In 1806, the first schoolhouse was built on the corner of Swan and Pearl streets,—the humble pioneer of an educational system that now embraces sixty modern grammar schools, three collegiate High Schools, and innumerable independent and private institutions of learning. Notable among these latter is the Le Couteulx Asylum for the instruction of the deaf and dumb. This beneficent institution owes its origin to the liberality of the Le Couteulx family. Louis Stephen Le Couteulx de Caumont, a Norman-French gentleman of station and culture, was the founder of the family in Buffalo. He came to New Amsterdam in 1804. On February 10, 1810, the “Town of Buffaloe” was created by an act of the legislature. This was the name originally given to the settlement by the Senecas, and there is little doubt that it was derived from the visits of the bison to the neighboring salt-licks. However that may be, the village of New Amsterdam was merged in 1810 into the town of Buffalo. [Illustration: LAFAYETTE SQUARE.] With the disappearance of the Dutch appellation of the town, vanished also the Dutch nomenclature of the streets. Van Staphorst and Willink Avenues were connected and called Main Street; Stadinzky Avenue, a name suggestive of the Polish element that later was to swell in such numbers the population of the city, became Church Street; Niagara Street succeeded Schimmelpennick Avenue; and Vollenhoven Avenue was changed into Erie Street. The origin of some of Buffalo’s thoroughfares is interesting and amusing. Utica Street was formerly a lane on the old Hodge farm, and led from the Cold Spring region to the Elmwood Avenue district. The people using it, however, were very careless about closing the gates, and this so irritated Mr. Hodge that he locked the gates and closed the lane. An indignation meeting was called in the little schoolhouse at Cold Spring. The schoolmaster was the chief speaker, and unless tradition does violence to his grammar, the principal part of his speech consisted of the declaration that “them Hodges is maintainin’ a ‘pent-up Uticky.’” When Mr. Hodge heard of the meeting, he relented and offered to give the people the lane on condition that the town government would lay out a street. The offer was accepted and the new thoroughfare was called Utica Street in commemoration of the schoolmaster’s speech. The inevitable newspaper appeared on the 3d of October, 1811, when the Buffalo _Gazette_ issued its first number. The _Gazette_ was the forerunner of journals which to-day recognize as their only competitors the Metropolitan press.