English: The Seymour Knox House, 414 Porter Avenue at Plymouth Avenue, Buffalo, New York, May 2020. The work of notable local architect Milton Beebe, the resplendent Queen Anne design of this beautiful
c. 1890 house includes intricate plaster ornamentation in the tympanum of its large frontal gable, a narrow but handsome turret on the right with a steeply-pitched, finial-topped conical roof, and a band of wooden shingles accentuating the façade between the first and second stories. 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. This was the first house Knox lived in after his move back to Buffalo; they moved
c. 1894 to an
only slightly smaller Queen Anne house at 467 Linwood Avenue, and from there in 1904 to an
Italian Renaissance-style residence on Delaware Avenue. The house has since been subdivided into apartments.