Send us Fan Mail On October 24th, 1901 — her sixty-third birthday — a retired schoolteacher named Annie Edson Taylor climbed into an oak barrel the size of a pickle cask, had the lid screwed down, had air pumped in with a bicycle pump, and was pushed into the current above Niagara Falls. Nobody had ever survived going over those falls. Annie knew that. She didn’t care. She had a plan. This week Emily goes solo again with the extraordinary true story of the first person in history to go over Niagara Falls in a barrel and live — a woman who did it broke, widowed, and terrified of the poor house, on her birthday, at sixty-three. What you’ll hear: The geology of Niagara Falls — because the rock Annie went over is more than 400 million years old, the falls themselves are 12,000 years old and have been slowly walking backward up the river ever since, and the cliff she plunged off used to be the floor of a warm, shallow sea. So we start there.Annie Edson Taylor: born 1838 in Auburn, New York, one of eight kids, her father died when she was twelve, her baby son died in infancy, her husband David died in the Civil War — and then she just kept going. Teaching school, giving dance lessons, moving from Texas to New York to Mexico City to Michigan, doing what she always did: “If there’s no door, she builds one.”By 1900, she’s lost her home to a fire and her savings to a clergyman. For a single woman in her sixties in 1901, the end of the road had a name: the Poor House. And she was getting closer to it every yearWhat changed everything: a man in a bar claiming he’d gone over the falls in a padded rubber suit. Annie heard it and did the math. If that was true, what could a schoolteacher do with a really good barrel?The barrel: oak, iron hoops, four and a half feet tall, a hundred and sixty pounds, cushions inside, a harness to hold her in, weight at the bottom so it would land feet first. She designed it herself. She named it the Queen of the MistHer promoter Frank Russell, who put the barrel in a store window — and then told the press she was forty-two. She was sixty-two. “Everybody on this riverbank is lying about their age. Annie’s just the only one doing it on purpose.”The test run: her cat — possibly named Niagara — went over the Horseshoe Falls first. Survived with a small cut on its head. Emily has thoughts about this.October 23rd: the water’s too rough, the boatmen call it off, and Annie cries in front of the reporters because she’s sixty-two and broke and has psyched herself up for this once alreadyOctober 24th, her sixty-third birthday: they row her out, she climbs in with a little heart-shaped pillow, they pump in the air, they plug the hole with a cork, and they push her into the current170 feet. 90% of a river. One woman in a barrel. Twenty minutes“My God, she’s alive.”Her first review: “I will never go over the falls again. I would sooner walk up to the mouth of a cannon.” Five stars. Would not recommendWhat happened next: about $400 total in earnings, a promoter who disappeared with the barrel, a younger woman introduced to crowds as “the heroine of Niagara” — with Annie’s barrelThe years that followed: a souvenir stand, postcards, stock market, a novel she tried to write, clairvoyant work, magnetic treatments. Always building a door where there wasn’t oneFebruary 23rd, 1921: Annie Edson Taylor walks into the Niagara County Poor House. She’s eighty-two. When they ask her age at the door, she tells them fifty-seven. She never stoppedAnd the falls: still moving. Slower now, since most of the water gets diverted for electricity. They have a dimmer switch at night. In 1969, the Army Corps of Engineers turned the American Falls off entirely for six months so geologists could study the cliff. In 1848, an ice jam stopped the falls cold for thirty hours and people walked out into the dry riverbed. All that power, and they don’t get to decide where most of their water goes. Neither did Annie“Annie Taylor’s plan was never to be poor again. It didn’t work. Her other plan — to do something no one else in the world had ever done — she nailed that one.” She’s buried in Oakwood Cemetery in Niagara Falls, in a section called Stunter’s Rest. 💌 Have a story, a question, or something you’ve been carrying? Emily wants to hear it. thatwasnttheplanpod@gmail.com or thatwasnttheplan.com 📲 Find us on Instagram | TikTok | YouTube — search @thatwasnttheplan 🎧 If this one stayed with you — subscribe, leave a review, and share it with someone who’s building a door right now. That wasn’t the plan, and we will talk to you next week. K bye. 🛢️ Support the show
