"All that a genteel family need require": the Church family's frontier experience at Belvidere, Allegany County, New York
Date
2000
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Publisher
University of Delaware
Abstract
Images of crude log cabins and primitive living conditions dominate Americans’ inherited understanding of life on the western frontier. The survival of Belvidere, a grand neoclassical-style stone and brick mansion built on the western New York frontier in 1808 therefore comes as surprise. Belvidere’s atypicality begs interpretation. Who built this home, and why? Were its occupants able to live the genteel lifestyle that Belvidere was designed for, despite its frontier location? ☐ Using Belvidere’s surviving material evidence in conjunction with documentary sources, this thesis explores the ideals and experience of the Church family, who built and lived at Belvidere for over eighty years. I trace the Churches’ elite family background, the circumstances behind Philip Church’s acquisition of the 100,000-acre tract of land in western New York where he built Belvidere, and his settlement tactics. I conclude that Belvidere was built both to serve as a sufficiently genteel home for a wealthy, fashionable family asserting their position of power within the community, and as an advertisement to help Church sell his land to wealthy prospective settlers. ☐ In constructing an expensive home in the latest transatlantic style on the frontier, the Churches expressed their faith in their ability to maintain a comfortable, elite lifestyle despite their frontier location. The Churches were able to import the necessary material goods and furnishings to pursue this ideal, defying traditional notions that fashionable consumer goods were not available on the frontier in early years. Their project to recreate the elite urban lifestyle they were accustomed to before moving to Allegany County ultimately failed though because they were unable to attract genteel people to settle there. Because they refused to socialize with people they felt were beneath them, the Church family suffered from loneliness in their remote home. Owning expensive and fashionable goods had no purpose when the “right” people did not see and appreciate them.