Cobblestone Society Museum
Childs (Gaines), Orleans County, New York
Marker Inscription
A complete cobblestone hamlet at Childs: church (1834), schoolhouse, and parsonage. Designated a National Historic Landmark for the finest concentration of cobblestone architecture in the United States.
Erected by Cobblestone Society
The Story
After the Erie Canal opened in 1825, the masons who had cut its locks turned to building homes, churches, and schools from glacial cobblestones. The Childs cluster is the densest surviving example of the craft.
Why it matters
It is the keystone site of the cobblestone trail — proof that a regional building style became a National Historic Landmark.
Related events
- · Cobblestone building era
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Alexander Classical School
Alexander, NY · est. 2004
Erected in 1837, this cobblestone building served the village of Alexander as a classical academy at a time when secondary education was rare in rural America. Cobblestone construction — laying tens of thousands of water-rounded stones by hand — flourished in a roughly 65-mile radius of Rochester, NY, after Erie Canal masons settled the region.
Lockport Locks — Flight of Five
Lockport, NY · est. 1976
To lift canal boats 60 feet over the Niagara Escarpment, engineers built five paired locks — boats going up on one side while others descended. The project drew workers from across Europe and gave the city of Lockport its name.
Wesleyan Chapel — Seneca Falls
Seneca Falls, NY · est. 1980
Organized by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott, the 1848 convention at the Wesleyan Chapel launched the organized women's suffrage movement. Sixty-eight women and thirty-two men signed the Declaration of Sentiments.
Lowell Textile Mills
Lowell, MA · est. 1978
Lowell harnessed the Merrimack's drop through a network of power canals to run the nation's first integrated cotton mills. Its young women workers — the 'Lowell mill girls' — wrote the first chapters of American labor history.