34 Orton Place

April 2007

34 Orton Place has had only a handful of owners in its 120 year history who have strived to care for it through the years.  It was built in the fall of 1885 by William O. Brewster, an organist who had a business at 10 Huron Street and speculated on the purchase of three homes on Orton Place to be resold for profit.  The first resident-owner of this house was Allen Lee Schryver.  He was one of Buffalo’s earliest settlers, arriving in Buffalo in 1836 to open a shoe and boot manufacturing business on Main Street. 

In 1898 Sarah E. Schryver, Allen's wife inherited the house after Allen’s death, but she died just 1½ years later.  The home was next inherited by Sarah’s daughter by a previous marriage, Mrs. Katharyn Danson Mulcay.  Katharyn was a widow and lived at 34 Orton Place with her two daughters Alene (born March, 1880) and Helen (born August, 1883).  One other family owned it briefly in the 1920s, at which time it was sold to an Italian family in 1927 and sensitively converted into two apartments.  It remained in the same family for over 50 years until the late 1980s and was the scene of many gala family and neighborhood parties and has a long history of hospitality.

The house was designed with many interior architectural features popular in the 1880s: a formal entry hall, a prominent staircase, large windows with ornate moldings and two fireplaces.  The fireplace mantle on the first floor is made of wood while the mantle on the second floor is made of slate painted to resemble black marble, a popular technique in the Victorian era.  The house also retains its charming kitchen sink on the first floor from the 1920s.  The first floor of the house is used to showcase early American antiques and original art from Buffalo’s history.

The exterior of the house features clapboard siding, a pyramidal roof, a soaring corbeled chimney stack and carved paneling in the left side gable.  The 19^th century cast iron fence with pineapple shaped finials that outlines the exterior of the house was restored a few years ago.  Shield-style shingles can be found in the front gable of the house.  The house is painted in authentic Victorian-era paint colors that highlight the home’s architecture.