Charles Germain House - Table of Contents
Residents - Charles Germain House
1131 Delaware Avenue, Buffalo, NY
By Edward T. Dunn
An Excerpt from
Buffalo's Delaware Avenue: Mansions and Families, by Edward T. Dunn. Pub.
by Canisius
College Press, 2003
The earliest resident at #1131 was Charles B. Germain, scion of family which came to the area before the War of 1812.
He was born in Buffalo in 1844, graduated from Hamilton College in 1866, read law in the office of Laning & Miller, passed the bar in 1868, and practiced law until he became judge of the United States District Court in 1884.
In 1881 he had married Mary J. Beggs of Cleveland.
He belonged to the Buffalo and Falconwood clubs and to the Trinity vestry. Charles Germain died in 1926.
His son, Edward B. Germain, was president of Dunlop Tire.
By 1900 Elgood Channing Lufkin was resident at #1131.He had been born in Springfield, Massachusetts, in 1864, and attended high school in Titusville where his father had gone seeking oil.
After graduating from M.I.T. in 1886, Elwood worked as an engineer at Holly Manufacturing in Lockport until 1889. From then until 1895 he was chief engineer of Independent Pipe Line, Lima, Ohio.
Meanwhile in 1890 he had married Lula Moulton of Emporia, Kansas.
From 1895 until 1908 he was general manager of the Snow Steam Pump Works on the corner of Snow and Roesser Avenues in Buffalo.
In 1909 he went to Houston and became vice president of the Texas Company, an oil-drilling firm. In 1901 an oil strike in Spindeltop had marked the beginning of an oil boom there. Lufkin was getting into Texas oil on the ground floor. In 1911 he was made president of the Texas Company of New York. He became president of the latter 1913-1920, right through World War I. During the war he was a member of the subcommittee on oil and metals of the Council of National Defense. During his presidency his company's name became Texaco. From 1920 until 1926 when he retired, Lufkin was chairman of the board and of its executive committee.
Republican, Protestant, and a Mason, he died at his estate in Rye, New York, in 1935.
After Lufkin's departure for Texas until the early 1920s, #1131 was the home of Edward L. Koons, who had been born circa 1862, attended P.S. 13 and Central High where he was a schoolmate of Francis Folsom, future wife of Grover Cleveland. Koons read law in the offices of William H. Glenney and married Anna Hengerer, daughter of Hengerer's founder.Koons and his brother, Henry, bought up East Side land and quickly resold it, invested the profits in gold mines in Ontario and merged them into Sylvanite Gold Mines of which Edward was president.
They managed Grover Cleveland's successful mayoral campaign and were prominent in the local end of his campaign for governor and later president.
Edward founded and was president of Abstract Title and Mortgage, director for over fifty years of Buffalo Insurance, first vice president of the Buffalo Savings, and in 1920 president of the Chamber of Commerce.
He was a member of the Church of the Redeemer (Lutheran), and of the Automobile, Country, Buffalo Athletic clubs, and for forty-five years of the Buffalo Club.
Koons died at eighty-four in the Park Lane Apartments in 1946.
Leonard A. Yerkes, a manufacturer, his wife Helen, and five children lived at #1131 in 1925, with three live-in servants.
By 1931 it had become the home of Doctor George T. Mosley, formerly of #202Delaware. He died in 1935 and his wife, Isabelle, continued there for a short time.
