Sam Patch, the Famous Jumper

After leaving Niagara, Patch—now struggling with severe alcohol addiction— traveled to Rochester, New York. Like Pawtucket and Paterson, Rochester was a mill town built near a waterfall. However, wealthy tourists like Colonel Stone knew Rochester as a city of progress. Before the War of 1812 and the development of the Erie Canal, the Genesee River was surrounded by wilderness. As settlers moved westward on the canal after the war, Rochester emerged seemingly overnight to become a town of 9,000 people in 1829. Tourists to Rochester at this time marveled at the number of mills and factories, the large mansions, glass storefronts, and towering church spires. The Rochester that Sam Patch saw in 1829 was a testament to progress and human-built improvements over the American wilderness.

The town’s use of the Genesee River was a clear sign of humanity’s taming of the natural world. A branch of the river south of Rochester fed into the Erie Canal, powering commercial and tourist traffic. Within the town, the river was blocked by a mill dam that diverted it into shallow rapids that powered mills and factories on both banks. In addition to a footbridge and a market bridge (a wide bridge on which business was conducted), the river was crossed by an aqueduct carrying the Erie Canal. For passengers on the canal, the powerful Genesee River provided a scenic backdrop that highlighted the power of the canal itself. Wealthy Americans like Colonel William Leete Stone—who stayed in Rochester on his way home from Niagara—celebrated the town, and especially the aqueduct, as a marvel of modern engineering and the spirit of progress. However, many British tourists mourned the loss of the forest that was cleared to build the town and criticized what they saw as the American tendency to destroy landscapes.

At the time of Patch’s arrival, the people of Rochester were engaged in an ongoing debate about the type of city they were going to be. The town’s leading citizens were mostly small-town descendants of Puritans who had family money but not land. After making their fortunes through industry and development in Rochester, these leading families sought to establish a respectable town that valued work over leisure and prayer over socialization. They dismissed the upper-class Manhattanites who traveled on the Erie Canal as thoughtless and wasteful people driven by fashion. They tried to ground the town in a spirit of civics and hard work by banning popular entertainment like circuses and theaters. These measures were rejected by the town’s large and vocal working class, which was comprised of the factory workers and their families as well as workers who catered to them, such as bar and restaurant owners.

Although Rochester had many fine hotels that would have likely taken in Sam Patch, he decided to stay at the Rochester Recess, a saloon and boardinghouse owned by a man named William Cochrane. The Recess was widely known as the headquarters of the Rochester Band, a group of so-called sporting men who enjoyed hunting, fishing, drinking, gambling, and pushing the boundaries of respectability. In its early years, many prestigious Rochester men were members of the Band, and it performed in many civic ceremonies, including the Fourth of July festivities and a celebration of the completion of the aqueduct. By the time Patch appeared, most of the prestigious members had left, choosing respectability over the raucous band. The remaining members included the bookbinder Sam Drake, who horrified Rochester’s respectable crowd by binding a Bible in a rattlesnake hide and organizing a shooting competition in the middle of a workday.

The walk from the Rochester Recess to his jumping point at Genesee Falls would have taken Patch through the bright center of Rochester to the poorer outskirts of the city. He would have passed an empty amphitheater, built for popular equestrian circuses that were eventually banned, and a theater, which was formally closed but occasionally saw traveling acts. He also would have passed the Erie Canal, which ran through the heart of the city. Johnson notes that although the canal brought prosperity and tourism to Rochester, it was also the site of repeated violence. Fights often broke out among the workers as traffic built up along the canal, and multiple murders were recorded in the 1820s. At the outskirts of the city, an Irish shantytown called Dublin marked the entrance to the Genesee wilderness. Rochester locals knew that the Genesee Falls could be deadly: Each year, dozens of residents were injured or killed in the falls. However, they also frequently hiked into the gorges to hunt, fish, and relax in the wilderness.

A crowd of 10,000 people gathered to watch Sam Patch’s jump on November 6, 1829. The town’s mills and factories practically emptied as spectators gathered on both banks of the river and in the gorge to watch Patch’s jump. From the river banks, the town appeared to emerge out of the river as a testament to progress. Those watching from the river were overwhelmed by the noise of the falls and were unnerved by the unstable limestone cliffs on which the town was built. The jump was a success, and Patch planned a second jump on the following Friday, the 13th, despite superstitions about bad luck on that date. Buoyed by his success and the crowds, Patch heavily marketed the second jump, publishing a broadsheet across the northeastern United States and Canada. On the day of the jump, Patch was visibly drunk. After giving a strange speech comparing himself to the historical figures Napoleon Bonaparte and the Duke of Wellington, Patch leaped off his platform. Halfway through the jump, he began to flail wildly. He hit the water at an unexpected angle and was killed on impact.