Louise Bethune was the first woman to found her own architectural firm in 1881, and was the first admitted to a professional architecture group, the Chicago-based Western Association of Architects. She designed 180 buildings, including a Buffalo landmark, the iconic Hotel Lafayette, and founded the local chapter of the American Institute of Architects.

But until fairly recently, there was only one known photo of Bethune, and no record of her life and work. Thanks to another Buffalo woman architect at the University at Buffalo, Bethune is finally getting recognition as a local pioneer.

Kelly Hayes McAlonie, the University at Buffalo’s director of campus planning, helped UB assemble and preserve a collection of Bethune memorabilia for the UB Special Collections library in Capen Hall on UB’s North Campus.

An exhibit titled “Louise Blanchard Bethune: Every Woman Her Own Architect” is on display at the library through the end of April. Working on it inspired McAlonie to write a book with the same title. And Bethune is among three “Trailblazing Women of WNY” to be honored with monuments outside the Old Erie County Hall in downtown Buffalo.

The Bethune collection represents the latest significant addition to the wealth of history housed at UB Special Collections, whose temperature- and humidity-controlled vaults preserve archives of dozens of famous figures that draw scholars and fans from around the world.

UB’s holdings include manuscripts and correspondence from poets and writers such as W. H. Auden, Thomas Merton and Ezra Pound, photos, blueprints and letters documenting architect Frank Llloyd Wright’s work in Western New York and the world’s largest James Joyce collection.

The Joyce collection is considered priceless, and last year garnered UB a $10 million state grant to create a destination James Joyce Museum at UB’s South Campus. UB is in the process of hiring a design firm, and continues to fundraise to endow a James Joyce curator position and financing for acquisitions and preservation, programming, exhibitions and maintenance costs, said James Maynard, curator of The Poetry Collection at UB.

As UB Special Collections grows, more people have been finding their way to the library on the fourth floor of Capen Hall, Maynard said. More than 2,000 people visited last year for scholarly research or to see exhibits, he added.

And as its holdings garner more attention and prestige, UB has also received more historic contributions, including a recent donation of 373 items from Frank Lloyd Wright’s Graycliff, the summer home that America’s most renowned architect designed for Buffalo business magnate Darwin Martin. Wright also designed Martin’s family home in the city, and both Graycliff and the Darwin Martin House are restored museums that draw thousands of Wright fans to WNY every year.

McAlonie and UB Archivist Hope Dunbar created the current Louise Bethune exhibit with items obtained by McAlonie and period pieces borrowed from other museums to illustrate Bethune’s life and legacy and her role in engaging WNY women in the sport of bicycling – then called “wheeling” – in the 1880s.

“It’s the largest repository of materials related to Louise, so it fills in a lot of archival silences and misinterpretations from the past,” Dunbar said.

McAlonie inherited her interest in “Louise” from a colleague in the Buffalo Chapter of the AIA, which Bethune founded in 1886. McAlonie came to Buffalo to work at Cannon Design in 1998 and joined the local AIA, where she met the late Adriana Barbasch, who spent years researching Bethune.

“Any research that there was on Louise, she had done it,” McAlonie said.

In 2006, Barbasch retired and offered to give McAlonie her 25 years of Bethune research “to maybe do something with it,” McAlonie said. McAlonie agreed and said the first thing she did was successfully nominate Bethune to the Western New York Women’s Hall of Fame.

In the process, McAlonie befriended the sole surviving heir of Louise and her husband, Robert Bethune, their great granddaughter, Zina Bethune, then a Los Angeles artist, McAlonie said.

In 2012, Zina Bethune was killed in a car accident, and McAlonie reached out to her husband, Sean Feeley, to express condolences. She also asked him to let her know if he found any items relating to Zina’s great-grandmother Louise. Two years later, he contacted her to say he had several old photo albums and wondered if UB would like them.

That is how McAlonie and the late Amy Vilz, the former UB archivist, created UB’s Zina Bethune Archive on Louise Bethune. It includes photos, blueprints and correpondence that illustrate the story of a woman who came alive for McAlonie and became the subject of her book.

Bethune was born Louise Blanchard, the daughter of two educators who taught around Central and Western New York before settling in Buffalo when she was 11. Louise had two younger siblings, fraternal twins who both died as children, leaving her an only child showered in attention from her parents, McAlonie said.

Louise loved drawing houses as a child, and studied architecture informally through high school. McAlonie said she intended to enroll at Cornell University architecture school, but first, at age 18, she walked into the office of a newly prominent young architect named Richard Waite and asked for an internship. Although it was unheard of at the time, Waite agreed to mentor an aspiring architect who was not a man.

Five years after joining Waite’s firm, Louise decided to start her own. She had met her future husband, who also apprenticed with Waite and supported her wish to break barriers as a professional woman. She opened her office in October 1881 and married Bethune in December, after which he joined the practice that became Bethune & Bethune.

“By the end of the 1880s, Louise and Robert would build one of the busiest and most prominent architectural firms in the city of Buffalo,” McAlonie wrote in her book.

In 1885, when Louise became the first woman to apply for membership in the Western Association of Architects, Robert Bethune withheld his own application. “He knew if they both applied, the members would assume that her architectural portfolio was his work,” McAlonie said.

“In 1888, for the same reason, Robert again waited to apply for membership to the AIA until Louise was successful,” she wrote.

Louise Bethune’s favorite projects were educational buildings, and she designed many Buffalo schools that were not preserved over time. Her masterpiece, the Hotel Lafayette, was completed in 1904 and was renovated to reflect its former splendor as a mixed-use building, now called Hotel @ The Lafayette, by developer Rocco Termini in 2012.

Three other buildings she designed are still standing in Buffalo, including the Witkop and Holmes Headquarters (1901), which is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Bethune also bought the first woman’s bicycle to go on sale in Buffalo (for $150) and founded the Buffalo Women’s Wheeling and Athletic Club in 1888, the second such club in the country. McAlonie wrote that Bethune was a “fearless bicyclist, often leading 25-mile-long biking expeditions.”

McAlonie, who wears a necklace with the name “Bethune,” also helped gain her recognition from the Erie County Commission on the Status of Women’s Monuments Project, an effort to rectify the lack of monuments to women in the U.S. and Buffalo.

The project began in 2017 after the commission noted that only 8% of monuments in the U.S. honor women, and only 2% in Buffalo do so. This summer, monuments to three “Trailblazing Women of WNY” – Bethune, civil rights activist Mary Talbert and Geraldine “Sid-tah” Green, a leader in the Akwasasne Mohawk and Seneca Nation communities – will be dedicated at Old County Hall.

The Bethune exhibit at UB closes at the end of this month, but UB Archivist Hope Dunbar said UB is partnering with the Western New York Library Resources Council to add the Bethune collection to their selection of exhibits available to be “checked out” for display at local schools, libraries and community centers.