Warren Hull House
Near Buffalo, New York
Standing just east of Buffalo in what is now the town of Lancaster, the Warren Hull House is one of the oldest surviving Federal-style houses in western New York. It was built around eighteen ten, when this stretch of Erie County was still raw frontier, only a few years after the Holland Land Company finished surveying the region and opening it to settlement. Warren Hull arrived as one of the early buyers, part of the wave of New England migrants who followed the Genesee Turnpike west after the Revolutionary War.
The house he built reflects the Federal style they brought with them, five-bay symmetry, a center entry, restrained ornamentation lifted from the pattern books of Asher Benjamin. It predates the Erie Canal by fifteen years and survived the transformation of the surrounding landscape from frontier farm to Buffalo suburb. Today it stands on the National Register of Historic Places as a quiet marker of the earliest generation of American settlement in western New York.
