Cynthia Van Ness carries the official title of director of library and archives at the Buffalo History Museum, though anyone who seeks her help understands this truth:
Over the years, her work has turned her into a Buffalo historian of deep knowledge and perspective. Her intuitive appreciation for a treasury of documents, images and articles gives her a fast ability to pinpoint a couple of centuries worth of civic touchstones.
Typically, she finds some long-ago context for just about anything that’s happening in Buffalo today. Yet it’s through that prism that Van Ness – considering the hit-or-miss idea that 1 million people might sweep into the region to witness Monday’s total solar eclipse – offers what for her is a rare judgment:
If it happens, there’s really no historic precedent for a gathering of that size, in Buffalo.
I called Van Ness, grateful for her perspective, after contemplating – with a wave of sadness – many voices I might have sought out only a few years ago. I wish I could hear from Lum Smith, the great community historian, or George Arthur, the longtime City Council member of razor-sharp memory who always saw ways to bring events of different eras together.
Silo City is located within what once was the Seneca territory known as Buffalo Creek, refuge and sanctuary for the Haudenosaunee and many Indigenous people following the tumult of the Revolutionary War and well into the 1800s.
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