Frank H. Goodyear - Table of Contents

Frank H. Goodyear Family in Buffalo
Buffalo, NY

Frank Henry Goodyear

Josephine Looney

Grace

Josephine

Florence

Frank Henry, Jr.

Edward T. Dunn, The Goodyear Family

Robert Holder, The Enterprising Goodyear


Frank Henry Goodyear  (PHOTO)
(1849-1907)

1871  - Married Josephine Looney, daughter of Robert Looney. As young man, Frank had worked for  Robert Looney, who ran a farm, sawmill, general store, and feed and grain business and also owned vast timberlands in Pennsylvania. Frank had arranged that Josephine's share in her father's estate should be timberlands.

1872  - To Buffalo

1887  - Formed lumber company with his brother, Charles

1901 -- Acquired large tract of white pine in Louisiana. The town was christened Bogalusa and built with shops, offices, a bank, and separate black and white residential sections, all centered on a sawmill - the largest sawmill in the world.

1902  -  The two brothers formed the Buffalo & Susquehanna Iron Company to operate blast furnaces south of Buffalo on Lake Erie. Two freighters, the Frank H. Goodyear and the S. M. Clement, were built to carry ore from the company's mines in Minnesota and Michigan down to Buffalo.

1906  - Built Buffalo & Susquehanna Railroad to transport their lumber.
1906  - #672 Delaware Avenue, NW corner at Summer St., finished.  House cost $500, 000 ($8,715,000 in 1997 dollars) to build.

1907  - Frank died of Bright's disease shortly after moving into his new home at #672 Delaware.

Director of Marine National Bank

Frank Henry Goodyear (1849-1907) was the son of a country doctor, Bradley Goodyear, and passed his boyhood in Holland and other small towns in the vicinity of East Aurora, New York. He came to Buffalo in 1872 at the age of 23.

In 1887, Goodyear and his brother, Charles Waterhouse, formed the lumber company and kindred organizations that became quite prominent in the business world.

The firm name became F. H. & C. W. Goodyear, and almost immediately their operations became so extensive that it was necessary for both to give their undivided attention to them. They were pioneers in the construction of standard built and equipped railroads for logging operations, penetrating the timber tracts of Pennsylvania, which had, up until that time, been considered well-nigh inaccessible to railroads.

From this beginning grew the Buffalo & Susquehanna Railroad, a line that has opened up, and given complete transportation facilities to, a section that heretofore had suffered keenly from the lack of them. Now the line became a permanent freight and passenger line, with three hundred and fifty miles of first-class standard-gauge track and roadbed, and would increase the mileage one hundred miles. The annual output of their holdings amounted to 200,000,000 feet of hemlock and nearly as much in hardwood, which was shipped over their own railroad, the Buffalo & Susquehanna.

See The Lackawanna Steel Company and the Buffalo and Susquehanna Iron Company for Goodyear's involvement with the Buffalo and Susquehanna Iron Company.

Goodyear was president of

  • the Buffalo & Susquehanna Railroad,
  • the steamship company and iron company of the same name, and
  • the New Orleans Great Northern Railroad,

He was a partner in the Goodyear Lumber Company, and a director of the U.S. Leather Co. and the Marine National Bank.

He made valuable donations to parks of Buffalo and a project dear to his heart was a zoo for this city, the start of which he wished to finance His offer was declined by our city fathers of the 1890s.

The name of Mrs. Goodyear (the former Josephine Looney) is perpetuated by the Josephine Goodyear Convalescent Home, Williamsville, the buildings of which were her gift to convalescent children of Western New York.

Mr. Goodyear died in 1907, his wife, eight years later. They were the parents of three daughters and a son.

Goodyear lived at a mansion (see photo above) on Delaware and Summer which was
demolished in 1938 and is now the site of the Red Cross parking lot. The house cost $500, 000 ($8,715,000 in 1997 dollars) to build.

A former residence was at 237 North St., which was also later (1901-1912) owned by John D. Larkin before he moved to "Larkland" in 1912.

Josephine Looney - wife of Frank Henry Goodyear
1851(?)-1915

Addresses:
Children:
  •  Grace.  Born 1872.

  •  Josephine. 1874-1904. 

  •  Florence.  Died 1958.

  •  Frank Henry Goodyear, Jr.  1891-
Grace
Born 1872.

Married Ganson Depew,  a vice president of the Buffalo & Susquehanna Iron Company, and the personal assistant of his father-in-law Frank Henry "F.H." Goodyear.
Josephine
1874-1904. 

Married George M. Sicard (born 1872) whose uncle, George J. Sicard, was a partner of Frank's brother Charles in Bissell, Sicard & Goodyear. After marriage he went to work for Frank's lumber and railroad companies, but quit after 1904 when his wife died.
Florence
Died  1958
1902   - Married George Olds Wagner
Frank Henry, Jr.
1891-

1907  - #672 Delaware (PHOTO) built, when Frank Jr was 16 years old.

1915  - Married Dorothy Virginia Knox, daughter of Seymour H. and Grace Knox I.
 
1915  - Frank Jr.'s mother died and left her house at
#672 Delaware Avenue, NW corner at Summer St., to him.  When married, he and Dorothy lived there. 

Also in 1915, Dorothy's father died, and her mother decided to buy the house at #806 (now #800) which was four doors away from her newly married daughter's house.  Mrs. Knox demolished the house and built a new house which was finished in 1918.

(The Goodyear and Knox mausoleums in Forest Lawn Cemetery are next to each other.)



The text below is an excerpt from
Buffalo's Delaware Avenue: Mansions and Families

By Edward T. Dunn
Pub. by
Canisius College Press, 2003, pp. 360-366

Frank and Charles Goodyear: Their progenitor was Dr. Jabez Bradley Goodyear, born in 1816, in Sempronius, New York. He dropped the Jabez at the time of his marriage. His first occupation was that of tailor. In his mid-twenties, he spent two years traveling through the South, supporting himself by his trade before returning to New York where he was induced by his uncle, Dr. Miles Goodyear, president of the Cortland County, Medical Society, to start practicing medicine as early as 1843. Jabez graduated from Geneva Medical College in 1845 and married Esther Permelia Kinne.

She had been born in Cortland in 1822 of New England stock, including an ancestor, who, in the best tradition of earnest Puritans, had come to America via Leyden, Holland, in 1635.

They lived in Virgil but moved to a farm near Cortland where there two sons were born, Charles Waterhouse in 1846 and Frank Henry in 1849.

Frank Goodyear

Frank was a standard nineteenth century tycoon. Soon after his birth, his family moved to Holland in Erie County. As a boy he worked at Root & Keating's tannery as did brother Charles. Frank attended the district school and East Aurora Academy when his father was practicing medicine there. Later Frank taught in the district school. He then went to Looneyville in Alden as a bookkeeper for Robert Looney, a native of the Island of Man, who ran a farm, sawmill, general store, and feed and grain business and also owned vast timberlands in Pennsylvania.

In 1871 Frank married the boss's daughter, twenty-year old Josephine. Next year her father died. Frank had already moved to Buffalo where he set up a coal and lumber business with help from the ubiquitous Elbridge Spaulding.

Frank had arranged that Josephine's share in her father's estate should be timberlands. He threw himself into the lumber business, setting up several mills in his timberlands along the Western New York & Pennsylvania to Buffalo.

In 1884 he bought more land in Potter County and built a sawmill at a town he renamed Austin, which became headquarters of his empire. He initiated temporary railroads, called tramways, to carry logs to his mills instead of floating them down on streams. His frantic pace brought on a nervous breakdown, during which he induced Charles to form E H. & C. W Goodyear and took a European rest cure. The story of their joint activities is that of two brothers who did not get along.

The Achilles heel of the Goodyear empire was Frank's decision to expand the railroads servicing his sawmills into an interstate road, the Buffalo & Susquehanna, to link his mills and the coal mines in western Pennsylvania with the Buffalo &Susquehanna Iron Company which the Goodyears had formed in 1902 to operate blast furnaces south of Buffalo on Lake Erie. Two freighters, the Frank H. Goodyear and the S. M. Clement, were built to carry ore from the company's mines in Minnesota and Michigan down to Buffalo. This was vertical integration, but it duplicated existing services with an inefficient railroad:

In 1906 the Goodyears built the Buffalo & Susquehanna Railroad from Wellsville to Buffalo, nearly 90 miles. A year later Frank Goodyear died; his brother Charles died in 1911, and the Goodyear empire began to fall apart. The expense of constructing the line to Buffalo began to cause financial difficulty, and the road laid aside plans to extend its line to Pittsburgh and relocate its line to eliminate the four switchbacks over the mountains between Galeton and Wharton. The Buffalo & Susquehanna Railway leased the Buffalo & Susquehanna Railroad, but that didn't forestall receivership. After a brief period of operation as the Wellsville & Buffalo, the Buffalo extension was scrapped in 1916.

More successful were Frank's ventures in Louisiana where in 1901 he acquired a large tract of white pine. Next year the Great Southern Lumber Company was formed with Frank as president and Charles vice-president. They had invested $9 million in 300,000 acres in Louisiana and Mississippi along the Pearl River. In 1905 a town site was selected along the Bogue Lusa Creek, a tributary of the Pearl, and a town christened Bogalusa was built with shops, offices, a bank, and separate black and white residential sections, all centered on a sawmill. The ninety mile New Orleans Great Northern Railroad was created to connect Bogalusa with the national network.

Frank died of Bright's disease in 1907, shortly after moving into his new home at #672 Delaware. He had not gotten much physical exercise and though only five feet eight, he weighed 220 pounds, a victim of overeating. His absorbing interest was business and he had a keen business sense. His estate was worth $10,000,000. The family chronicler wrote:

He had a quick, eager, incisive mind and was irascibly impatient with the plodder ... He was forever making notes and even at a formal dinner there was a pad and pencil beside his place. Often he could not read the notes he had made ... He was never really happy. The only thing he enjoyed was success that needed constant increase and he died looking failure in the face, the failure of his pet project, the Buffalo and Susquehanna Railway. He was the head of every enterprise with which he was connected, all of them, but the one, greatly successful. He told me that if a man was successful in six out of ten enterprises he was himself a success and seven out of ten made him an extraordinary success, but when it came to his own case he needed ten out of ten.

Shortly after his death the panic of 1907 struck. Town and railroad building stopped. The sawmill had been completed, but did not go into operation until late 1908. But though the effects panic lingered, the decision to start up proved sound. It was the largest sawmill in the world.

Frank's money-making left him little time for other activities. President Cleveland appointed him in 1886 to examine federal land granted to the Northern Pacific Railroad. He was Park Commissioner of Buffalo, president of the Buffalo Club in 1903, and director of three local concerns: Marine Bank, Rogers Brown Iron Company, and United States Leather, a customer for the bark from his sawmills. His clubs were the Lawyers' and Manhattan clubs of New York, the Buffalo, Country, Ellicott, Falconwood, and Liberal clubs of Buffalo, and the Jekyll Club of Jekyll Island, Georgia.

762 Delaware

Frank's mansion at 762 Delaware, modeled on a house on the Champs-Elysees in Paris, was completed in 1906. By then his three daughters, Grace who married Ganson Depew, Josephine who married George M. Sicard, and Florence who married George 0. Wagner, had left home.

Frank had resided briefly at #443 Delaware when he came to Buffalo in 1872. Thereafter he lived in succession at #652 Main [across the street from the Pierce Building], #671 Main [across the street from the Greyhound Bus Terminal], and #267 North, the Bemis House.

Family

His wife Josephine, a retiring soul, died at sixty-four in October 1915 of the effects of a heart attack at the Exchange Street Station. She was remembered as the benefactress of the convalescent home for children named after her in Williamsville.

Grace, the eldest of Frank and Josephine's children, had been born in 1872. In 1894 she married Ganson Depew who had been born in 1862 and was everybody's choice for Mr. Nice Guy. He was the nephew of Chauncey Depew, president of the New York Central and Senator from New York 1900-1911. Admitted to the bar in 1887, Ganson deserted the law to work for his father-in-law and became manager of Goodyear Lumber, vice-president of Buffalo & Susquehanna Coal, and assistant to the president of the Buffalo & Susquehanna Railway.

Frank Goodyear's second daughter, Josephine, born in 1874, married George Montgomery Sicard in 1900. The Sicards came from Utica where George was born in 1872. His uncle, George J. Sicard, was a partner of Cleveland, Bissell & Sicard, and later of Frank's brother Charles in Bissell, Sicard & Goodyear. George Sicard attended Utica Academy, graduated from Yale in 1894, received his law degree from N.Y.U. in 1895, and came to Buffalo where he began practice with Moot, Sprague & Brownell. After marriage he went to work for Frank's lumber and railroad companies. Josephine, his wife, died 1904. Soon afterwards Sicard, who had not gotten along with his father-in-law, resigned from his companies and moved to Pelham Manor where he lived the last thirty years of his life.

Florence, Frank Goodyear's third daughter, attended Saint Margaret's School in Buffalo and finishing school in New York. Back in Buffalo she married in 1902 George Olds Wagner ....



The text below is an excerpt (page 4) from

The Enterprising Goodyears
By Robert Holder
(online August 2013)

The name of Goodyear looms large in the history of lumber on the Niagara Frontier. The enterprises of Frank H. and Charles W. Good-year brought them personal profit and benefitted the community in many ways.

While other lumber dealers passed by good forests that were far from water transportation, Frank H. Goodyear invested heavily in isolated forest holdings. He built his own sawmills. Then he promptly connected them with shipping centers, by laying out his own railroads to reach the busy mills. In 1885 he bought 13,000 acres of woodland in Potter County, Pennsylvania. The railroad he built for this venture later became part of the Buffalo and Susquehanna Railroad which gave Buffalo easy access to coal as well as to timber .

In 1887 Frank entered into partnership with his brother, Charles, and by 1902 the Goodyear Lumber Company was incorporated. Typical of the advanced thinking of the Goodyears was the building of a sawmill of steel - the first of its kind. The output of this mill was expected to exceedthat of any other sawmill in the world at that time.

The Goodyear brothers' interests included the Buffalo and Susquehanna Coal and Coke Company, the Buffalo and Susquehanna steam-ship Company, the Great Southern Lumber Company, and the Marine National Bank of Buffalo, of which both brothers were directors.

Charles W. and Frank H. Goodyear

By C. W. Goodyear

Excerpts from  Bogalusa Story, pp. 46-60 

CHARLES Waterhouse Goodyear was fifty-six and Frank Henry Goodyear was fifty-two when the brothers invested nine million dollars in their fifteen-million-dollar venture in Louisiana and Mississippi. Earnings accumulated from lumber and coal enterprises in Pennsylvania provided the necessary funds.

But the Great Southern Lumber Company, from its beginning to its end years later, was essentially a Goodyear family enterprise.
   
Like many of their contemporaries of comparable industrial achievement and stature, the two brothers who founded this fabulous lumber empire started life with meager beginnings. They were born in a rural settlement near Cortland, New York. Their father, Bradley Goodyear, was a country doctor. A poignant memory that never left them was the sound of sleigh bells waking them in the darkness of a winter's night as their father hurried to an expectant mother or drove for miles in a blizzard to prescribe a hot mustard foot bath for a hysterical patient who feared that death was imminent.

   
Practicing his profession among families of modest means, often without compensation at all, Dr. Goodyear never was able financially to provide his sons with educational advantages beyond those which were available in the public schools. The white one-room rural schoolhouse where they obtained their elementary education was typical of hundreds of others ...
  
Both of the Goodyear boys inherited a few traits in common from their mother, but otherwise their characters, personalities, and appearances were completely unlike. Like their mother, both were ambitious to succeed, impulsive with quick tempers, generous with their worldly goods and tolerant of the frailties of others. Unlike their father, the brothers were stockily built. A later tendency toward obesity was allowed to take its course in unrestrained gastronomy and with as little exercise as possible. Athletics did not become popular until late in their lives. Among women of their day, voluptuous bosoms and well-rounded buttocks were considered necessities of pulchritude. Among men, a protruding stomach was a mark of enviable distinction. At middle age, both of the brothers weighed well over 200 pounds.

   
The urge to do great things could not long be satisfied in their native New York State village. Frank was the first to leave home. Still in his teens, he had an insatiable desire to make money that was to stay with him all the years of his life. Coupled with that consuming ambition were abundant energy and keen business sense. With his worldly possessions packed in a small satchel and $100 borrowed from his father, young Frank boarded the train for Looneyville on the outskirts of Buffalo. It was here that he began what was to be a spectacular business career, as a $35 a month employee of Robert Looney, founder of the town which honored his name.


The urge to search out greater opportunities soon made itself felt. In 1872, Frank Goodyear and his young wife moved to Buffalo. Frank was only twenty-two, but, financed by Elbridge Gerry Spaulding, a leading citizen of Buffalo who was nationally known as the "Father of Greenbacks," he set up a lumber-and-coal business of his own. Mr. Spaulding must have been much impressed with Frank's business acumen, for generosity was not one of the old gentleman's characteristics. The wealthy Mr. Spaulding made a practice of walking to his office to save the five-cent fare in a horse-drawn street car, and it was his custom to read the penny newspaper as it lay on the newsstand. The fact that Frank sold Mr. Spaulding the idea of financing a business scheme was evidence of a talent that was to make him an outstanding industrialist of his time.
   
In a few years, Frank Goodyear liquidated his indebtedness and built up a lumber-and-coal business that provided capital for investing in even larger and more profitable enterprises. By this time he knew the lumber business was to be his life, and the idea appealed to him. He was impatient to expand his interests; he felt bridled and restrained. When finally he heard that a large tract of virgin hemlock timber in Potter County, Pennsylvania, might be had at a reasonable price, he could hardly wait to see it. He took the first train to Keating Summit, a flag station on the very edge of the timberlands.

   
Alone he climbed, almost ran, to the top of a mountain, where his eyes scanned thousands of acres of hemlock trees that had scarcely known the stroke of a woodsman's ax. He looked at it longingly for hours and when he came back down the mountain, his decision was made. In a few years he owned and operated fifteen sawmills in northern Pennsylvania. He made their management a one-man job at which he worked night and day. And at the age of thirty-seven, he broke under the strain of his own intense nervous energy. He was stopped for the first time in his life, but not for long.

Charles Goodyear was cut from a different cloth, of a more versatile pattern. There was ambition, but it was less compelling than that which possessed his brother Frank. A professional career rather than business success appealed to him as a young man. During his summers, as a youth, he worked on a farm and in a tannery to pay for an education in the academies at Wyoming, Cortland, and East Aurora in western New York. He was a talented orator and was one of the finest debaters in the schools he attended. For awhile he taught school before he, too, went to Buffalo to study law.

In 1871, when he was twenty-six years old, he was admitted to the bar in New York State and hung out his own shingle. From the start of his career he attracted attention as a young lawyer, and later succeeded Grover Cleveland as a senior partner in Buffalo's leading law firm when Cleveland gave up his practice to enter politics. With his brilliant personality, distinguished physical appearance, and oratorical ability it was not surprising that Charles Goodyear, too, should dabble in politics.

In 1876, he was appointed Assistant District Attorney in Erie County. Later he was District Attorney. After one important and sensational trial, a Buffalo newspaper commented: "No case that has been before the courts in many a day has been so cleverly handled as by Mr. Charles W. Goodyear."

Public life was beginning to attract Charles Goodyear more and more. His close friendship with Grover Cleveland also was an incentive to a growing interest in politics. In 1882, he was elected County Chairman of the Democratic Committee. In this first position of political leadership, he won his spurs. He played an important role in the nomination and the election of Grover Cleveland as Governor of New York State. 

Years later, a boom was started for the candidacy of Charles Goodyear in the gubernatorial campaign of 1904. He declined at the outset, but his political backers were persistent and a "Goodyear for Governor" movement gained momentum.

The position of Ella's husband [Charles] in the community [Buffalo] was well established and he was a successful, prominent lawyer. But he was beginning to realize that the legal profession never would assure him more than a comfortable living, and Charles Goodyear needed more than that. 

In 1887, Charles became his brother's partner in the already established lumber business. Frank again had cracked under the strain of excessive work and had gone to Europe. Charles took over, assuming the responsibility of running a large lumber enterprise. As a lawyer he frequently had been associated with the affairs of corporations, so that he was not long adjusting himself to the problems attached to his new vocation. He spent most of his time in Pennsylvania, actively managing the business from the logging of timber to the final processing of lumber.

ALL during the Gay Nineties, Charles and Frank rode on the crest of the wave. They were approaching middle age. Their business was running smoothly and profitably. Frank had a million dollars on deposit in the bank and a fortune besides in stocks and bonds, but his ambition to make still more money never lessened until the last year of his life. Already he had dreamed of another lumber operation when the supply of hemlock timber in Pennsylvania was exhausted. He knew there were almost boundless tracts of virgin yellow pine in the Deep South. The urge to build the largest sawmill in the world grew as Frank studied the glowing reports of timber cruisers in Louisiana and Mississippi.

The home of Charles and Ella was only a short distance from Frank's [Charles's brother] elaborate house and it [Charles & Ella's house] was the scene of many brilliant social affairs and family gatherings. In later years, it was not unusual for twenty-five children and grandchildren to sit down together at a Sunday or holiday dinner. A large garden party on the well-manicured lawn at the rear of the house became an annual summer event.

Early in the new century, Charles and Frank Goodyear saw the beginning of the end of their Pennsylvania lumber business. Liquidation was inevitable. What to do with their money became a new problem for the Goodyear brothers. A meager return of 6 per cent from gilt-edge corporate bonds or 4 per cent on bank deposits satisfied neither of them. They found the solution to their dilemma in the timberlands of the Deep South. They decided to put a large part of their eggs in one basket and then watch the basket. Both had seen hard times come and go. They had seen the price of lumber dip below the cost of manufacture, but they had never known of a recession in the market value of merchantable trees. Another investment in timber ready to be manufactured into lumber seemed to them to be prudent foresight. And they were right.



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