William Pitt Preble Longfellow

Background

William Pitt Preble Longfellow was the son of Stephen and Marianne (Preble) Longfellow and a nephew of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. He was born on October 25, 1836 at Portland, Maine, United States.

Education

Longfellow graduated from Harvard College in 1855. He continued his studies in the Lawrence Scientific School at Harvard, winning the degree of Bachelor of Science in 1859.

Career

Longfellow started his career by joining the staff of Edward Cabot, the Boston architect. In 1868-1869 he served as secretary of the Boston Society of Architecture, making many pleasant and valuable professional contacts. For the following three years he was an assistant architect of the United States Treasury Department. Later, for one year, 1881-1882, he served as adjunct professor of architectural design at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

When school children of Cambridge planned to surprise the aging poet on his seventy-second birthday with a chair made from wood of the spreading chestnut tree over the familiar village smithy, Longfellow the architect was selected to design the chair. His contributions to the progress of his profession were solid, not showy or spectacular. He was for a time director of the newly opened school of drawing and painting at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts; of the museum itself he became a trustee. He was the first editor of the American Architect during the years in which it was published in Boston. In 1893 he served on the jury of award of the architectural section of the World's Columbian Exposition. Increasingly in his later years he gave practically his whole time to writing on architectural subjects. His musical compositions, particularly his settings for some of Tennyson's poems, were creditable. His death occurred at East Gloucester, Massachusetts, during a brief visit at the summer art colony. He left no children.

Achievements

• Longfellow was well known as an author of the following works: "Abstract of Lectures on Perspective" (1889); "A Cyclopaedia of Works of Architecture in Italy, Greece and the Levant" (1895); "The Column and the Arch" (1899); and "Applied Perspective". He also took an active part in designing and constructing the Boston Post Office.

Works

More photos

• book

  • A cyclopaedia of works of architecture in Italy, Greece, and the Levant

    (This book was originally published prior to 1923, and rep...)

  • The Column and the Arch: Essays on Architectural History (Classic Reprint)

    (November, (Typographical errors above are due to OCR soft...)

  • Applied perspective, for architects and painters

    (Applied perspective, for architects and painters. 188 Pages.)

Personality

Longfellow was of a reserved disposition, a clever amateur musician and a serious student of literature.

Connections

Longfellow married in Boston, on May 26, 1870, Susan Emily Daniell, and for many years he and his wife had a residence adjacent to the Craigie House in Cambridge, in which his uncle lived. They were accustomed to spend their summers on the Maine coast with his bachelor cousin, Alexander Wadsworth Longfellow, also an architect.

Father:

Stephen Longfellow

Mother:

Marianne (Preble) Longfellow

Spouse:

Susan Emily Daniell

Uncle:

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Cousin:

Alexander Wadsworth Longfellow