Although the neighborhood was the scene of various operations during the War of Independence, not a single white settler was living on the site of the present city when the federal constitution was adopted in 1787, and the town was not laid out till after the second presidency of Washington. In 1801 Joseph Ellicott, sometimes called the "Father of Buffalo," plotted the site for a town, calling it New Amsterdam but the name of Buffalo Creek or Buffalo proved more popular. Ellicott was the agent of a group of Dutch capitalists called the Holland Land Co., who purchased a large tract of land for speculative purposes in the neighborhood of Buffalo (1792). At an early period (1784) the present site of the city of Buffalo had come to be known as the "Buffalo Creek region," either from the herds of buffalo or bison, which, according to Indian tradition, had frequented the salt licks of the creek, or more probably for some Indian chief. During the War of 1812 Buffalo was a frontier town, and, owing to its position on Lake Erie, very close to an important theater of operations. The first gun of the war is said to have been fired on Aug. 13, by a battery at Black Rock, then a rival, now a suburb of Buffalo, and shortly afterwards British soldiers from the Canadian garrison at Ft. Erie (directly across the Niagara River from Buffalo) made a raid into Buffalo harbour and captured the schooner "Connecticut." The Americans replied with a brilliant exploit in which Lieut. Jesse D. Elliott (1782-1845) crossed the river and captured the "Detroit" and the "Caledonia" under the guns of Ft. Erie. The ruins of Ft. Erie are among the most picturesque features of the region about Buffalo. The fort was captured in 1814 by an American force under Gen. Winfield Scott, and was held by the Americans till the end of the war, despite the efforts of a British besieging force to dislodge them. At the close of hostilities the Americans blew up the fort. In the following spring (1812) five of the gunboats used by Capt. Perry at the Battle of Lake Erie were fitted out in the harbour at Buffalo. Perry's victory, however, did not save the little settlement from an attack in Dec. of that year in which Gen. Sir Phineas Riall and a force of 1,200 British and Indians captured the town and almost completely destroyed it. After the war the town was rebuilt, and grew rapidly. In 1818, near where La Salle in 1679 built his little sailing vessel, the "Griffin," a group of N.Y. capitalists completed the "Walk-in-the-Water," the first steamboat on the Great Lakes. The completion of the Erie Canal, seven years later, with Buffalo as its western terminus, greatly increased the city's importance. At Buffalo in 1848 met the Free Soil convention that nominated Martin Van Buren for the presidency and Charles Francis Adams for the vice-presidency. Grover Cleveland lived in Buffalo from 1855 until 1884, when he was elected president.