Alexander Jackson Davis

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Alexander Jackson Davis : biography

July 24, 1803 – January 14, 1892

Davis was invited to become a member of the American Institute of Architects shortly after its founding in 1857. In the late 1850s, Davis worked with the entrepreneur Llewellyn S. Haskell to create Llewellyn Park in West Orange, New Jersey, a garden suburb that was one of the first planned residential communities in the United States.

Gothic villa, watercolor. A faculty residence on the Parade Ground, [[Virginia Military Institute, 1850s]] [[Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut, 1842.]] Davis designed buildings for the University of Michigan in 1838, and in the 1840s he designed buildings for the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

At Virginia Military Institute, Jackson’s designs from 1848 through the 1850s created the first entirely Gothic revival college campus, built in brick and stuccoed to imitate stone.Mary Ann Sullivan, Davis’s plan for the Barracks quadrangle was interrupted by the Civil War; it was sympathetically completed to designs of Bertram Goodhue in the early 20th century.

With the onset of Civil War in 1861, patronage in house building dried up, and after the war, new styles unsympathetic to Davis’s nature were in vogue. In 1867, he designed the Hurst-Pierrepont Estate. In 1878, Davis closed his office, where he had usually both lived and worked. He built little in the last thirty years of his life, but spent his easy retirement in West Orange drawing plans for grandiose schemes that he never expected to build, and selecting and ordering his designs and papers, by which he determined to be remembered. They are shared by four New York institutions: the Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library at Columbia University, the New York Public Library, the New-York Historical Society, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. A further collection of Davis material has been assembled at the Henry Francis DuPont Winterthur Museum library. After closing his office he joined his wife, Margaret Beale, whom he had married in 1853, and their two children. "Wildmont," his summer lodge overlooking Llewellyn Park, West Orange, New Jersey, was enlarged for year-round use, but it burned down in 1884, before the family could move there, and he died in a small house on its site. Henry Austin (1804-91).]] Yale Skull & Bones’ tomb showing A. J. Davis’ towers salvaged from his Yale Alumni Hall (1851-3) at right rear