Rochester is home to Eastman Kodak and the Xerox corporation, the founders of which funded the University of Rochester in the early nineteenth century. Susan B. Anthony, a suffragette who lived before the suffragette movement existed, fought for women’s vote and registered to vote in Rochester.
Notable museums in Rochester include the Strong National Museum of Play featuring Sesame Street, the Rochester Museum Science Center with interactive exhibits, and the Memorial Art Gallery with notable regional art.
A portrait of Colonel Nathaniel Rochester, founder of the city, hangs in the gallery. He bought and sold slaves in Maryland and continued to profit from the business even after he moved to New York. He continued to do so until the state banned it in 1827.
Fredrick Douglass often met with Susan B. Anthony. Anthony, raised a Quaker, believed that abolishing slavery was integral to her work to fight for women’s suffrage. Douglass was born a slave in Maryland in 1818 and went to England for a speaking tour in 1846 to speak against slavery as a fugitive slave. He didn’t return to America until 1847 when his British friends bought his freedom.
He was well-spoken and chose to live in Rochester to start The North Star, an anti-slavery newspaper. Rochester had many Quakers who believed in racial equality and was close to the Underground Railroad, where many fugitive slaves made it to freedom in Canada. He is buried near Highland Park, where there is also a statue of him.
Highland Park was the city’s first park built around existing nursery land around a reservoir in the late nineteenth century. The reservoir has been in continuous service since 1876. The Lamberton Conservatory was added in 1909 near a trophy cannon taken from a Spanish cruiser at the Battle of Manila Bay in the Philippines during the Spanish-American War in 1898.
