Buildings in Hamburg, NY - Table of Contents

Captain Braley Buxton House / Lindy's Buxton Inn
2836 Pleasant Ave. at Route 20, Town of Hamburg, N.Y.
Erected 1869

Restaurant Information: (716) 648-4660



TEXT


Click on illustrations to enlarge

South (front) elevation.
Cross gable roof.

Side elevation

Side view of front porch.

Front porch.
Rounded windows are typical of
Italianate style

Detail

Built in 1869 by Braley Buxton, a captain in the New York State militia during the Civil War, with homemade bricks.

Buxton (1817-1877) came to Hamburg from Vermont in 1836, marrying Harriet Philips in 1837. He was commissioned captain in the New York State Militia in 1854.

Buxton bought several parcels of land on the former Cooper Ridge Road, now Pleasant Avenue. The area was rich with clay deposits, and he built a kiln south of the house. His 15 children made the bricks for the home, working before and after school. During the 1860s, the Buxton family was in the business of manufacturing bricks.

Italianate style 1850-1885

The first Italianate houses in the United States were built in the late 1830s; the style was popularized by influential Andrew Jackson Downing, a widely respected American landscape gardener who also published house pattern books in the 1840s and '50s.

Downing's one-year partner (Downing died in a fire) was
Calvert Vaux who himself published a fairly influential pattern book entitled Villas and Cottages.Six years later, Vaux moved to New York City and soon partnered with the superintendent of a new park that was being created. The park was Central Park and the superintendent was Frederick Law Olmsted. They went on to win the design competition for Central Park and also the design for the parks system in Buffalo. Vaux also designed structures for some of the Buffalo parks.

Downing's building designs were mostly for single family rural houses built in the Picturesque
Gothic and Italianate styles. Believing that every American deserved a good home, he designed homes for three classes: villas for the wealthy, cottages for working men, and farmhouses for farmers. He intended for every family to be able to afford one of these homes, but of course this did not occur.

Downing believed that architecture and the fine arts could affect the morals of the owners, and that improvement of the external appearance of a home would help "better" all those who had contact with the home. The general good of America was benefited by good taste and beautiful architecture, he felt. Others in the 1840s believed that the proper home environment could assure eternal comforts in heaven. The private home was becoming the place for moral education and the focus of middle class America's search for the meaning of life.

By the 1860s the style had completely overshadowed its earlier companion, the Gothic Revival.

Identifying Features

For much more information and illustrations of the Italianate style, see Italianate in Buffalo 1850-1885


Sources:


Photos and their arrangement © 2002 Chuck LaChiusa
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