Alexander Parris
By: Betsy Lowenstein
Alexander Parris
(1780–1852) was one of the most prominent architect-engineers of Massachusetts
in the first half of the nineteenth-century. Parris was born in Halifax,
Massachusetts, on November 24, 1780. His early career was spent in Portland,
Maine and Richmond, Virginia. Between 1815 and 1827, Parris emerged as Boston’s
leading architect. Parris’s projects in Boston include the David Sears House, a
notable Greek Revival structure; Massachusetts General Hospital, where Parris
implemented a Bulfinch design; and Faneuil Hall Market, a project praised for
its boldness of design and public benefit. In 1824, Alexander Parris began an
association with the Boston Naval Shipyard at Charlestown that was to endure for
twenty years. Within this time he designed a number of substantial granite
structures, including an engine house, storehouses, and the immensely important
ropewalk complex, and superintended the construction of one of the first dry
docks built by the federal government. In the 1830s Parris began to design and
construct lighthouses and beacons for the U.S. Treasury Department. Parris’s
work for the government took him up and down the eastern coast, from Mt. Desert,
Maine, to Pensacola, Florida. Parris ended his career as chief engineer of
Portsmouth Navy Yard in New Hampshire. He died in Pembroke, Massachusetts on
June 16, 1852. A digital archive of select Parris materials may be viewed at
www.parrisproject.org.
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