File:Former First Trust Company, Tonawanda, New York - 20211123.jpg

English: The former First Trust Company building at 6 Main Street (corner Niagara Street) in Tonawanda, New York, as seen in November 2021. One of the few period commercial buildings in Tonawanda's business district not to have been razed during the urban renewal campaigns of the middle 20th century, the First Trust Company building's Colonial Revival styling is rather restrained in opulence by comparison with the usual bank architecture of the day: rather than a façade wholly of stone, the exterior is of dark red brick with sparsely employed stone trim that is chiefly seen on and around the entrance, wherein a pair of engaged Doric columns support a frieze that contains a stone panel with the bank's name engraved on it, and - on the side elevations - smaller relief panels in urn and vine motifs atop the Doric pilaster strips that separate the floor-to-ceiling windows. Atop a cornice is a simple parapet circumnavigating the flat roof. Originally known as the Lumber Exchange Bank (that being the foundation of Tonawanda's economy in the old days), First Trust Company was founded in 1893 with a capital stock of $100,000 by George F. Rand, a budding young financier from Buffalo who would soon go on to greater renown as founding president of the Marine Trust Company. The building seen here was constructed in 1929 as a replacement for their original headquarters, a handsome Romanesque Revival structure on the same site that was long known as the "Depository". First Trust merged in 1951 with the aforementioned Marine Trust Company, and the newly rechristened Marine Midland Bank (and corporate successor HSBC) retained the building as a branch office until the latter's pullout of the U.S. retail banking market in 2012.