The decade following Buffalo’s Niagara-Falls-powered Pan American Exposition of 1901 saw, like harbingers of the energy-hungry century to come, an auto factory [Pierce-Arrow] rise on a portion of the exposition grounds and a Pennsylvania-born oilman named Louis C. Wilson move to the heart of Frederick Law Olmsted’s parkway system.

At 148 Soldiers Place Charles F. Warner, best known for developing Buffalo’s Central Park neighborhood, built for Wilson and his wife an American Renaissance mansion of buff brick with a central hipped dormer, ornate rafter tails, orthogonally bracketed and keystoned terra cotta lintels and an offset tetrastyle Doric portico.

The house’s mid- century owner, Whitworth Ferguson, a director of the Erie-Lackawanna Railroad and founder of the Ferguson Electrical Construction Co., imagined a future of possibilities for American energy production, bringing nuclear research to UB, building a windmill atop his firm’s roof and, coincidentally, rewiring the house that oil built.