| For
the first two centuries after European settlement of the area, land on both sides
of Niagara Falls was privately owned. Development and commercial ventures threatened
the natural beauty of the area, and visitors sometimes had to pay entrepreneurs
a fee to view the Falls through holes in a fence. Public
dissatisfaction led to the Free Niagara movement, which included the artist Frederick
Church, the landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, New York Assemblyman Thomas
Vincent Welch, and the journalist Jonathan Baxter Harrison. A
series of Harrison's letters to newspapers in Boston and New York (collected in
the 1882 pamphlet The Condition of Niagara Falls, and the Measures Needed to Preserve
Them) were particularly influential in turning public opinion in favor of preservation
In
1885, New York state began to purchase land from developers, under the charter
of the Niagara Reservation State Park. In the same year, Ontario established the
Queen Victoria Niagara Falls Park for the same purpose. Both
organizations have proved remarkably successful operations that have restricted
development on both sides of the Falls and the Niagara River. On the Canadian
side, the Niagara Parks Commission governs land usage along the entire course
of the Niagara River, from Lake Erie to Lake Ontario. | 
