Robert Livingston Fryer - Table of Contents

Robert Livingston Fryer

By Edward T. Dunn
Reprinted from
Buffalo's Delaware Avenue: Mansions and Families
.
Pub. by
Canisius College Press, 2003, pp. 415-416

... Robert Livingston Fryer, great grandson of Chancellor Robert Livingston (1746-1813), member of the Continental Congress, prominent on the committee which drafted New York's constitution, and minister to France who grasped the opportunity of securing Louisiana from Napoleon. Livingston was also an agriculturalist and a backer of Robert Fulton of Clermont fame.

Robert Fryer was born in Albany in 1848, son of William and Margaretta Livingston Fryer, and had to make his own way in the world. He became a partner in the lumber business with William Gratwick, later of #414 and still later #776 Delaware. The company owned vast timberlands in Louisiana and Michigan and yards in North Tonawanda.

In 1882 Fryer married Melissa Dodge Pratt, daughter of Pascal P Pratt, and the Fryers moved to Albany where Robert was still in business. Two years later they transferred to Buffalo. Fryer became vice-president of M&T in 1884 when his father-in-law, who in 1856 had been a founder and vice-president, became president and his son-in-law succeeded him as vice-president. When Pratt retired in 1901, Fryer became president.

He was also president of Fidelity Trust of which Pratt had also been a founder and which was to be merged with M&T in 1925 to form the M&T Trust.

Fryer was a director of the Pennsylvania Railroad, the I.R.C., the Commercial Bank of Albany, vice-president of Buffalo Gas, and a warden of Trinity

He was active in the Sons of the American Revolution, the Society of Colonial Wars, the Holland Society of New York, the Metropolitan and Bankers' clubs of New York, and the Fort Orange Club of Albany. Locally he belonged to the Buffalo, Saturn, Country, and Ellicott clubs.

His only sister was the wife of Daniel Manning of Albany, Cleveland's Secretary of the Treasury in 1885.

Fryer died in 1915 at sixty-seven.

Illustration from Darci's Place of Origins


Son Livingston

His widow, a son Livingston, his wife Catherine Appleton, and two more of his sons lived at #685 Delaware until Melissa's death in 1932 at seventy-eight. After his mother's death, Livingston and family remained in the mansion until it was sold for a medical center in 1948.

He had graduated from Harvard in 1910, served during World War I in the Norton-Harjes Ambulance Corps in France, and was commissioned an artillery officer. For a time he was director of the Albright Art Gallery, but he and his wife spent much of their time at their chateau at Arapajon, near Paris. For having given land to that village for a school, he was elected to the Legion of Honor.

He belonged to the usual clubs in Buffalo and to the Racquet & Tennis, Union League, Polo, and Travelers clubs in New York as well as in the Cercle Inter Allies. He died in Buffalo in 1960 at seventy-seven.


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