PETER HARRISON, FIRST AMERICAN ARCHITECT

by Carl Bridenbaugh '25Univ. No. Carolina Press, Chapel Hill,1949. 195 pp., 41 ills. $6.50.

During the fifteen years of his architectural activity (1748-1763) Peter Harrison was the most distinguished architect of Colonial America. Ship-owner and merchant of New- port, and in later years collector of His Majesty's customs at New Haven, Harrison, like many educated gentlemen of the day, practiced architecture as an amateur. Yet by training, talent, and standards he perhaps deserves the appellation—so frequently given of "America's first professional architect."

Designer of the Redwood Library, Touro Synagogue, and the Brick Market at Newport, King's Chapel in Boston, Christ Church in Cambridge, and probably of St. Michael's Church in Charleston, South Carolina, Harrison was the first American architect to adopt, in thorough and discerning fashion, the formal Palladianism of contemporary English architecture and thus markedly to affect the development of the American Georgian style. He was the first to adopt, in the Redwood Library, a nearly complete classical temple form, and thus to anticipate Thomas Jefferson's scholarly classicism by almost fortv years.

Yet because he was a Tory royalist who died on the eve of the Revolution—his records and professional library, the finest in America, destroyed by a New Haven mobHarrison has hitherto been little known. Mr. Bridenbaugh, a distinguished historian of the Colonial period, has used a wealth of primary source materials to bring together here the first complete portrait of Harrison as a man and as an architect. Thorough in its analysis of architectural monuments, convincing in its biographical detail, and particularly vivid in its picture of the American colonies in the mid-eighteenth century, the account is both authoritative and interesting, a contribution of first-rate importance to American architectural history.

Of particular interest to Dartmouth men is the story of how Harrison almost became the designer of Dartmouth Hall. Governor John Wentworth, a friend and patron of Harrison, desired him to design the proposed College Edifice. But Eleazar Wheelock who disliked Wentworth's and Harrison's Anglicanism and usually contrived to have his own way favored a house-carpenter he had met while taking the waters at Lebanon Springs, New York, in 1772. At Wentworth's instance, Wheelock perforce had to write Peter Harrison (on June 28, 1773) but his letter was so equivocal and unenthusiastic ("I am in hopes you might be induced to take a Journey here for a less Reward than you would think reasonable") that Harrison never answered it, and Dartmouth missed an opportunity to have a building designed by the first architect of his day. It might have come to naught in any event, for Harrison died two weeks after the battle of Lexington in '75, and the Revolution intervened before the cornerstone of Dartmouth Hall was laid in 1784.

(Dr. Bridenbaugh, formerly professor of History at Brown University and is now director of the Institute of Early American History and Culture at Williamsburg, Virginia.)