Alexander Parris (November 24, 1780 - June 16, 1852) was a prominent American architect-engineer. His work transitions between Federal style architecture and later Greek Revival.
Parris was born in Halifax, Massachusetts. When aged 16, he apprenticed to a housewright in Pembroke, but talent would lead him towards architecture. Married to Silvina Bonney Stetson in 1800, he moved to Portland, Maine. The seaport, bombarded during the Revolution by the Royal Navy, was then experiencing a building boom, and the young architect received a number of commissions, both residential and commercial. Then, in 1810, Paris traveled to Richmond, Virginia, where the executive mansion would be one of his creations. In the War of 1812, he served in Plattsburg, New York as a "Captain of the Artificers" (engineers), gaining knowledge of military requirements for engineering.
In 1815, he moved to Boston, where he found a position in the office of architect Charles Bulfinch. Like his famous employer, from whom he learned, Parris produced refined residences, churches and commercial buildings. In 1818, he helped complete the "Bulfinch Building" at Massachusetts General Hospital, when Bulfinch himself was called to Washington to work on the U.S. Capitol Building. Between 1815 and 1827, Parris would become Boston's leading architect.
In 1824, however, he began a twenty year association working for the Boston Navy Yard in Charlestown. He would end his career as chief engineer at the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard in Kittery, Maine. With the federal government as patron, Parris produced plans for numerous utilitarian structures, from storehouses to ropewalks, and was superintendent of construction at one of the nation's first drydocks, located at the Charlestown base. Today, he is fondly remembered for his stalwart stone lighthouses, commissioned by the U.S. Treasury Department. They are often of a tapered style termed "windswept."
Parris balanced the delicacy of his "superb draftsmanship," as it was called, with the coarseness of his building material of choice: granite. His most famous building, Quincy Market, is made of it.
He died in Pembroke, MA.
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Buildings & Lighthouses:
- 1804 - James Deering House, Portland, Maine
- 1804 - Portland Bank, Portland, Maine
- 1805 - Hunnewell-Shepley House, Portland, Maine
- 1807 - Preble House, Portland, Maine
- 1812 - Wickham House, Richmond, Virginia
- 1813 - Governor's Mansion, Richmond, Virginia
- 1816 - David Sears House, Boston, Massachusetts
- 1816 - Watertown Arsenal, Watertown, Massachusetts
- 1819 - Cathedral Church of St. Paul, Boston, Massachusetts
- 1822 - St. Paul's Episcopal Church, Windsor, Vermont
- 1824 - Pilgrim Hall, Plymouth, Massachusetts
- 1826 - Quincy Market, Boston, Massachusetts
- 1828 - United First Parish Church, Quincy, Massachusetts
- 1834 - St. Joseph's Church, Boston, Massachusetts
- 1834 - Ropewalk, Boston Navy Yard, Charlestown, Massachusetts
- 1839 - Saddleback Ledge Lighthouse, between the islands of Vinalhaven and Isle au Haut, Maine
- 1847 - Mount Desert Rock Lighthouse, south of Mount Desert Island, Maine
- 1848 - Libby Island Lighthouse, Machiasport, Maine, at the entrance to Machias Bay
- 1848 - Matinicus Rock Lighthouse, 6 miles south of Matinicus Island, Maine
- 1848 - Whitehead Island Lighthouse, Whitehead Island, Maine, at the southern entrance to Penobscot Bay
- 1849 - Execution Rocks Lighthouse, Long Island Sound, New York
- 1850 - Monhegan Island Lighthouse, Monhegan Island, Maine