Oliver Cabana,
Jr. who was born of French-Canadian ancestry in Island Point,Vermont, in
1865, one of ten children of Oliver Cabana, the village blacksmith, and
his wife Edmire De Rainville.
At fourteen he came to live with relatives in Buffalo where, after
studying bookkeeping at Bryant & Stratton, he went to work for a
tanning and belt manufacturing firm. Six years later he sank his
savings of $480 in a belt fastener and mender invented by his
half-brother. He then bought out the brother's interest and formed the
Buffalo Specialty Company. Cabana prospered and established two
factories in Buffalo, also in Canada, England and Germany. Sales went
into the millions and the name was changed to the Liquid Veneer Company.
In 1886 he married Isabelle Josephine Pilliard of Buffalo in the French Church at Clinton and Washington.
He then got into old mining, hospitals, oil producing, cattle raising,
and banking, and was director of thirty-five companies and a member of
numerous societies and clubs. Cabana became the official head of all
the industries with which he was connected. He developed the
Wright-Hargreaves Gold Mine in Kirkland Lake, Ontario. He was chairman
of Liberty Bank of Buffalo, and was responsible for its building. He
developed the Sun Diet Health Foundation in East Aurora, and wrote
books on Central Park Hospital. He assisted in the development of
Canisius College.
Democratic Party
Cabana used his wealth to become a power in the
Democratic Party. He managed the campaign for Gov. Alfred E. Smith in
Buffalo and Erie County in 1928. He bankrolled banquets for visiting
sachems and during the Smith-Hoover presidential election wrote Al a
check for $25,000, besides spending locally $26,000 ($888,930 in 1997
dollars.)
During the 1930s he gave more than $100,000 to Democratic causes
besides making good on $27,000 worth of notes signed by party leaders.
Cabana was an original Roosevelt-for-president man. For his second
inaugural as governor in January 1931, Roosevelt summoned him to Albany
and deputized him to clean house in Erie County. This made William H.
Fitzpatrick, off-and-on County Democratic boss for thirty years,
unhappy, but Cabana put down a Fitzpatrick revolt in the primaries. In
the general election Democrats not only won the city clerk's office and
captured the common council but for the first time in memory gained a
one-man majority on the Board of Supervisors. It was a Democratic year
anyway, but Cabana claimed credit for the win. This was the zenith of
his political career.
Shortly before the election he resigned the chairmanship and appointed
George Zimmerman in his stead. Cabana expected to remain the power
behind the throne, but Zimmerman was his own man, and Cabana was out.
Cabana bred, developed and drove race horses in Elma and bred Holstein cattle.
He died in 1938. His friend, Archbishop Thomas J. Walsh of Newark,
formerly of Buffalo, came back to celebrate the funeral Mass. The
widow, Isabella, stayed at #824 Delaware until her death at ninety-two in 1953.
A daughter, Miss Isabelle Cabana, lived there until 1961 when the house
was vacant for two years until it became a child care center