Early Years and Education
John Wellborn Root was born in 1850 in Lumpkin, Georgia, the son of Sidney Root, a planter, and his wife, Mary H. Clark. He was named after a maternal uncle, Marshall Johnson Wellborn. Root was raised in Atlanta, where he was first educated at home. When Atlanta fell to the Union during the American Civil War, Root's father sent young Root and two other boys on a steamer to England, while his mother and sister went to Cuthburt, Georgia. John's father, Sidney, had a shipping business based in Liverpool, England.
While in Liverpool, Root studied at Clare Mount School. His later design work was said to have been influenced by the pioneering work of Liverpool architect Peter Ellis, who designed and built the world's first two metal-framed, glass curtain-walled buildings, Oriel Chambers (1864) and 16 Cook Street (1866).
After Root returned to the U.S., he earned an undergraduate degree from New York University in 1869. After graduation, he took a job with the architect James Renwick, Jr. of Renwick and Sands of New York as an unpaid apprentice. Later he took a position with John Butler Snook in New York. While working for Snook, Root was a construction supervisor on Warren and Wetmore's Grand Central Terminal. Root was greatly influenced by the architecture of Henry Hobson Richardson.
Read more about this topic: John Wellborn Root
Famous quotes containing the words early, years and/or education:
“We have been told over and over about the importance of bonding to our children. Rarely do we hear about the skill of letting go, or, as one parent said, “that we raise our children to leave us.” Early childhood, as our kids gain skills and eagerly want some distance from us, is a time to build a kind of adult-child balance which permits both of us room.”
—Joan Sheingold Ditzion (20th century)
“... a novel survives because of its basic truthfulness, its having within it something general and universal, and a quality of imaginative perception which applies just as much now as it did in the fifty or hundred or two hundred years since the novel came to life.”
—Elizabeth Bowen (1899–1973)
“Very likely education does not make very much difference.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)