Annie Edson Taylor Was the First Person to Survive Going Over Niagara Falls in a Barrel
On this day · 24 October 1901
On her 63rd birthday in 1901, a widowed schoolteacher sealed herself inside an oak barrel and plunged over the Horseshoe Falls — and lived to tell it.
On 24 October 1901 — her 63rd birthday — Annie Edson Taylor became the first person to go over Niagara Falls in a barrel and survive. A widowed Michigan schoolteacher facing poverty, she hoped the stunt would bring her fame and a fortune to live on.
Taylor designed her own vessel: a barrel of Kentucky oak bound with iron hoops, padded with cushions, and weighted at the base with an anvil to keep it upright. Two days earlier she had tested it by sending a cat over the falls first; the animal emerged largely unharmed.
The possible outcomes, she said in 1901, were “fame and fortune or instant death.”
Towed into the river and cut loose, the barrel swept over the Canadian Horseshoe Falls. Rescuers reached it minutes later and freed Taylor — battered, with a gash to her head, but alive. The fortune never came. She earned little from lectures, was robbed of her barrel by a manager, and died penniless in 1921, buried in Niagara Falls’s “Stunter’s Rest.”
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