Henry Bacon (November 28, 1866, Watseka, Illinois – February 17, 1924, New York) an American Beaux-Arts architect, is best remembered for his severe Greek Doric Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. (built 1915–1922), which was his final project.
Raised in and around Wilmington, North Carolina, where his father was a civil engineer, Bacon spent a year at the University of Illinois, Urbana, before beginning in 1885 as a draftsman, briefly in Boston, and then in the office of McKim, Mead and White in New York City, the best-known American architectural firm of its time. After four years, a fellowship enabled him to spend two years traveling abroad, drawing details of Roman and Greek architecture as far afield as Turkey, where he met his future wife, Laura Florence Calvert, daughter of a British consul. Returning to the U.S. he spent a few more years with his mentor, McKim, working on projects like the Rhode Island State House in Providence, Rhode Island, before opening his own office in 1897, at first with a partner James Brite.
Aside from the Lincoln Memorial Bacon built the Danforth Memorial Library, in Paterson, New Jersey; the train station in the style of an Italian villa in Naugatuck, Connecticut, the Observatory and other buildings at Wesleyan University and the Union Square Savings Bank, New York City.
Bacon was very active as a designer of monuments and settings for public sculpture. He designed the Court of the Four Seasons, for the 1915 Panama-Pacific Exposition, San Francisco. He designed the World War I memorial at Yale University. He collaborated with sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens on the Sen. Mark Hanna Monument in Cleveland, Ohio, and Daniel Chester French was responsible for the Memorial's pensive colossal Lincoln. He is less known for his private houses, including some early ones in Shingle Style.
He died of cancer, and is buried at Oakdale Cemetery in Wilmington, with which he never lost contact.
During World War II a Liberty ship was named after him.
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Last updated: 05-15-2005 13:54:44
