An excerpt from
Buffalo's Delaware Avenue: Mansions and Families
By Edward T. Dunn
Pub. by Canisius
College Press, 2003
The next resident
at #805 Delaware [now the 1967 Temple
Beth Zion] was Spencer Kellogg, who had the Forbush
house razed and replaced with a splendid red-brick Georgian mansion with Doric columns which was completed in 1905 at a cost of $500,000.
Kellogg was born in West Galway, New York, in 1851. He graduated
from the Gloversville Seminary and was also privately tutored.
In 1875 he married Jane Morris... [See James R. Arnone, Central Park, Buffalo, New York: A Neighborhood of History and Tradition, 2010, pp. 130-131 for history of Jane's parents.]
Financial interests
After his marriage
he was engaged briefly in banking in Des Moines. But he moved to Buffalo in 1879
where he founded a linseed oil business, which became Spencer Kellogg & Sons.
Flax seed from which this oil is made could easily be brought from the Midwest and
North Central States via the Lakes to Buffalo for processing and distribution to
eastern markets.
He also became a grain elevator operator, a manufacturer
of brooms and brushes, paints and varnishes, white lead, iron and steel, and vegetable
oils. Kellogg & Sons became the largest of its kind in the world, with plants
and offices throughout the United States and Europe.
In 1910 on the death of Colonel Barnard, owner of the Sizer
mansion on Niagara Square, Spencer Kellogg & Sons bought the house, expanded
it, and made it company headquarters.
At first the new #805 housed Spencer, fifty-two, his fifty-year
old wife Jane, and four children: Howard twenty-four, Gertrude twenty-two,
Ruth fifteen, and Dorris eleven. There were five domestics, the majority Irish girls,
and in the back an Irish coachman and family. In 1952, when the Kelloggs had long
decamped, a reporter recalled the glories of the mansion, not all of them gone:
Before beginning construction of the Kellogg home, architects
for the firm of Green
& Wicks and plaster workers from Marcott & Co.,
New York, interior decorators, were sent to Europe to observe various aspects of
French and Italian architecture and art for adaptation to the mansion. Throughout
its building only the finest materials were used. Fireplaces were of imported marble,
balustrades of artistic wrought iron, lighting features of hammered bronze,
wrought iron, crystal and gold, doors of solid mahogany, door knobs of cut glass; and the gold
leaf ornamentation in the ceiling was very costly. Built
into this one-time home are the basement theater, ... an art gallery and the beautiful
music room in which more than a hundred persons can be seated without crowding.
Mr. Kellogg collected paintings and other objects of art
from many distant countries. One of his favorite paintings was a Thomas Moran landscape.
The gold andirons, harmonizing with the color scheme of the mahogany and gold library,
came from Egypt. Carved gilded chairs of the reception hall were created in Austria. A table, topped
with hand-tooled leather, is of Italian workmanship.
The art gallery is equipped with lighting designed to display
paintings to advantage. Bedrooms are spacious and all bathrooms are in marble. Fixtures,
including showers, are plated in gold.
The rooms of the first floor are virtually as they were
when Mr. Kellogg lived there. In the reception hall, the crimson hangings and upholstery
and the crimson velvet carpet have been replaced. The French blue damask covered
walls of the drawing room, with its ample fireplace of cream-colored marble surmounted by a gold-framed arched mirror,
are impressive. In the ivory and gold music room, the consoles of rare veined marble, selected by Mr. Kellogg, remain,
Spencer Kellogg had a summer home, "Lochevan,"
in Derby. After his death in 1922, son Howard, who had made this his regular home
and had become executive vice-president of the family firm, became president.
Spencer Kellogg's widow remained at #805 for a few years
until it was sold to the Town Club, a woman's group founded in 1926, which moved
into its new quarters the next year. It had served as a private home for a mere dozen
years.
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