File:James Youngs House, Amherst, New York - 20200709.jpg

English: The James Youngs House, 251 Youngs Road, Amherst, New York, July 2020. One of only a few stone farmhouses remaining from the early period of the town's history - and one of even fewer that were built using locally quarried limestone sourced from the nearby Onondaga Escarpment - the Youngs House was built some time between 1830 and 1855 and exemplifies the vernacular (though in this case clearly Greek Revival-influenced) farmhouse architecture of the era, with a rough-textured façade of uncoursed masonry contrasting with smoother cut-stone lintels crowning the windows. The front gable once contained a round-arched window, traces of which are still visible in the masonry. The house is located on what was once the nearly 184-acre plot owned by James S. Youngs (1777-1861), a Connecticut native who arrived in Western New York in the first decade of the 19th century and probably bought the land directly from the Holland Land Company, which held title to most of the state west of the Genesee River at the time; after his death, the house passed into the hands of his son James Frederick (1817-1892). The Youngs family were farmers originally, but had moved into the production of lime by the 1880s; the kilns operated on the northern edge of the property by nephew Francis Youngs produced a high-quality product suitable for refining into plaster. Subsequent owners include Stephen (1854-1903) and Fanny Walker (1859-1924), Buffalo residents who used the Young house as a summer home, and under whose ownership the house was reduced to a shell in a 1916 fire and subsequently rebuilt. It's now part of the property of the Country Club of Buffalo.