William Ralph Emerson

This article is about the Shingle Style architect. For the later American architect and MIT dean, see William Emerson (American architect). For the British architect, see William Emerson (British architect).

William Ralph Emerson (March 11, 1833 – November 23, 1917) was an American architect. He partnered with Carl Fehmer in Emerson and Fehmer.

The Hotel Claremont, built in 1890–1892, Claremont, New Hampshire

Emerson was born in Alton, Illinois, a cousin of Ralph Waldo Emerson, and trained in the office of Jonathan Preston (1801–1888), an architect–builder in Boston, Massachusetts. He formed an architectural partnership with Preston (1857–1861), practiced alone for two years, then partnered with Carl Fehmer (1864–1873). On September 15, 1873 he married Sylvia Hathaway Watson.

He is best known for his Shingle Style houses and inns. He worked with fellow Boston designer Frederick Law Olmsted on the creation of the National Zoo in Washington, D.C., designing several of the zoo's first buildings.[1]

Emerson was a friend to the Boston painter William Morris Hunt, who painted a portrait of Emerson's son Ralph, shown at an exhibition of Hunt's work at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts in 1880.[2]

Emerson died in Milton, Massachusetts.

Selected works

References

  1. Heather Ewing, 'The Architecture of the National Zoological Park,' in New Worlds, New Animals: From Menagerie to Zoological Park in the Nineteenth Century. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996.
  2. Portrait of Master Ralph Emerson, Exhibition of the Works of William Morris Hunt, Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Dec. 20, 1879-Jan. 31, 1880, Seventh Edition, Alfred Mudge & Son, Boston, 1880

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