Forman-Cabana House - Table of Contents

George V. Forman
824 Delaware Avenue Buffalo, N.Y.

George V. Forman, an early oil magnate He was born near Milford, NJ in 1841. After graduating from Princeton in 1861 he practiced law in Trenton, NJ. Later he moved to Oil City, PA, where with Capt. J. J. Vandergrift, he established the Oil City Trust Co. Forman was president for a time.

While a resident of Olean and a member of the Exchange National Bank of Olean, Forman organized the Eastern Oil Co. incorporated in West Virginia. He then came to Buffalo to be president of the company.

Forman, a very punctual man, according to Anson Goodyear, "every morning left his house at a certain hour and met George Williams at his house just above North Street, to walk to the Fidelity Building together. Mr. Forman boasted a very prominent corporation and leaned backward to achieve his balance. Mr. Williams was emaciated and bent forward to achieve his. It was a procession on which people checked their watches."

Georgia Green Forman

George Forman, by 1895 living at #824 had four children. His oldest son, Howard Arter Forman, born in 1870, came to Buffalo where in 1892 he married Georgia Green of Lockport. Georgia had been born in 1871. She was brought to Buffalo by her parents in the 1880's and was educated at St. Margaret's, a former private school on North St. and also graduated from Miss Masters School at Dobbs Ferry. She married Howard A. Forman in 1892. For more than a decade she served on the Board of Managers of Children's Hospital. Georgia Forman was a contributor to the Room of Contemporary Art at the Albright Art Gallery, presenting it in 1940 with a Sixth Dynasty Limestone Buddhist statue of a winged lion (Chimera). Georgia Forman died at age 85 on 6/24/1955. She is buried in Forest lawn Cemetery in Section H, lot 126.

Howard, vice-president of Eastern Petroleum of which his father was president, and Georgia lived for some years on North Street. During the World War I he was Federal Fuel Administrator for Buffalo. After the war he and Georgia separated and by the early 1920s he had moved to Lexington, Kentucky, where he died in 1931. He left his wife well situated since in 1928 she moved into an exquisite modern mansion at #77 Oakland Place behind her ex-father-in-law, George Forman. She traveled widely through Europe and the Orient, amassing a fine collection of Japanese and Chinese objets d'art. Two years before her death in 1955 she moved after twenty-five years on Oakland into The Campanile. Number 77 Oakland was sold to the Catholic diocese of Buffalo in 1955 for an episcopal residence.

A third Forman mansion in Buffalo was that of George Forman's second son, George Alfred, at #1260 Delaware where his widow was residing in the early 1930s.

George Forman's daughter Mary married Conger Goodyear of the #888 Delaware Goodyears.

George V. Forman died in 1922 . He was succeeded at #824 by Oliver F Cabana.


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Page by Chuck LaChiusa in 2003
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