Edward Clarke Cabot was born on April 17, 1818 in Boston, Massachusetts, United States; the third of the eleven children of Samuel Cabot and Eliza Perkins, daughter of Thomas Handasyd Perkins, a well-known merchant. Cabot's father, too, was a merchant in Boston, largely interested in the China and East India trade.
A somewhat delicate child, Cabot was educated at private schools in Boston and Brookline, spent his early summers at Nahant, and had no university training.
At the age of seventeen he went to Illinois, where, in partnership with George Curzon, he engaged in sheep raising. This venture, in which Cabot's father had invested some $12, 000, ended disastrously and Cabot returned to the East in 1841. Then for more than four years he had a sheep farm at Windsor, Vermont. In 1845 the Boston Athenaeum invited designs for a new building, and, from his farm, Cabot submitted a sketch which was accepted with the proviso that he associate himself with George M. Dexter, a civil engineer, as supervisor. Cabot stayed some time in Dexter's office and later opened his own office in Boston. In 1849-58 and 1862-65 he was associated with his brother, James Elliot Cabot, and in 1875 he entered into partnership with Frank W. Chandler, under the firm name of Cabot & Chandler. When, a few years later, Chandler became professor of architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, two members of the office force were made partners and the firm name was changed to Cabot, Everett & Meade. During the Civil War, Cabot served for less than a year as lieutenant colonel of the 44th Massachusetts Infantry. His architectural practise consisted largely of country houses of the more informal type, in the picturesque style then in vogue, to which he gave great charm by the restraint and exquisiteness of his taste. His two largest commissions were the Boston Theatre (1852 - 53), and the hospital of Johns Hopkins University, finally opened in 1889, which was done in association with Chandler. Before working on the Boston Theatre, Cabot spent a year abroad and made an intensive study of La Scala in Milan in preparation for his Boston work. After his retirement in 1888, he devoted the major portion of his time to painting and became an accomplished water-colorist, exhibiting frequently in Boston.
He lived all his life in Boston and its suburbs, building for himself two houses in Brookline, and spending his later summers at Nonquitt. Cabot's work was distinguished by its delicacy, its restraint, and its schooled originality. The Boston Athenaeum is in a fine Italian Renaissance, an extraordinary style for that date, 1845; and still more extraordinary is the beauty with which it was carried out, as it was the work of one till then a mere amateur.
His position as president of the Boston Society of Architects was an expression of the general esteem and affection in which he was held, and through it he came in contact with every important architect in Boston for thirty years. He was, says an editorial in the American Architect and Building News (Jan. 12, 1901), "a model of kind and gentle dignity. "
Edward Clarke Cabot is best known today for his architectural achievements, the most famous of which is the Boston Athenæum’s building at 10 ½ Beacon Street, but during his lifetime his artistic output earned him equal praise. He is also noted for producing several distinguished Queen Anne Style houses in the 1870s.
He was a member of the Boston Art Club and the Boston Watercolor Society and exhibited his drawings and watercolors at a number of venues throughout the city, including, briefly, at the Boston Athenæum.
He was twice married: first, at Salem, Massachussets, July 7, 1842, to Martha Eunice Robinson (died Brookline, Massachussets, Nov. 28, 1871), by whom he had five children; second, at Melrose, Massachussets, October 13, 1873, to Louisa Winslow Sewall (died Brookline, Massachussets, Aug. 10, 1907), by whom he had three children.
