David R Kohler 1819 - 1902

David Kohler The Man Who Dug the City This portrait shows David Kohler, a man whose lifetime of labor is buried beneath the streets you walk on today.

Kohler arrived in the Tonawandas in 1836, when the area was little more than mud, timber, and canal traffic. Over the next sixty years, he became one of the community’s most familiar figures — serving as tax collector, canal collector, town supervisor, street commissioner, and assessor for North and South Tonawanda.

But titles only tell part of the story.

Late in life, Kohler pointed out a ditch running beneath Goundry Street and quietly told a reporter, “I helped dig that ditch over sixty years ago.” Long before pavement and sidewalks, he cut drainage channels by hand — shaping the ground that would later be built over, widened, and paved.

By the time this photograph was taken, Kohler was nearly eighty years old. He walked the city with a quick step, startling younger men with his energy, moving through streets he had once helped carve out of swamp and clay.

And yet, like so many builders of early Tonawanda, his work disappeared beneath progress.

Roads widened. Canals changed. Cemeteries expanded and were cut back again. Even the dead were moved to make way for the city he helped build.

David Kohler represents a quieter kind of dark history — not crime or violence, but the unsettling truth that cities are layered over forgotten labor. Every street rests on hands that are now buried.

When you stand among these graves, remember: the city above and the cemetery below are made of the same earth.