File:Benjamin Long Homestead, Tonawanda, New York - 20200117.jpg

English: The Benjamin Long Homestead, Tonawanda, New York, January 2020. Located at Long's Point, where Ellicott Creek empties into Tonawanda Creek, this oldest extant building in the City of Tonawanda was home to the Long family - Benjamin, his wife Mary, and their five daughters - until 1860, and owned by the family through at least 1893. Pennsylvania Dutch by extraction, Benjamin Long (1787-1859) arrived in the frontier hamlet of Tonawanda in 1828 when it consisted of a dozen cabins splayed on either side of the creek, building this house the next year out of hand-hewn oak and walnut timber with cedar clapboard siding on a foundation of Medina sandstone; by the time of his death, he was one of the most prominent citizens of the then-village. After the Long family's departure, the house served variously as a livery stable and as Jay's Log Cabin, a restaurant and tavern owned by the Jared Tiffany family, from 1943. After a devastating fire in 1971 almost destroyed the historic structure, the Historical Society of the Tonawandas purchased the building, restoring it, furnishing it with genuine antiques in the Empire and Early Victorian styles, and reopening it as a historic house museum in 1979. The Tonawanda Tower, on the opposite side of Ellicott Creek, rises in the background.