William Buffington Jr.
American politician

William Buffington Jr. (May 31, 1817 – January 21, 1881) was an American farmer, hotel keeper, and politician from New York.
Life
Buffington was born on May 31, 1817, in Cambridge, New York, the son of William Buffington Sr. and Harriet Churchill.
Buffington moved to Marcellus with his family in 1818, and then to New Albion in 1826. He attended common schools in the latter place and spent a few months in a high school in what later became Gowanda. He was elected inspector of schools while still relatively young and later became elected town superintendent of schools for five consecutive terms. He began working as a farmer when he was twenty. When the New York and Erie Railroad was established, he built and ran a hotel in the village of Cattaraugus.
Buffington represented New Albion as town supervisor in 1849, 1850, and 1857.
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This entry incorporates text from “William Buffington Jr.” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.