Annie Edson Taylor

Professional options were limited for women in 1901. Homemaker was the primary choice, but the work was exhausting and the pay was notoriously low – almost nonexistent really. For those unmarried women who did not fill the wife/mother role of homemaker, teaching was an option. Daredevil was a decidedly less popular choice. In and around Niagara Falls, that job had been taken up almost exclusively by men, although Maria Spelterini had crossed the Niagara gorge on a tightrope above the Whirlpool Rapids in 1876 with peach baskets strapped to her feet.

Still, daredevils were mostly men. Among them was Matthew Webb, the first man to swim across the English Channel. He swam from Dover to Calais on a wager for £500, then came to Niagara Falls in 1883 to challenge Niagara’s class 6 Whirlpool Rapids with nothing more than his swimsuit. As it turned out, the Niagara River proved more deadly than the English Channel.

Taking note that Webb’s hubris had cost him his life, between 1886 and 1889, Carlisle Graham, a cooper from Philadelphia, tried the stunt with a bit more protection. He shot successfully through the Whirlpool Rapids four times in a barrel, of course (he was a cooper after all).

By 1901, Annie Edson Taylor had tried life as a homemaker and, after the death of her husband and baby, as a teacher. Now at age 62, living on her own in Bay City, Michigan, she had little more than her wits to keep herself fed and housed. She had neither Spelterini’s grace nor Webb’s strength, but she did have Graham’s practicality.

So, even though she was no cooper, she designed herself a barrel. And what a barrel it was, made of hardy Kentucky Oak and secured with ten iron hoops, each riveted every four inches. It stood 4 ½ feet high, 12 inches at the head, 34 inches at the middle, 15 inches at the foot, and weighed 160 pounds.

And then she hired a manager to promote the greatest stunt of them all – the one that Carlisle Graham only boasted he would do, the one that would make her world famous – plunging 158 feet over Niagara Falls, disappearing into its mist . . . and surviving. No one thought she could do it, but on October 24, 1901, her 63rd birthday, she did just that. Much to the satisfaction of homemakers everywhere, a photographer captured the priceless look on Carlisle Graham’s face when she emerged from her barrel alive. Annie Edson Taylor did what no one before her dared. For that, she will always be Niagara’s Queen of the Mist.

Visit Taylor’s final resting place as part of a Notable Persons walking tour at historic Oakwood Cemetery in Niagara Falls.