Born to Build
In July 1811, the designer responsible for the Suffolk County Courthouse in Boston, Massachusetts, had a unique vantage point from which to superintend his project’s construction. Charles Bulfinch, the first professional architect born on the American side of the Atlantic, could observe work crews making progress toward completing the courthouse through the window of a cell in the Court Street Jail. Renowned now as a pioneering American designer, Bulfinch achieved notoriety then for having exhausted his family’s fortune in yet another failed real estate venture. Enthusiastic about architecture since youth, he took up the practice as a trade and a career enabling him to claw his way out of debt and in the process evolved a neoclassicist style that still stands, reflected in structures in Boston, Washington, DC, and Hartford, Connecticut.
Charles Bulfinch was born in August 1763 to a Brahmin family of Boston’s comfortable class. Earning a master’s degree from Harvard College in 1784, young Bulfinch spent a year and a half on the Grand Tour commonly enjoyed by young men of means, soaking up Europe from London to Rome. Keen on architecture from an early age, within a year of returning from the Continent he had drawn his first design as an amateur: a church on Hollis Street that refracted St. Paul’s in London in miniature. Family wealth—the Bulfinches traded in both goods and slaves—exempted him from having to stoop to hawking his design services. In 1787 he entered and won a design competition announced by the state of Massachusetts for a statehouse to be built in Boston. His design featured a dome, visually echoing classic Roman governmental style.
In 1788, the year his Hollis Street church made it from paper into plaster and brick, Charles married Hannah Apthorp, a cousin. As an investment he put family, commissioned to travel to the Pacific Northwest for furs, then to the Orient for silk. was the first American ship to reach China. Departing Shanghai for Boston, Captain Robert Gray took the long way home, and upon anchoring in Boston harbor in 1790 became the first American ship to have circumnavigated the globe. The following year, Bostonians elected Bulfinch to the Board of Selectmen, which managed the city. He held that office for 24 of the next 27 years. That same year, he received his second major architectural commission, the design of the Connecticut statehouse in Hartford (see “Built by Bulfinch,” p. 65).
