Greatbatch, a 37-year-old assistant professor of electrical engineering at UB, was working on an oscilloscope at a chronic disease…

12/19/2025

Best wishes for the holiday season and a happy and healthy New Year, to our radio audience and our page visitors, from your NFHP crew and contributors!

11/25/2025

https://www.btpm.org/heritage-moments/2018-08-13/heritage-moments-frederick-law-olmsted-and-the-stroll-that-saved-niagara
Another favourite from the NFHP archives -- landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, architect H H Richardson, and parks commissioner William Dorsheimer visit Niagara Falls in 1869 and are appalled at the nature-obscuring commercialization of the great cataract, and so begin the "Free Niagara" movement, involving a Who's Who of 19th-century writers, artists, and scientists. Listen and read more at the link!

Niagara Falls in the 1800s was an industrialist’s dreamland and a huckster’s paradise. Cheap waterpower abounded — all you had to do was build a channel…

11/07/2025

https://www.btpm.org/heritage-moments/2018-08-27/heritage-moments-marilyn-bell-the-teenager-who-conquered-eels-exhaustion-and-lake-ontario
On an equally wet but much happier note, another one from the NFHP archives...

Overnight sensation — that term gets bandied about from time to time. But Marilyn Bell literally was one. At 11:07 p.m. on Sept. 8, 1954, when she dove…

10/31/2025

https://www.btpm.org/heritage-moments/2018-05-21/heritage-moments-the-kinzua-dam-and-the-broken-treaty-with-the-seneca-nation
Once more from the NFHP archives: the tragic injustice of the construction of the Kinzua Dam...

It was nothing less than the forced displacement of almost 700 people, and more than 50 years later the memory of it still haunts those families and their…

10/25/2025

https://www.btpm.org/heritage-moments/2015-12-21/heritage-moments-jamestowns-own-lucille-ball-rises-to-superstardom
Another episode from the archives: with Jamestown's National Comedy Center in the news lately, we'll rerun our Lucille Ball story this weekend. Enjoy!

In the 1950s, when she was a famous comedienne with the most popular show on television, Lucille Ball liked to say she was from Jamestown. But for much of…

10/09/2025

https://www.btpm.org/2025-06-24/heritage-moments-john-lewiss-boyhood-trip-to-buffalo-and-how-it-changed-america
A brand new episode! Young John Lewis vists Buffalo and is astounded by the transformative experience. Full marks to all our actors who've appeared in our three seasons, but it was a special treat for us to have renowned Hollywood and Broadway actor Stephen McKinley Henderson in our cast for this one.

When John Lewis, the last of the great figures of the Civil Rights era, died at age 80 in 2020, Americans reflected with near-universal admiration on a life well lived. And, thanks to Lewis himself, they knew of the pivotal role that Buffalo played in molding this national icon.

10/01/2025

https://www.btpm.org/heritage-moments/2018-07-30/heritage-moments-in-an-ocean-of-horror-father-conways-courage
More from the NFHP archives: eighty years after the sinking of the USS Indianapolis, remembering the phenomenal courage of Buffalo priest and Navy chaplain Fr Thomas Conway in one the most tragic and nightmarsh episodes of WWII...

The sinking of the U.S.S. Indianapolis in the early morning hours of July 30, 1945, is the worst disaster to befall a single ship in the history of the US…

09/17/2025

https://www.btpm.org/heritage-moments/2018-06-18/heritage-moments-an-ode-to-bridges
Another recent reprise: something to keep in mind as we drive around Western New York and Southern Ontario through this summer's gorgeous weather...

The Niagara Frontier is a land of bridges. And if the bridges themselves are not particularly spectacular, the places they span are — rushing waterways…

09/04/2025

https://www.btpm.org/heritage-moments/2018-02-12/heritage-moments-w-e-b-du-bois-the-niagara-movement-and-the-mighty-current-of-black-protest
The Niagara Movement: how the activism of W.E.B. Du Bois and others in Fort Erie and Buffao 120 years ago fought racism and laid the foundation of what would become the NAACP.

For black people at the turn of the 20th century, America was a harrowing place to be. It was a land of legally sanctioned discrimination, widespread…

08/22/2025

https://www.btpm.org/heritage-moments/2018-07-02/heritage-moments-stanley-spisiak-lbj-and-a-bucket-of-buffalo-river-sludge
Jeweler by trade, conservationist in spirit and action, Buffalo's Stan Spisiak brought President Johnson to the lakeshore here in 1966, sparking the clean-up of Lake Erie -- and the 1972 Clean Water Act, now threatened by the current federal administration.

It’s the early 1960s, and you’re summering at Crystal Beach. You walk across the sands to take a dip in the warm waves of Lake Erie. But before you get to…

08/14/2025

https://www.btpm.org/2025-05-28/heritage-moments-from-new-york-to-paris-in-1908-via-buffalo-and-mongolia
Another new Season III episode! Listen to and read about the adventures of the Thomas Flyer, the Buffalo-built car whose Buffalonian driving team in 1908 made it the first to circumnavigate a world then of unpaved, unmarked roads and mostly no roads at all!

Imagine driving across the continent on unpaved roads, railroad ties and trackless wastes… in an open car with no heat, no windshield, no nothing.