The first European settlers in the area around Niagara Falls were Philip Bender and Thomas McMicking and their families. They were in the second wave of settlers to cross onto the west bank of the Niagara River and they arrived in 1783. Both men were former Butler's Rangers. German-born Bender settled on the land just north of the Falls and Scotsman McMicking settled at what became Stamford Village. Bender and McMicking both have streets named after them; Bender in Niagara Falls (where three streets nearby are named after his sons Philip, John, and Hiram), and McMicking in the old Stamford Village just north of the Green.

The next year, Francis Ellsworth, another former Ranger, arrived and he settled closest to the Falls, south of Bender, with James Forsyth between them. The sutler for the Rangers, John Burch, settled to the south of them on the northern bank of the Chippawa Creek, and a pair of former Rangers, Isaac Dolson and Elijah Phelps, settled north of them at the foot of the escarpment (Queenston). Between Dolson and Bender, a trio of Rangers, the Thomson brothers, settled just north of the Whirlpool. When land title papers were drawn up for their grants, a clerk misspelled their names as Thompson. Archibald and James accepted their fate but not John; he crossed out the offensive "p" and signed his name the old way. Most of the Thom(p)son's land is now under the reservoir.

Within a short time, Burch had built a sawmill and gristmill on the Niagara River at what is now the Toronto Power Building, Bender had started a quarry, and McMicking was growing apples. Ellsworth sold his property to Charles Wilson, who built a tavern on the native trail just north of the Falls, where the Oakes Inn is now located. After 1790, the trail was widened to become the Portage Road on the west bank of the river. Wilson's Tavern was to be the scene of an important event before the Battle of Lundy's Lane, when Mrs Wilson, either deliberately or otherwise, overestimated the size of the British forces and caused the American general, Winfield Scott, to hesitate just long enough for Sir Gordon Drummond to organize his forces.

After Burch's death in 1798, Thomas Clark bought Burch's Mills and they eventually ended up as part of the Clark and Street industrial empire. Samuel Street Jr. moved into Burch's former house near the mills but Clark built a fine house at the top of the hill and called it Clark Hill. Harry Oakes later replaced the house with another called Oak Hall.

Oak Hall

James Forsyth's son William bought Wilson's Tavern in 1817, renamed it the Niagara Falls Hotel, and started his career as Niagara's first tourist entrepreneur. He operated a rowboat ferry and built a stairway down the cliff to the ferry. This was unwise because the government owned the Chain Reserve, a strip of land one chain wide (66 feet or 20m) running along the bank of the river. This later led Forsyth into a running feud with the government, a situation few people ever emerge from with grace and humour. Besides the government, Forsyth had to contend with competition, which arrived in 1820 when John Brown built the Ontario House on the Portage Road a little south of Forsyth's hotel. This forced Forsyth to rip down his hotel and replace it with a fancy new hotel named the Pavilion.

Jutting out into space immediately north of the Horseshoe Falls was once a great slab of rock named Table Rock. The cliff under the rock being made from the same material as the rock under the Falls, it was subject to wear in the same way and pieces of Table Rock broke off over the years. In 1829, William Forsyth got permission to set off explosions to blow up the dangerous parts of the rock. Later that year the first Niagara stunt occurred when Sam Patch set up a ladder on the bank of the river below Goat Island and jumped into the river from a small platform at a height of 90 feet (27m)

Transport around Niagara Falls in the early years was by Shank's Pony or by actual pony or horse. This mode of transport eventually made way for stagecoach lines running along the Portage Road. When the Welland Canal opened in 1829, much of the traffic switched to the new canal, and many of the merchants began to feel the pinch. A group of them banded together to build the Erie and Ontario Railway from Queenston to Chippawa. This railway ran up the hill from Queenston, along the route of Stanley Avenue to Portage Road south of Drummondville, and then followed Portage Road to Chippawa. It had literally a three horsepower engine, because the coach was pulled by three horses up the escarpment at Queenston and then usually one horse pulled it from there to Chippawa. At Drummondville, passengers going to the new Clifton House Hotel would change to a horse-drawn omnibus provided by the hotel.

Samuel Zimmerman, regarded as the founder of Niagara Falls, made his money as a contractor for the Welland Canal. He bought land where the Queen Victoria Park is located and started to create a great estate next to the Clifton House Hotel. Before his mansion could be finished, Zimmerman was killed in a railway accident returning from a trip to Toronto in 1857. This was ironic because Zimmerman had been responsible for the extension of the Great Western Railway to Niagara.

By that time, the village of Clifton, which had been created when Capt. Ogden Creighton had bought land from the Bender family in 1832, had begun to expand at last. In 1848, the first suspension bridge was built over the river and the village of Elgin had grown at the Canadian end of the bridge. In 1856, the two villages joined to form the Town of Clifton. The town changed its name to the Town of Niagara Falls in 1881 but Drummondville changed its name the next year to the Village of Niagara Falls to add confusion. This was finally sorted out in 1904 when the two joined together as the City of Niagara Falls.