Henry Bacon - Education and Early Career

Education and Early Career

Henry Bacon was born in Watseka, Illinois. He studied briefly at the University of Illinois, Urbana (1884), but left to begin his architectural career as a draftsman, eventually serving in the office of McKim, Mead & White (MMW) in New York City, one of the best-known architectural firms in its time. Bacon’s works of that period were in the late Greek Revival and Beaux-Arts modes associated with the firm. His more important works include the Danforth Memorial Library in Paterson, New Jersey (1908) and the train station in Naugatuck, Connecticut.

While at MMW, Bacon won, in 1889, the Rotch Traveling Scholarship for architectural students, which gave him two years of study and travel in Europe, which he spent learning and drawing details of Roman and Greek architecture. In Turkey, he met his future wife, Laura Florence Calvert, daughter of a British Consul. He traveled with another fellowship student, Albert Kahn who would become a leading industrial architect. Returning to the U.S. he spent a few more years with his mentor, Charles McKim, working on projects such as the Rhode Island State House in Providence, Rhode Island, and serving as McKim's personal representative in Chicago during the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893, for which MMW was designing several buildings.

In 1897 Bacon left MMW to found, with James Brite, a younger architect from the firm, the partnership of Brite and Bacon Architects. There Brite was in charge of financial, administrative, and contracting aspects of the partnership, while Bacon was in charge of the architectural design and construction. The partnership immediately won the competition for the Jersey City Public Library and the Hall of History for American University in Washington, DC, and thereafter built a good number of public buildings and a small number of private residences.

The partnership was selected in 1897 to build two private residences, the "La Fetra Mansion" in Summit, New Jersey, and a three-story Georgian mansion "Laurel Hill" in Columbia, North Carolina. The "La Fetra Mansion" was designed and built by Bacon, and his design was published in the September 1901 issue of The Architecture, the pre-eminent architectural professional journal of its time. The LeFetra Mansion fully exhibits Bacon's preference for Beaux-Arts Neo-Greek and Roman architecture style. His simple and elegant lines and his skill in dimensions and proportions gave rise to a stately elegance, peaceful tranquility, and a sense of divine protection.

In 1897, Bacon was also approached by a group which was organized with the intent to raise public and private funds to build a monument in Washington, DC to memorialize Abraham Lincoln. Bacon began his conceptual, artistic, and architectural design for the Lincoln Memorial that year, and continued in the effort even though the funding for the building of the project did not materialize until years later. The Brite and Bacon Partnership dissolved in 1902 partly resulting from Brite's disagreement over Bacon's passion and the unpaid time he spent on the design. After that, Bacon practiced under his own name with significant success, building a large number of famous public buildings and monuments, until his death in 1924.