So, who was Edward Howard Hutchinson? If that name sounds familiar, there are many reasons. 

• Take the #20-Elmwood bus downtown and you will pass the imposing brick structure that is Hutchinson Central Technical High School.
• Walk down Linwood Avenue near West Utica and you may come across what appears to be an old stone plinth semi-buried in the grass edging the sidewalk. Could those partially obscured letters possibly spell “Hutchinson”?
• Drive north down Main Street in Williamsville, just past South Cayuga, and you can’t miss the Williamsville Fire Department/Hutchinson Hose Co.
• And what is the name of that road in North Buffalo that runs between Midway Avenue, near Bailey, to Clarence Avenue?

These are just a few of many Hutchinson family namesakes.  Let’s explore this intriguing chapter in Buffalo history…

John Hutchinson, Edward’s grandfather, was a leading tanner who operated his business on the east side of Ellicott Creek. He succeeded Jonas Williams, a mill owner for whom Williamsville is named, as postmaster, and was the first chief of the Village of Williamsville fire department (an interest he would pass on to his son and grandson). This elder Hutchinson married Harriett Martin in 1818. Their son, John Martin Hutchinson, was born in 1820 in Williamsville.

In 1839, John Martin Hutchinson moved to Buffalo, where he plied his trade as a wholesaler of leather goods manufactured in the family’s Williamsville tannery. In January 1851, he married Eunice Alzina Howard. Their son, Edward Howard Hutchinson, was born March 7, 1852, in Buffalo. Tragically, Edward’s mother died five days later. 

After his wife’s death, John Martin Hutchinson and his son moved into the home of Eunice’s sister, Sally M. Howard, who was married to James D. Sheppard—the uncle in the aforementioned bank visit. The Sheppard house, at 175 West Chippewa, was where young Edward’s uncle James would help launch his nephew’s later financial success.

Sheppard left his own mark on Western New York’s cultural and commercial history.  He was a musician from England who emigrated to Buffalo.  He is credited with bringing the first piano here, shipped to him from New York via the Erie Canal.   He opened a music store that eventually evolved into Denton, Cottier & Daniels.   A clever entrepreneur himself, he clearly saw something in his nephew early on.  Perhaps a precocious curiosity, intelligence, a knack for business?  Somehow, the fire was lit, and little Edward would eventually become a well-known civic leader, benefactor, philanthropist, presumptive and perennially promoted mayoral candidate (though he always refused to run), friend of Grover Cleveland, world traveler, and more, active to the end of his nearly 86 years.  

Perhaps the most prominent concrete—brick, actually—iteration of the Hutchinson legacy is the Buffalo public educational institution that bears his name, Hutchinson Central Technical High School, or Hutch-Tech.  Located on South Elmwood Avenue between West Chippewa and Johnson Park, it is situated where Hutchinson and his wife, Jeanie Blanche Ganson, whom he married in 1872, made their home for a time.  The property had also included the Sheppard home, where a baby and his bereaved father found shelter.   In 1909, the Hutchinsons gave their homestead land to the city for construction of a sorely needed new school.  Work started in March 1913; the building was completed for use by the fall term in 1914.

In 1907, according to an online history of the Williamsville Fire Department, voters authorized construction of a new facility for the fire company.   That fall, the Amherst Bee reported on “A Magnificent Gift”: Edward H. Hutchinson, grandson of the first fire chief of Williamsville, had donated a parcel of land along the south side of Main Street.   The ever-thoughtful benefactor even donated $100 (about $3,177 today) to defray the cost of the organization’s party heralding the advent of 1908.  When the fire company held its annual meeting on January 14, 1908, they voted unanimously to accept a new designation: The Hutchinson Hose Company.  The familiar name is still emblazoned on the latest modern iteration of this storied fire protection company, still with a location on Williamsville’s Main Street.

As much as philanthropy was bred into Edward Hutchinson, so was a devotion to civic engagement.  Again, following in the footsteps of his father, who died in 1886, he took on positions held by his father, including a directorship at Marine Bank, and as a commissioner of the Buffalo Fire Department.    Among numerous charitable and cultural affiliations, he also honored his patrimony as 10th Ward alderman, and president of the Board of Trustees for the Buffalo City Cemetery (Forest Lawn), wherein one can view the Hutchinson family gravesite, a starkly sedate memorial for such an accomplished clan.

Hutchinson never knew his mother, Eunice Alzina Howard Hutchinson, who died when he was five days old. Raised by an aunt and his father, he was of a breed that seems nearly extinct in our fractious modern times:  He was kindhearted and adhered to a strict personal code of ethics.  He thanked his father for that, admitting in an interview published late in his life:

I thought he [my father] was unreasonably strict…there was a time at about the age of 16…when I, like most boys, thought I knew everything and he nothing.  But around 23 or 24 I began to realize that he did know a few things, and at 35 I decided he knew a lot, and much more than I did.  Now I know no man ever had a finer father than I.

Ambition, integrity, persistence, and understanding of the pursuit in question—these are the four qualities necessary for success, as Hutchinson once told a reporter.  There is also the small matter of luck—he had the good fortune to be born into a well-to-do family.  In 1870, his father set him up in business, with L.W. Drake & Company, a pork packer and provisions dealer.  When their plant was destroyed by fire in 1875, Hutchinson moved on.  

He knew how to answer when opportunity knocked. In 1882, he partnered with pharmacist George I. Thurstone (also identified, in at least one newspaper account of the Hutchinson business enterprises, as George C. Thurston), in what was then an era of thriving patent drug/drugstore businesses.   Hutchinson was in charge of the firm’s financial affairs, soon proving himself an aggressive businessman. He had the brilliant idea of advertising their wares in newspapers.  Theirs was the first full-page newspaper ad ever secured by a single local firm, according to one account.  It cost them $100.

Ever the clever entrepreneur, he even had a printing plant built.  It was the first of many building projects in the still-churning cauldron of downtown Buffalo development.  By 1887, he had expanded his real estate holdings to include the Hutchinson, a block of four stores and 12 apartments, at 869 Main St., a streetscape soon mirrored by another project, the Strathmore, at Main and Carlton.  

In 1889, in a prime spot across from County Hall, the Hutchinson Office Building was erected on West Eagle Street.   That building later housed the University of Buffalo Law School—a November 30, 1961, newspaper account of a three-alarm fire at 71-73 West Eagle St. noted the cancellation of law school classes, which had been held on the west side of the structure.

Tending to his real estate holdings and his prominent roles in banking were the primary occupations of Edward H. Hutchinson at this time, and for the rest of his life.   He was elected vice president of the old Peoples Bank of Buffalo in 1913.  He had succeeded his father as a director of the Marine Midland Bank (now part of Key Bank).  In 1928, he was serving as honorary chairman of the board of the Manufacturers and Traders Trust Company (today, M&T Bank).

Until very near his death, newspapers reported that the legendary civic and business leader continued his daily visits to his office in the Erie County Savings Bank, of which he was a director.

In politics, he long resisted the blandishments of those who urged him, at various times, to run for mayor of Buffalo, the office held by Grover Cleveland, his close friend and, later, U.S. president.  Hutchinson did hold office, serving on the Board of Aldermen, representing the old 10th Ward.  He was a lifelong Democrat, converting his father, according to one published interview, in a twist on the “like father, like son” trajectory of his life.

As noted in the biography written by Charles Edwin Knowles, Edward H. Hutchinson was interested in politics from a young age.  “Father was an old-line Whig,” he said.   “I remember as well as if it had been yesterday when Stephen A. Douglas spoke in this city down on the Terrace in 1860.  I was about eight years old then. …Well, Douglas won me over and I…got a Douglas streamer and put it on my pole.  Father wanted to know what was up and I told him I had turned Democrat.  He went over to the Democracy after that campaign and he was always a Democrat.”

At the time, Douglas served in the U.S. Senate, representing Illinois. He supported the Compromise of 1850, which set the precedent of state sovereignty to decide the issue of slavery and delayed the South’s secession by a decade. In 1860, his campaign for the U.S. presidency was defeated by Republican Abraham Lincoln.

Hutchinson suffered a stroke on February 17, 1938, and died nine days later. He was eulogized as “Buffalo’s First Citizen.” Three years later, the Buffalo Courier-Express noted that the City of Buffalo was honoring its Hutchinson: “Hutchinson Avenue Honors Buffalo Banker’s Memory.” The roadway currently runs through North Buffalo’s LaSalle neighborhood, between Midway Avenue near Bailey to Clarence Avenue.

Who was Edward H. Hutchinson? He was a successful businessman.

A banker.

A builder.

A benefactor. 

The next time you see the name, you’ll remember the civic leader from a long-gone era.