From the Buffalo News:
Once, when Jane A. Porter was visiting Europe in the late 19th century, someone asked her if she had ever seen Niagara Falls.
“Seen them?” she allegedly replied. “Why, I own them.”
She wasn’t kidding.
As an heir to the property bought by her grandfather, Augustus Porter, Jane Porter did indeed own the mighty cataracts—at least until 1885, when the family’s waterfront property was bought by New York State to form the nation’s first state park.
The Porter family’s other land holdings, worth millions of dollars even in 19th century money, were the focus of a series of lengthy court fights in the 1880s and ’90s.
At the end of it all, Jane Porter was declared mentally ill — a “lunatic,” in the terminology of the time — even though it’s far from clear that she was really insane by today’s standards, or indeed by any standards.
She seems to have been done out of her property by a greedy sister and a lawyer who supposedly was on her side but had a blatant conflict of interest.
The story was a sensation at the time, gaining coverage even in the New York Times.
But for a century, it was forgotten until it was unearthed in the basement of the Niagara County Courthouse.