First around the falls
The falls that named the city were the worst obstacle on the whole Mohawk route — roughly a forty-foot drop through a gorge that forced every canoe and bateau to portage.1 So it's no accident that one of America's earliest canals was built here: in 1795 the Western Inland Lock Navigation Company opened a five-lock canal around the falls, a generation before the Erie.12 Pieces of that pioneering work survive on Moss Island's flank.
The Erie Canal followed through the gorge in the 1820s, the railroad in the 1830s, and the Barge Canal in 1918 — the last bringing Lock 17, whose 40.5-foot lift is the highest on the canal system and was for years described as the tallest of any lock in the world.3 Boats still ride its chamber every summer.
Cheese capital
The gorge gave Little Falls water power for mills; the surrounding hill farms gave it something to sell. After the cheese-factory system spread from Rome in the 1850s, Little Falls became one of the nation's great cheese markets — for a stretch of the late 1800s, dairy buyers set national prices in its market square before the trade consolidated elsewhere.
Mills wove and knitted along the raceways into the 20th century, then wound down like the rest of the Valley's textile trade. What stayed is the bones: a compact stone-and-brick downtown, mill buildings turned shops at Canal Place, and the strange, beautiful potholed rock of Moss Island, now climbed for fun rather than portaged out of necessity.