Western New York Heritage Magazine

In August 1887, Anna Katherine Green, her husband Charles Rohlfs, and their two children registered at the Fillmore Hotel on Niagara Square. Charles was to take a new job as a foreman and stove designer at the Sherman S. Jewett Stove Company. They settled down and spent the rest of their years in Buffalo. When Charles and Anna Katherine moved to town, she had already published seven "criminal romances," and with the help of the fame she had earned from the mystery novels, she had also published two volumes of poems - one of them a heroic verse drama.

To read more of Joan Warthling Roberts' story, see page 4 of the Fall 2004 Heritage Magazine. Suscribe now!

Harvesting the Land, Reaching the Sky: How the Buffalo Pitts Company Blazed Agricultural and Aeronautical Trails

In the years immediately preceding the outbreak of the First World War in Europe, Harold McCormick was the president of the Aero Club of Illinois and the vice president and chief stockholder of the International Harvester Company. International Harvester was then one of the country's top two producers of agricultural steam tractors. The other top producer of steam tractors was the Buffalo Pitts Company, the main rival of International Harvester. As an early enthusiast of flying, Harold McCormick owned two Curtiss flying boats, one of which was equipped with an unusually shaped high-efficiency propeller designed by Charles Olmsted. Olmsted was the aeronautical engineer the Buffalo Pitts company had contracted with to add aircraft production to their renowned line of agricultural equipment. Ironically, the flying boat Edith, owned by International Harvester's Harold McCormick, would be the first aircraft ever to fly with a propeller produced at the Buffalo Pitts Company.

To read the rest of Garett Olmsted's story, see page 16 in the Fall 2004 issue. Subscribe now!

Chautauqua's Hidden Architect

Set by a lake in picturesque rural Western New York, Chautauqua Institution is an internationally known island of culture and American history. The rich collection of historic architecture including large public buildings and clusters of quaint cottages, some dating back to Chautauqua's founding in the 1870's, put the entire Chautauqua Institution on the National Register of Historic Places in the 1970's.

But hidden in a folded page of century-old history is a relationship to Buffalo's days as a thriving industrial center: For at least a dozen years Chautauqua Institution's architect was the legendary Buffalo firm of Green and Wicks.

To read more of Edward Evans' story, see page 38 of the Fall 2004 Heritage Magazine. Subscribe now!

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