Crime Scene and Trauma Cleanup in Lyons Falls, NY

Lyons Falls is a village in Lewis County, New York, situated at a 70-foot waterfall on the Black River, just below the point where the Moose River joins it from the east.

French refugees first settled the spot, then called High Falls, in 1794, where the Moose and Black rivers meet.

Caleb Lyon settled at the falls in 1823, built a bridge over the rivers in 1829 and a grist mill in 1830, and the village that grew up took the Lyon family name.

Caleb Lyon's son Lyman, as a member of the New York Assembly, helped push through the Black River Canal, which was built to link Lyons Falls with the Erie Canal at Rome.

The village stood at the northern end of the Black River Canal when the waterway was completed in the 1850s, turning it into a busy shipping and milling center.

In the early 1890s entrepreneur Gordias H. P. Gould bought property at the river junction and built a paper mill that opened in 1895; papermaking continued for a century before the mill closed in 2000.

Lyons Falls had a population of 570 at the 2020 census, almost unchanged from 566 in 2010 and 591 in 2000 - and well above the 470 residents counted in 1900 before the mill-era boom.

Most of the village lies in the town of West Turin on the west bank of the Black River, while a less developed part, including Riverside Park, lies in the town of Lyonsdale on the east bank.

The Forest Presbyterian Church, the Gould Mansion Complex and The Pines are listed on the National Register of Historic Places, and the Wildwood Cemetery and Mary Lyon Fisher Memorial Chapel were added in 2011.

The village sits at the junction of state Routes 12 and 12D, about 14 miles south of Lowville, the Lewis County seat, on the western edge of the Adirondacks.