Career
In England Hamilton designed the Lincoln and Worcester Insane Asylums. The Birmingham, Plymouth, and Leicester Cemeteries. And churches in London and Oxford (according to an affidavit).
He is believed to have come to the United States. in approximately 1850 and to Cincinnati in approximately 1852.
According to the Architectural Foundation of Cincinnati"s Biographical Dictionary of Cincinnati Architects: "relatively little is known about Hamilton"s American career, but he seems to have been a fine designer, willing to explore new technology, and with a significant influence through his pupils on later 19th-century Cincinnati-area architecture." He is listed on his own in 1853-1855, with Rankin, 1856–1857, and with James West. McLaughlin in 1857-1858. Prominent Cincinnati architect Samuel Hannaford, born in England and brought to the Cincinnati area as a child, got his start in Hamilton"s office in 1857.
The Horticultural Review and Botanical Magazine (published in Cincinnati by HW Derby and edited by John Aston Warder and James West Ward) published Hamilton’s Charles Anderson House (later Broadwell House) at Securities and Exchange Commission Fifth and Pike streets in downtown Cincinnati, and ran a series of signed articles on architecture by Hamilton. The article about "rural architecture" are "perhaps" the earliest known architectural writings by a Cincinnati-based architect, announced by the publication"s editor in the first issue of the volume, IV, 1 (1/1854), 47.
Heriot-Watt University Derby Building Hamilton & Rankin on Third Street (New) National Theater on Sycamore Saint (1857) for John Bates "the pioneer and most successful theatrical manager of the West" Masonic Hall or Temple at Third and Walnut (Hamilton & McLaughlin)a "grandiose, exotic, probably Ruskinian, yet precociously Mansard-roofed" building.
Woodward High School building "one of the earlier buildings in America to use terracotta for exterior decoration, and the first in Cincinnati to use terracotta for the exterior, according to an article in the “Editor’s Bureau” in The Horticultural Review and Botanical Magazine, IV (1854), 428-429." Before Hamilton"s building was constructed, Woodward High School first opened on October 24, 1831, making it the first high school west of the Allegheny Mountains and the oldest public high school still in operation in the United States. Charles Anderson House (later Broadwell House) a "handsome and ingeniously sited Italian Villa" in volume IV (1854), built at Securities and Exchange Commission Fifth and Pike streets Affidavit from Steve Gordon.