Amherst depicts the breathtaking evolution of a small farming community into a major economic, educational, and medical hub of western New York. The book reveals how Amherst's rich soils, rapid falls, and near-Buffalo location led to the community's great progress and growth. In a single century, the population rose from just over four thousand in 1900 to one hundred fifteen thousand in 2000. Today, the town includes the thousand-acre campus of the new State University of New York at Buffalo and the Amherst Museum, visited by more than fifty thousand people each year.