Darwin D. Martin Photograph Collection

Darwin D. Martin Photo Collection at the University at Buffalo

This collection consists of photographs of the Darwin D. Martin family of Buffalo, NY, and photographs of homes designed by Frank Lloyd Wright for the Martins: the Darwin D. Martin House Complex in Buffalo and Graycliff in Derby, NY. The Darwin D. Martin Photograph Collection forms part of the Frank Lloyd Wright/Darwin D. Martin Collection in the University Archives and Special Collections and contains Martin family papers, correspondence between Wright and Martin, and architectural drawings. The images offer a representative sample of several people and structures that helped transform and define Buffalo as a nationally recognized industrial center in the late 19th century into the early 20th century.

Buffalo, NY, from the end of the Civil War to the Great Depression, is perhaps one of the best representations of a region exhibiting the supreme tensions existing in America’s growing industrial urban areas: tensions between the push for modern advancement and the pull of traditional agrarian ideals of earlier American lifestyles. The life and times of the Darwin D. Martin family and their associates, including personalities such as Frank Lloyd Wright, present a microcosm of this contrast in American culture moving into the 20th century.

Darwin Denice Martin was born in 1865 in Madison County, NY, to Hiram Martin and Anna Eliza McMannis. Darwin Martin’s mother died when he was just six years old. His father was a farmer who spent time in Iowa and Nebraska before finally settling in Buffalo in 1878. At the end of the Civil War, Buffalo was on its way to becoming a boom city. The railroads, as well as the Erie Canal, contributed to establishing the area as a central point in the exchange of raw materials coming from the west and heading to eastern factories and of finished products from those factories in the east heading out to consumers in the west. Buffalo itself was also a great manufacturing center along with the rail and shipping industries for transporting the enormo