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.