English: The Seymour Knox House, 1035 Delaware Avenue, Buffalo, New York, April 2020. A handsome buff-brick structure in a comely melange of the Beaux-Arts Neoclassical and Italian Renaissance styles executed by Niagara Falls architect E. E. Joralemon, the house boasts a classically-inspired marble portico, balustrades and trim to match, lion's-head gargoyles in the Greek style, and a small porte-cochere on its north side (not visible in this photo). A native of Russell, St. Lawrence County, New York, Seymour Horace Knox (1861-1915) started on his path to success in 1884 with the five-and-ten-cent store he opened with his cousin Frank W. Woolworth in Reading, Pennsylvania. The ertswhile co-owner of "Woolworth & Knox" finally struck out on his own in 1890, with his eponymous Seymour H. Knox Company setting up shop in two locations in downtown Buffalo; soon enough, however, he reconciled with his cousin, merging the more than 100 stores he owned regionally in 1912 into the even larger Woolworth chain and becoming vice-president of the same. Seymour and his wife Grace had three children that survived into adulthood, who went on to carry the Knox name ever upward as one of the few of the old blue-blood families of Buffalo to remain primarily resident in the local area. This was the third and final house that Knox lived in after his move back to Buffalo, from 1904 until his death; earlier residences include
the Queen Anne-style, Milton Beebe-designed house at 414 Porter Avenue (
c. 1890-
c. 1894), and the
only slightly smaller Queen Anne house at 467 Linwood Avenue (
c. 1894-1904). His widow and children moved yet again three years after his death - to the
French Baroque-style mansion at 800 Delaware Avenue - but continued to operate this house as rental property until 1922, when they sold it to the Roman Catholic Diocese of Buffalo for use as the official residence of the Bishop, a function it served until the diocese's 1953 acquisition of the former
Georgia Greene Forman House on Oakland Place. It now serves as the rectory of the adjacent Blessed Sacrament R.C. Church.