Archives Speaker Series Showcases Larkin Company

Canisius College Archives Speaker Series presents its Spring offering, “Documenting Marketing History: Researching Buffalo’s Larkin Company” on Thursday, April 26 at 2:30 p.m. Bouwhuis Library, 2nd floor.

Howard Stanger, PhD, professor of management and history, and Christine Schnaithmann MA, research and teaching assistant,  department of cultural history and theory, Humboldt-Universitat, Berlin, are featured speakers. Together they will offer a transatlantic examination of Buffalo's remarkable Larkin Company.

Stanger, a noted authority on labor history, will share his research about Buffalo’s once prominent Larkin Soap Manufacturing Company, including the development of its unique corporate culture and how it started the buying club-based marketing practices, almost a century before today’s big box stores picked up on the concept. Ms. Schnaithmann will share her investigation of the relationship between office organization and architecture using Frank Lloyd Wright's Larking Building as a case study.

Company founder, John D. Larkin counted among his employees Frank and Darwin D. Martin, whose 125 Jewett Parkway home was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, and Elbert Hubbard, who pioneered his own enterprising artisan community -The Roycrofters. Architect Frank Lloyd Wright also designed the Larkin Company’s innovative and gigantic office building, where today, a revitalized growing and vibrant manufacturing area -The Hydraulic District – is located on the edge of downtown Buffalo.

The Archives Speaker Series features scholars whose work is reliant on archival research, and who have produced an expression of scholarship based on that research. This event is free and open to the public. Light refreshments will be served. For more information contact Kathleen DeLaney, Archivist at delaney@canisius.edu or ext. 8421