A Detail of Some Particular Services Performed in America, During the Years 1776, 1777, 1778, and 1779
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A Description Of Ithiel Town's Improvement In The Principle, Construction, And Practical Execution Of Bridges, For Roads, Railroads, And Aqueducts ... ... And Scientific Remarks And Observations
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Ithiel Town was a prominent American architect and civil engineer.
Background
Ithiel was born on October 3, 1784 at Thompson, Connecticut. He was the son of Archelaus Town, a farmer, and Martha (Johnson) Town. He was a descendant of William Towne who was in Salem, Massachussets, as early as 1640. Ithiel's father died when the boy was eight years old.
Education
During his youth he worked at house-carpentering and also taught school. Adventuring to Boston finally, he there acquired a knowledge of architecture in a school conducted by Asher Benjamin, an architect and prolific writer of books on the subject.
He was awarded an honorary Master of Arts degree from Yale University.
Career
Little is known of Town's activities during his early years, although he is said, while in Boston, to have contrived a plan for the relief of the Old State House.
The important work with which his career began was the construction of Center Church on the New Haven Green. In its construction Town showed familiarity with classical examples of architectural design, and ability both as a designer and as an engineer. He constructed the spire as a unit, on the level and within the tower; when finished, it was raised by an ingenious "windlass and tackle" of his own devising to position on the top of the tower in two and one-half hours. He employed unusual architectural refinements, such as proportioning the orders in the tower so that they would appear of the correct classic proportions when viewed from the pavement below, and giving a slight inward inclination to certain panels in the tower to insure "spring. "
He was next commissioned, 1814, to design and build Trinity Church, also on the New Haven Green. This was executed in seam-faced local trap rock, with delicate parapets and pinnacles of woodwork, in the Gothic taste, bordering the roof and surmounting the square tower.
His reputation now established, he was called upon to design many public buildings: for New Haven, a state capitol building and a general hospital; for New York City, the custom house on Wall Street; for Hartford, Christ Church. Other designs of his were those of the state capitol buildings in Indianapolis, Ind. , and Raleigh, N. C. ; he also designed a number of dwelling houses.
During 1827-28, he worked in partnership with Martin E. Thompson of New York. In the exhibitions of the National Academy of Design for those years, Town and Thompson exhibited a number of designs made in common, including "Front Elevation of New Boston Theatre" (1827) and "Design for the Church of the Ascension on Canal Street, New York City" (1828). The diary of Alexander J. Davis, in the Metropolitan Museum, reveals that the beautiful, old, Greek-revival asylum building, still standing in the grounds of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, was designed by Town.
About 1829 Town and Davis formed a partnership with offices in New York, and their names are associated in many designs. Though he always maintained his home in New Haven, Town's career is even more associated, both professionally and socially, with New York, where he doubtless found more congenial companionship than in the ultra-religious, academic atmosphere of his home town. His selection by Samuel F. B. Morse as one of the two representatives of architecture, in the founding of the National Academy of Design, shows persuasively Town's outstanding position at that time as a designer and as a man of superior culture.
On January 28, 1820, he was granted a patent for a truss bridge, and from that time forward he was the best known bridge-builder in the country. His returns from this kind of work seem to have been greater than from his work as an architect; from 1820 until his death he apparently had ample funds. He thus possessed the means to gather together in his New Haven residence what for many years was the finest collection of choice books relating to architecture and the fine arts assembled in the United States. The fame of this collection is fully supported by the five catalogues issued after his death for its sale in Boston, Washington, and New York.
He traveled extensively in Europe with Morse in 1829-30, envisaged transatlantic steamship navigation, and contributed an unsigned article on the subject to the American Railroad Journal of November 24, 1832 (reprinted by J. P. Wright in Atlantic Steam-ships, 1838). In 1835 he published The Outlines of a Plan for Establishing in New York an Academy and Institution of the Fine Arts (1835). He also wrote on mathematics and the building of schoolhouses, and published A Detail of Some Particular Services Performed in America 1776-1779 (1835), founded on manuscript material he bought in England. To him has recently been given credit for designing the very charming obverse of the medal struck in 1838 to commemorate the two-hundredth anniversary of the foundation of New Haven. The greatly inferior reverse of the medal was done by Hezekiah Augur.
Town died in New Haven and was buried in Grove Street Cemetery, where his grave is marked by a marble headstone as simple as he was modest and unassuming.