Orlando Whitney Norcross was born on October 25, 1839 in Clinton, Maine, United States. He was the second son of Jesse Springer and Margaret Ann (Whitney) Norcross and eighth in descent from Jeremiah Norcross, a proprietor in Watertown, Massachussets.
Removing with his family to Salem, Massachussets, at the age of four, he attended the grammar schools there.
Norcross started to work at about thirteen because his father had joined the gold rush of 1849 and never returned. After following for several years his father's trade of carpenter, he enlisted as artificer July 5, 1861, in the company which became Company D, 16t Heavy Artillery, Massachusetts Volunteers. As road and bridge-builder during his three years with the Army of the Potomac, he was often under Confederate fire.
Honorably discharged in the summer of 1864, he formed a partnership, as building-contractor, with his elder brother James, who managed the clerical and financial affairs of the firm while Orlando directed the constructional work, to which he was always, heart and soul, devoted. After completing successfully their first large contract, the Leicester Congregational Church, the firm established permanent headquarters at Worcester, Massachussets, in 1868. The financial panic of 1873 yielded them an unexpected dividend, for building prices dropped substantially shortly after they had signed a contract for the erection of Trinity Church, Boston. This contract had other important results. Executed between 1872 and 1877, it brought young Norcross into personal contact with H. H. Richardson, the eminent architect, who during fifteen years regarded him as his right-hand man on all matters of practical construction.
Norcross was quick to adopt new methods and materials. His practical inventiveness and resourcefulness often put the technical judgments of engineers to rout, notably in the case of a stone arch at the Springfield, Massachussets, railway station.
At West Point, the erection of the Battle Monument, a granite monolith 41. 6 feet high, weighing eighty-one tons, at that time (1893) the largest polished shaft in the world, presented almost insuperable difficulties over which, however, Norcross as usual triumphed. He came to be widely recognized as a leader in his field.
Norcross invented flat-slab construction of reinforced concrete. He was appointed by the Secretary of the Treasury as one of three commissioners to inspect the Chicago Federal Building. The first edition of Frank E. Kidder's Architect's and Builder's Pocket-Book (1885), known as the "contractor's Bible" for nearly half a century, was dedicated to him. On his eighty-first birthday a bronze tablet bearing a bas-relief portrait of him was unveiled in the Worcester City Hall.
To the financial side of his work Norcross was always indifferent, and in later years he suffered as a consequence.
From early life he was devoted to books, seeking to atone by wide and constant reading for his lack of formal education. His absorption in work was proverbial.
His Civil War experiences and abundant contacts with labor having impressed him keenly with the waste and suffering entailed by strong drink, he was always a firm temperance advocate.
Norcross was a disciple of nature and fond of tramping; he loved his home and shunned club life.
Norcross married Ellen Sibley of Salem in May 1870, who bore him five children, of whom two sons died in infancy.
